Awash in a Sea of Flavor : Caspian Cuisine, an Iranian restaurant adjacent to Santa Monica Promenade, takes diners on a culinary journey.

I suppose this is what a Santa Monica Promenade-adjacent Iranian restaurant should look like: glassed-off smoking area, huge abstract paintings, cast-iron garden lamps scattered among the tables, cobalt-blue water glasses. And all with an upscale name, Caspian Cuisine.

A lot of Iranian places use “Caspian” in their names, but this one is actually serious about it. The high ceiling is a huge map of the Caspian Sea. That’s Azerbaijan on one side and Turkmenistan (with the gulf of Kara Bogaz Gol) on the other, with Kazakhstan and Russia down toward the end. Basically, this is a particularly good Iranian restaurant, but among its 50 menu items you can find a few from those other countries as well.

For instance, you could start with a warm Azerbaijani yogurt soup, doghashi, fragrant with garlic and dill, thickened with rice and garbanzos, lightened with minced cucumber. Manta is a Kazakh steamed beef ravioli, again flavored with dill. They’re a little vague about where Caucasus eggplant comes from, but it’s a savory, sloppy, garlicky deal of sliced eggplant rolled around tomatoes.

From the Russian end of the map come spinach or potato piroshki with a buttery, cakey crust. You don’t often see blinchiki, which are buckwheat pancakes pleasantly stuffed with chicken puree. “Russian patty” is guilty pleasure material, a sort of shepherd’s pie made with chicken livers. There are two versions of borscht; the cold one, which has been Californianized with a lighter broth and raw onions, will probably not hit the spot with traditional borscht-lovers.

The nutty, crunchy rice at the bottom of a Persian pilaf (tahdig) is traditionally served to the honored guest, but here it makes an unusual appetizer topped with a choice of Iranian stews. Otherwise, the rest of the appetizer list is the usual Iranian pickles, stuffed grape leaves and the like. Don’t order the borani if you’re looking for a vegetable--there’s just a little pureed spinach in a lot of (appetizingly tart) yogurt. You can get Caucasus eggplant, manta, Russian patty and borani together on a combo plate.

As usual at an Iranian place, the entrees are mostly kebabs, such as barg (broad strips of filet marinated in saffron and onion juice) and kofteh (ground beef with little crunchy bits of onion), and they’re perfectly good. But there’s also quail kebab--two quail, slightly saffrony, a lot of work to eat--served on a pilaf flavored with tart barberries. Even more unusual is the venison kebab. The meat is tender and richly flavored, with a faint caraway-like taste.

And there are half a dozen excellent fish kebabs, all cooked a point. In particular, the sturgeon kebab (the most expensive entree, which consists of only about five pieces of fish) is so perfectly cooked it’s almost fluffy.

The usual Iranian stews are nicely done. The most everyday one, ghormeh sabzi, is a surprisingly light, fresh-tasting version, made with beef, red beans, stewed greens and a dash of tart sumac berries. One of the best dishes here is gheimeh, a stew of yellow split peas and beef in a rich tomato sauce, hauntingly perfumed with dried limes.

The Iranian stew everybody likes best is fesenjan, with its rich sauce of ground walnuts and sweet-sour pomegranate juice. Here it’s made with duck, whose dark, gamey meat really goes better with this powerful sauce than the usual chicken. And it is indeed a powerful, mouth-filling sauce, with the walnuts definitely playing second fiddle to the sharp pomegranate.

There aren’t many non-Iranian items among the entrees, though there is an unusual Russian dish of chicken puree baked in a golden crust--it’s like a torpedo of boneless chicken, or like the blinchiki writ large; savory, but perhaps a little samey. There’s also a vegetarian entree list, including the unusual baghali ghatogh, a dish of favas in that tart yogurt.

If you’re up to dessert (portions are fairly large, particularly if you eat up all your basmati rice pilaf), there are a slightly salty pistachio ice cream and a rose petal ice cream, with a perfume-like flavor that really only emerges when it melts. The baghlava is a Caucasian variety of baklava. Unlike the usual sort, it’s not a way of eating filo but a way of eating ground walnuts. The tiny, dense lozenge has exactly three layers of paper-thin pastry and two thick ones of walnuts with a strong jolt of clove flavoring.

Promenade shoppers ought to discover this place. It’s elegant and unusual--and anyway, you can’t live on cappuccino alone.

BE THERE

Caspian Cuisine, 205 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 395-5695. Wine. Street and public lot parking. Visa and MasterCard accepted. No takeout. Open for lunch 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. and dinner 5:30-11 p.m. daily. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$54.

What to Get: doghashi, blinchiki, tahdig, gheimeh, duck fesenjan, venison kebab, baghlava.