San Diego Spotlight : Southern Cooking Meets Roots in Unusual Pairing

It requires two specific acts of faith to arrive at a table at Mavis’ and Cyn’s, but those who make both should be satisfied by the engaging twin menus of traditional Southern-style fare and savory East African cuisine.

You must first accept as true that this La Mesa restaurant’s address is indeed 7353 El Cajon Blvd., despite the fact that the sign in front of the hulking, unattractive building advertises the Sub Zero nightclub and mentions nothing in the way of food. Having circled the block once or twice and come to the conclusion that you may as well park and venture indoors to see whether this might really be the place, you will be greeted by a large, unpopulated and rather forbidding lobby, equipped with signs marked “Restaurant” and “Club” that point in opposite directions. At this moment, doubt registers high and the exit looks appealing, because if any place never looked like a restaurant, this is it.

But there, off to the left and around the corner, is the dining room, a reasonably gracious, well-appointed space decidedly at odds with the neon and ultraviolet lights left from the days when the entire structure was occupied by a nightery called Club Vid. If ever there was an odd coupling, it is between the polite, sedate precincts of Mavis’ and Cyn’s and the loud, dark cavern of Sub Zero, whose youthful patrons never arrive before 9 p.m. Perhaps to place the barricade of an hour between the two clienteles, the restaurant does not seat patrons past 8 p.m.

Sisters Mavis Young and Cynthia Lewis, Texas-bred and well-schooled in the simple but ample delights of Southern cooking, occasionally seek to meet contemporary tastes by offering angel hair pasta in marinara sauce and chicken in Chardonnay. But by and large, the menu reads like a roll call of those dishes that people in large sections of this country once accepted as everyday fare, including pan-fried catfish filets, Southern-fried chicken, grilled pork chops with barbecue and apple sauces, and deep-fried, crab-stuffed shrimp, a Texas specialty that is served with good, basic “cocktail” sauce and would be utterly incomplete in its absence.

A separate, even more specifically down-home list mentions a choice of the day’s fish, either baked or fried; Cajun-style chicken; barbecued beef ribs, red beans and rice, and other specialties. Not everything is available at all times, and the menus should be taken as general guides, because garnishes change and surprises--largely pleasant--show up with regularity. Prices do not seem graven in stone, and, when the check arrived following a recent dinner, they generally were less than the menu had indicated.

To further complicate the issue, Maryam Suliman, who in the mid-1980s operated La Jolla’s agreeable but short-lived Queen of Sheba Ethiopian restaurant, adds her own supplementary menu of East African fare every Friday. Some of these preparations are savory, highly spiced stews with names such as zigni , fitfit , kelwa and derho , while others take grander names, such as the “Queen’s Meal” (an Abyssinian stew of chicken and eggs) and the “Pride of the Nomad,” or sliced lamb sauteed with okra, garlic and fresh tomato. Priced at $16.95 each, all East African meals include an appetizer, soup or salad, dessert and, sometimes, injera , a flat, spongy Ethiopian bread that can be torn in strips, rolled and used in place of a fork.

In a thoroughly cross-cultural gesture, the kitchen sent a complimentary appetizer plate distantly related to the American “relish tray” of fond but distant memory. It included carrot and celery sticks; French fries; short, odd-looking breaded objects that turned out to be snippets of fried onion rings, oily but good; a mild mustard sauce for dipping all of the above, and, finally, the triangular pastries that Ethiopians call samboosa . The name, like the dish, closely resembles the Indian samosa , a fried, flaky pastry packed with seasoned meat or vegetables. Suliman filled hers with a spiced, surprisingly savory stuffing of lightly cooked fresh spinach.

The salads, innocent of the radicchio, mache and oak leaf lettuces that dominate the plates at au courant eateries, featured just plain old iceberg and were reliable but dull. They basically served to kill the time until the arrival of such agreeable main events as the barbecued beef ribs--huge, meat-encased bones flavored throughout by a marvelous sauce of much subtlety; it would take much in the way of time and ribs to discern the constituent elements of this sauce.

Mavis and Cyn likely located the recipe for the “Cajun” chicken in a cookbook, rather than in their childhood memories, but they did well with this spice-coated portion of bird. However, the Jamaican-style “jerk” chicken, marinated in a supposedly hot, highly flavored marinade, did little to impress a guest who has had the real thing served on location. All these plates included large portions of rice and simple but well-cooked vegetables.

From the East African list, the Omderman’s Dish, a Sudanese creation of lamb leg braised in a sauce of peanuts, tomato and yogurt, seemed savory but relatively tame; the meat could have been more moist. The side dish of lengthily stewed, remarkably tender and flavorful okra starred in this case.

Other entree choices include salmon in garlic sauce; file gumbo with shrimp, crab, chicken and hot Louisiana-style sausage; herb-marinated, baked chicken; curry-marinated lamb kebabs; grilled T-bone steak in garlic sauce (a nice touch), and a very old-fashioned plate of baby beef liver sauteed with onions and mushrooms.

All in all, the Southern cooking seems the most interesting. Meals include a basket of rather refined corn bread, and excellent biscuits so rich and fluffy that they seem a cross between ordinary biscuits and the Parker House dinner rolls in which American home cooks once invested much pride and effort.

The desserts change from time to time and may arrive at table seemingly of their own accord. Recently, the kitchen dispatched a sweet potato pie, spiced with cinnamon and cloves and delicious to the last flake of crust, and a plate of sweet samboosa stuffed with sugared cream cheese and dates. These were not unlike American fruit turnovers, and they went down quite easily.

MAVIS’ AND CYN’S

7353 El Cajon Blvd., La Mesa 464-7881 Lunch and dinner served Tuesday through Saturday; brunch only Sunday; closed Monday Entrees and complete dinners $8.95 to $17.50; dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, about $25 to $50 Credit cards accepted