Tip o’ the Hat

The Red Hat Restaurant takes its name from a Persian love story. A woman shows up for what sounds like a blind date, having instructed the guy to look for a lady in a red hat. She keeps the appointment, but he flakes, and for years to come our heroine continues to show up at the same meeting place, always wearing her red hat.

I have a feeling this story, printed on the menu, has lost a punch line in translation. But if the poor thing had chosen to haunt Red Hat Restaurant while waiting for the guy to appear, she could have at least consoled herself with some very fine Persian food.

This Tustin spot, open less than a year, dishes up a rock-solid menu of Persian specialties. It’s a tiny place in a Newport Avenue shopping center with a no-frills interior and no-alcohol policy. But as the food begins to arrive, you quickly forget the somewhat spartan atmosphere.

The menu offers a number of combination plates that allow small parties to taste a wide variety without having to order too many dishes, a fact we discovered by vastly underestimating the portions. As it happened, my friends and I stuffed ourselves anyway and still had leftovers.

Ample-sized appetizers (about $8) are enough for three or four people to munch on.

I’ve never been a big fan of stuffed grape leaves, but the dolmeh here soon had me singing a different tune. Arriving warm and fat, their aromatic filling of ground beef, rice, onions and peas gave them an uncharacteristically voluptuous bite. Two separate dishes of sauteed eggplant might seem like overkill on one platter, but the smoky kashk-e bademjan, made with whey, garlic and mint, sustained an interesting contrast to the yogurt-mellowed borani.

I have a hunch that Red Hat’s version of one of my Persian favorites, salad Olivier (potato chicken salad made crunchy with peas and pickles), is a good one, based on the fact that it was already gone early in the evening on two visits, but I’ll have to make another trip to find out.

The Red Hat Special soup is certainly a keeper. It’s a medley of vegetables in a hearty tomatoey chicken broth, amped up with a bracing dose of lime juice. Some may find it an acquired taste, but a few spoonfuls are probably enough to complete one’s seduction.

However, I can’t really say the same for the green salads. The Red Hat special salad, a combination of lettuce, feta, raisins, dates and walnuts, looks promising on paper, but the lettuce turned out to be iceberg and the salad otherwise suffered from a too-stark oil and vinegar dressing. The basic garden salad was similarly afflicted.

By now, the edge had worn off our appetites, but the array of entrees set before us quickly sharpened them. We found ourselves facing two combination plates, each flanked by a heaping mound of basmati rice. Each one could have fed at least two people (there were three of us), but we also had an order of lubia polo, one of the menu’s eight rice dishes, which came with a skewer of koobideh (ground beef).

Meat, in Persian cuisine, is almost always marinaded before cooking, and here Red Hat excels. The chicken barg is a standout. Brightly tinted from a sublime saffron-lemon marinade, strips of chicken tenders arrive sizzling and done to a succulent turn. But then the forks flew toward the juicy chunks of boneless baby lamb, imbued with a subtle tang of mustard.

The beef barg, made from tender pieces of filet mignon, practically melted in our mouths. My only quibble was with the charbroiled salmon; its promising marinade was undermined by a fishy aftertaste, a problem that remained when I tried the dish again on another trip.

Of course, nobody outdoes Persians on rice, and you could make a career of working your way through Red Hat’s many variations. The lubia polo is a moist mountain of saffron rice mixed with green beans, tomato sauce and diced beef. It gets my vote for the ultimate Persian comfort food. But for an exotic treat, try the adas polo, traditionally served for special occasions.

Dates, almonds, lentils and boiled chicken come together in a heap of feathery saffron rice to create a satisfying adventure in taste and texture. And if you happen to see the lady in the Red Hat lurking around, order one for her. It’s just the thing to make up for an eternity of disappointment.

BE THERE

Red Hat Restaurant, 13882 Newport Ave., Tustin. (714) 731-7079. Open 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. and 5-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday; 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday. Dinner: appetizers $2.99-7.99; entrees $6.99-$19.99. No alcohol. All major credit cards accepted.