A Little Taste of Hemingway at Cafe Habana on Melrose

E l Sandwich Cubano, that’s the thing to order at Cafe Habana. It’s muy autentico , so they tell me.

Perhaps you’d feel a little strange going to an ethnic restaurant and ordering el sandwich . Think nothing of it. One of the easiest travel experiences you can have these days is to fly to a strange land and sit down to a menu in a strange alphabet only to find you’re reading about something called a club sanweesh .

Anyway, el sandwich Cubano is very good. It’s ham, roast pork and Swiss cheese with lettuce, tomato and pickles, and the best part is that it comes on an excellent French-type loaf that’s sliced in half lengthwise, making it cute and entertaining to eat, if a little hard to handle.

Cafe Habana itself is sleek fun. There are the usual expatriate nostalgia things on the wall--maps of Cuba, a framed collection of pre-Castro money--but the place also has some of the Melrose look of post-catastrophe elegance. The minimalist chairs are a little tall, so you may have the impression everybody walking by your table is oddly short. On a kind of metal cage above the kitchen, two clocks ostentatiously show the time on rather hard-to-read dials, for those two important time zones, Melrose and Habana.

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Exoticism begins with the drinks. You can get beer (mostly American but including Caribe), but there are some extremely strange soft drinks. Materba is a soda that tastes like various tropical fruits, but is actually flavored with the Argentine tea called yerba mate. Malta is a malt-flavored soda that tastes sort of like carbonated molasses. Toward the end of the meal, a busboy will bring you a glass of ice water with an orange slice in it.

The best of the appetizers are the empanadas, tiny pies with a beef filling rather like mild chili. There are also some deep-fried potato balls with beef and peppers inside, a tamal Cubano with sweetish cornmeal filled half with black beans and half with pork, and delicate, rather European croquettes of ham or chicken, lightly fried. They could use a little sauce, but all that’s available is the tiny pot of a sort of vinaigrette that’s always on the table. You can get samples of all these on a generous sample plate--more appetizers than one person can be expected to consume alone.

Apart from the sandwiches, the entrees tend to be simple fried beef, fish or chicken dishes, but some of the meat dishes are more complicated. Complicated but basically folksy, that is.

Ropa vieja is just a nice soupy beef and tomato stew with a little pepper in it, but boliche is eye of round stuffed with a sausage, stewed until the meat is tender (though still a little dry; this is eye of round, after all). The sausage gives the meat a complex fragrance, and the whole thing is covered with a good tomato sauce that isn’t spicy but doesn’t taste Italian, either.

There are also some steaks, the Creole sort of steak which makes a cult of how thin the meat can be cut, like Wiener schnitzel. The bi s tec empanizado, which the menu identifies as the owner’s favorite, comes in a slightly spicy breading, tasty but sort of a greasy way to have a steak.

And then there’s the Hemingway. This is surprisingly good: more or less the same breaded, paper-thin steak as the bistec empanizado folded over a mixture of ham, Swiss cheese and pickles.

Some of the fish dishes come in a “luscious green sauce” that’s not as luscious as it sounds, though pretty refined for folksy cooking. It’s garlicky and a little sweet, and buttery, I guess, but not what I call “luscious.” The side dishes you can get with entrees include plain black beans, good fried sweet plantains, pleasant but rather starchy and not sweet green plantains, and yuca, a somewhat neutral-tasting starch.

For dessert there’s basically flan and bread pudding. The flan is an eggy model with good caramel sauce, and the Spanish bread pudding is exceptionally good.

Sometimes there are also cheesecakes with sauces for dessert, but they tend to be pretty strange. And the cheesecakes have a curious aroma, “like barbecue sauce,” somebody said.

I choose to believe this cannot be muy autentico Cuban cheesecake. I’ll have another sandwich, please.

Suggested dishes: empanadas, $3.35; el sandwich Cubano, $4.95; boliche, $8.95; Spanish bread pudding, $2.25.

Cafe Habana, 7465 Melrose, West Hollywood. (213) 655-2822. Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday , till 11:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday . Beer and wine. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $16 to $40.