The fusion cuisine of the Old World

On the big-screen TV, shaggy young musicians wearing baseball caps backward were being interviewed MTV-style in a recording studio. Then they picked up their guitars and started playing wild, melancholy Romanian music, complete with a tuba as bass.

Another day, the TV was tuned to an interview with a Romanian expert on cave exploration. Unless it’s a Friday (disco) or a weekend night (live entertainment), the Romanian satellite feed always will remind you that Restaurant Dunarea is Anaheim’s Romanian restaurant. That and the Impressionist paintings of Romanian scenes on the walls.

Romania is surrounded by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Ukraine. On top of that, it’s been ruled by the Turks, and you can’t ignore all those Germans living in Transylvania. No wonder its cuisine can suggest three or four others at once.

Take the appetizers. In Romania, zacusca -- from a Bulgarian word for snack or relish -- refers to a puree of tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, the same sweet, faintly hot relish known as ajvar in the other Balkan countries.

Dunarea’s “off the grill” (afumaturi) is even more cosmopolitan. It’s a plate of smoky cold cuts, starting with the voluptuous, rather German idea of smoked pork loin, cut very thin. The rest of the plate is two kinds of aged sausage: a garlicky, peppery Hungarian salami (gyulai) and ghiudem, a flattened beef sausage of Turkish origin, brown rather than reddish in color, with an aftertaste of vinegar and hot pepper. “Off the grill” is pretty much the Orient Express on a plate.

But other dishes at Dunarea are less exotic. Much of the menu is devoted to plain, meaty food and plenty of it. “Dunarea feast,” for example, is a plate of fried things: breakfast-type pork links, breaded mushrooms, breaded kashkaval (like a nuttier version of Monterey Jack) and a good pile of breaded chicken livers.

When you order an entree, it comes with either a lettuce salad or the soup of the day, generally beef with vegetables. Get the soup. Its punchy broth typically has a little tomato, red pepper and garlic in it, but what makes it so aromatic is the combination of dill and leustean. That’s the herb known in English (insofar as it is known at all in English) as lovage. It was a favorite of the ancient Romans, and Romania is about the last country that still appreciates this spicy, evocative celery-like herb.

Dobrogeana is visually striking: six scoops of bright yellow corn mush -- Romania’s preferred starch -- arranged around a stew of beef, pork and chicken in a paprika sauce, topped with a fried egg (making seven golden globes in all). The whole plate is covered with a snowfall of finely grated feta and maybe Parmesan.

Even more striking is the stuffed cabbage (sarmale insoi varza), a colorful fusion of Central Europe and the Middle East. Arranged around the north half of the plate are six scoops of corn mush; around the south half, half a dozen cabbage rolls with a rich, meaty filling of pork and beef -- some of it clearly smoked -- lighted up by paprika and aromatic with dill. In the middle of the plate sits a dollop of sour cream, so the total effect is like a Hungarian szekely gulyas deconstructed into neat packages.

When I ordered this, one mound of cornmeal had a bit of bacon on top and a serrano pepper had been inserted partway into another. (There’s also a grape-leaf version, perfectly good but less wild.)

Other dishes are plain-looking and evidently designed for vampire country. Lamb pastrami is not like beef pastrami at all; imagine a really good, dense butterflied leg of lamb rubbed with lots of garlic. Romanian feast (carne de pork prajita cu usturoi) is chunks of fried pork with cornmeal mush. Think of it as a boneless version of pork chops and grits with plenty of garlic. Mititei, Romania’s national snack, is grilled boneless beef sausages with allspice and garlic.

There aren’t many desserts here. A perfectly good flan tarted up with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. A profiterole on ice cream, covered with whipped cream. The best, by far, is amertuma: a luscious rectangle of soft chocolate studded with nuts and raisins.

The first time I went to Dunarea, the waitress hopefully asked, “Vorbiti romaneste?” Sorry, I don’t vorbesc the language, but yo, dude, I am down with the cuisine.

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Restaurant Dunarea

Location: 821 N. Euclid St., Suite 3, Anaheim, (714) 772-7233.

Price: Appetizers, $3.75 to $8.90; main dishes, $7.50 to $15.50; desserts, $3.75 to $4.25.

Best dishes: “Off the grill” (afumaturi), stuffed cabbage (sarmale insoi varza), dobrogeana, lamb pastrami (pastrama de miel), amertuma.

Details: Lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, and Sundays; dinner, 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 6:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Fridays through Sundays; closed Mondays. Reservations required Friday evenings. Beer and wine. Parking lot. All major credit cards.