In preparation for our coming war with Iraq, this column will be touring restaurants related to previous US interventions. This week, we have Sabur, owned by Harris Jusufbegovic, formerly of Bosnia. Sabur features "exotic Mediterranean" food, some of it clearly Dalmatian, but none of it even slightly spotty. The Balkan dishes especially have the immediate lip-smacking appeal and savor of good Italian food, and won’t seem exotic in any sense other than that most restaurant food just isn’t this good. The exoticism appears mostly in the décor and chef Chris Kane’s interest in Moroccan and other Mediterranean cuisines.

The breadbasket is full of slices of a hearty peasant loaf, just one kind but the right kind. You can dip this in some herbed olive oil, but save room for the meal that follows. Potato-and-celery-root cakes ($10) are — even during latke season — just the greatest vegetable pancakes you’ve ever tasted, especially with the spiced-pear salsa and the more-familiar sour cream. Grilled Balkan sausages ($7) are small, tender bites, obviously intended to be wrapped in the very fresh pita breads provided, with some of the sliced red onion, which brings out a mild lamb flavor. Grilled shrimp wrapped in vine leaves ($9) are four large shrimp, very nicely done, although the dipping sauce, a "spicy saffron rouille" is very spicy indeed. The only appetizer I wouldn’t have every day was the roast-lamb soup with chickpeas and harissa spices ($4). Basically, the choice of Moroccan spices made for something that tasted like most people’s vegetarian chili, only with meat. (If you like vegetarian chili and don’t mind meat, this is your soup.)

Salads come in two sizes — normal and enormous, judging by our small salad of field greens ($4), with a very lively lemon-juice dressing.

The obvious entrée of choice is slow-open-hearth-roasted lamb ($17.75). This is kept going in a large pan with an exotic-looking domed top that sits on a grill in the dining room. The roasting is so slow that I didn’t realize the grill was actually turned on until our waitress began taking out the lamb for our platter. We had a large chunk of shank, with carrots, other root vegetables, and a sauce to die or kill for.

But one shouldn’t miss the pan-roasted cod with polenta ($16.75). This turns out to be the classic Dalmatian-coast dish of fish baked slowly in a sauce of tomatoes, artichokes, mushrooms, peppers, cured olives, and caper berries. Croatian fisherman brought this dish to San Francisco (where it became popular at the Tadich Grill and other early restaurants) and to Louisiana, where it may have influenced the thick Cajun "cou bouillon." It’s a wonderful way to make scrod, a wonderful sauce on polenta (it would work on pasta as well), and just great eating.

The special our night was venison ($21.50), and it was splendid in a more generally European style. Game-farm venison is gamy only at the end of the aftertaste, and the chef’s challenge is to keep it from drying out, even when ordered medium-rare. Ours came as ordered and was as fork-tender as the seared sashimi tuna it resembled. What gaminess it retained was set off with a cherry sauce and a pilaf with nuts and fruit (dates? figs?) that provided excellent contrast, along with some delicious, but salty, spinach.

Veal medallions with porcini ($17.75) are Mediterranean, if not exotic, and certainly delicious. The veal was a little chewy, but better flavored for it, and the dried wild mushrooms were excellent, as was the tangle of angel-hair pasta and the stir-fried snap peas.

I don’t recall when we’ve had such a consistent flight of entrées, and all of them wine-friendly. The list at Sabur is very good with this food, especially the by-the-glass Grgich posip ($6.25/ 25). This is a Croatian white, grown only on one island, but vinified by the celebrated California winemaker Mike Grgich (Yup, the Grgich Hills chardonnay guy.) In the glass it is very dry and grassy, like a pouilly-fuissé or Sancerre. A glass of McGuigan shiraz ($6.50/32) was soft as dating-bar merlot by comparison.

We were rushing out to a show at the Somerville Theatre, but our server suggested a quick taste of the special chocolate-chestnut cake with chestnut ice cream ($7) and the glazed apricots ($5). The apricots were six bites of heavenly plumped-up fruit, stuffed with creamy mascarpone and crunchy almonds. The cake was a handsome layer cake with a rich butter-cream filling — crunchy in every bite like a nut bread. The chestnut ice cream was really extraordinary, as sweet as pistachio but brightly flavored with fresh-roasted chestnuts.

Service was quite good on a quiet Sunday night. Our waitress was also from Bosnia and knew the menu well, offering useful suggestions and plenty of water. The background music varied from what sounded like Balkan folk music to what was certainly Billie Holiday. Sabur’s dining room is dark and romantic, with a Bukhara rug over quarry tiles, and Turkish-looking lamps. The tables have copper tops; there are shelves of folk-art objects and one wonderful-looking shelf piled with square loaves of bread. Wouldn’t you feel just right coming into a roadside restaurant in Bosnia or Croatia and seeing a heap of breads like that? Sabur should make a show of cutting them up for diners’ breadbaskets.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com