Girls just wanna have fun, and aging-boomer foodie girls especially wanna have fun at the table (as other options become scarcer). Tabule offers that kind of culinary gambol. (Not gamble — I didn’t taste anything awful.) A genuine original, it provides good vibes, professional service, affordable and interesting wines, and happy, oddball surprises in the cooking. The flavor-base is more or less Mexican, but then it rambles — to Japan, Thailand, Persia, anywhere that chef-owner Moe Sadighian’s palate wants to roam.

Sadighian owns several fine-dining restaurants in Tijuana, including the original Tabule, with a similar menu of his recipes. As we know, since 9/11 brought our “beefed up” (paranoid) border security, TJ restaurants have been hurting badly. And from the opposite viewpoint, many middle-class transborder families have moved to this side of la linea as the crime cartels have taken up kidnapping as a big-money sport. Several Tijuana restaurants have faced the music and opened locations on this side of the frontier. Romesco (along with several of TJ’s most popular taquerias) have played it safe by opening in Chula Vista, preferred neighborhood of TJ expats. Tabule is betting on the Gaslamp, with food that would go over big in North Park (land of culinary adventure) but may be risky for an audience of strolling conventioneers, tourists, and club kids downtown. I hope it can manage to charm them as it charmed me.

The surroundings are attractive and comfortable, with a warm color scheme of orange, dark brown, and black and well-spaced tables that give you ample breathing room. Our server was friendly and professional (and also very cute). The menu is long, the appetizer lists daunting: One section showcases mainly Mexican “starters,” followed by numerous variations of ceviche, plus sashimi, soups, salads. Samurai Jim, Michelle, and I expected chef-turned-realtor James to join us and ordered an appetizer for him too, just before he called to say he was at the vet’s with a sick dog. The extra appetizer we ordered for him was the best of them all — what a shame we had to eat his share!

That was Gohan Tabule (Tabule rice), an inventive sort of deconstructed sushi party roll (minus the wrapping) mingling a pile of heavily sweetened sushi rice mixed with shredded crab and cream cheese, topped with avocado slices, slicks of Japanese eel sauce, and devastating puffs of sweet, ripe plantain. Sounds crazy, tasted amazing — every bite different from the previous bite, and none of them something you’re likely to have tasted before. It’s not high culinary art, nothing refined about it — I’d call it brilliant folk art. Or I’d call it scrumptious.

Before the appetizers, we enjoyed crusty baguette slices dipped into two salsas, an incendiary green serrano chile sauce and a thin coral aioli variant. The spicy one came into play with our arrachera tacos, soft, fill-’em-yourself, small corn tortillas along with strips of mesquite-grilled skirt steak, chopped tomatoes, onions, minced cilantro, and chopped avocado. At the Tijuana Tabule, the skirt steak is marinated, but here it isn’t — Sadighian feared that San Diegans wouldn’t like a really Mexican marinade. I think (and hope) he’s wrong about that; besides, this cut of beef is so porous, so ready to drink up flavors, that not to marinate it, or at least give it a spice rub, seems like a wasted opportunity. Cooked plain, it needed salsa to bring it to life. (If you care to go hunting for it, the best-marinated arrachera I’ve tasted locally was at El Callejon in Encinitas, with a haunting spice mixture.)

If we hadn’t already decided on a duck entrée, we might’ve ordered the mesquite-grilled duck meat tacos instead. Or duck burrito. Or lettuce-wrapped pulled duck. I can’t duck the feeling that Tabule is a place I’d like to eat at a lot more often, since I love duck almost any way you serve it. When I spoke with the chef-owner, he mentioned that his own favorite was a dish of Thai baby-back ribs in a spicy mango sauce “with genuine Thai spices.” Maybe not everything will be dead-on great here, but it’s a menu that begs for exploration.

A long list of interesting ceviches includes caracol. “Ever eat sea snails?” I asked Jim. He hadn’t. “Ah, too bad your sensei didn’t order that at Ota — Ota cooks a whole one over burning sugar, it’s really interesting.” Here, the firm-tender meat of this large, beautiful creature (with an opalescent white shell, when it’s at home in the sea) is swathed in tomatoes, red onions, ginger, cilantro, and avocado. No, it doesn’t taste like chicken — more like octopus. It’s pretty good, not quite great. Another dose of the green chile salsa might have helped, but my ears were still smoking from the splash I’d spooned over the skirt steak.

From the selection of salads, the tabbouleh sounded like a natural. It’s usually made from minced parsley and mint, plus bulgur wheat, cukes, tomato, and lemon juice. Here, the menu says it’s made with couscous, but the grain is actually bulgur (the owner just thought couscous would sound more familiar). There’s so little mint in it (again, for fear of offending cautious San Diego palates), I couldn’t taste any at all. It was nice and healthy but to my taste awfully timid.

The most popular entrées, the handsome waiter told us, are the two variations of Chilean sea bass. Given that this noble, slow-growing species has been overfished to the brink of extinction and that impermissible catches are still being hauled in by the ton by outlaw poachers in the wild South Atlantic, I passed. (Michelle told me that Costco sells it cheap, frozen. All I can say to that is, “Ayyy! I hope it’s counterfeit.”) It’s a great fish, I love it, but I don’t want to eat the last dodo or Martha, the last passenger pigeon. (Yes, she had a name.) Gimme a nice haunch of lowland gorilla “bush meat” instead…. When I asked the owner about this issue, he told me that he buys the fish from Leong-Kuba (one of the best of the local fishmongers) and that it’s certified non-poached.

Michele and I were simultaneously drawn to linguini nere, black pasta colored with calamari ink, served with shrimp and octopus in an arrabiata (spicy tomato) sauce. The sauce wasn’t very spicy, but the dish was delish. The pasta was firm-tender, and so were the seafoods in it. The sauce was lively but not overwhelming — everything in balance. I loved the way the pasta texture and the octopus texture mirrored each other.

The entrée that drew me to the restaurant, more than any other enticement, was a duck breast with reduced pome granate sauce with walnuts. The Persian name for this combination is fesenjan, and it usually involves diced duck meat swathed in the thick, tart sauce. Here in San Diego, our Persian restaurants (like Bandar and Sadaf) adapt the dish by substituting chicken for duck, which always disappoints me. (You need a darker fowl than chicken — a full-flavored duck or a squab — to stand up to pomegranate.) Well, Tabule doesn’t do classic fesenjan either — instead of chopped duck meat swathed in tangy sauce, you get a whole duck breast glazed in it. To our tastes, the duck breast was rather overcooked at medium-well, but it wasn’t dry, more like heavy-velvet — just as it would be cooked in fesenjan. The tart sauce was scintillating. The Middle Eastern–style veggies — grilled bell pepper and onion, zucchini lengths, and chopped creamer potatoes — were thoroughly pleasing.

The sauce with the French lamb chops (actually a cut piece of rack from the ribs) was also exciting, but there was far too much of it. Hot-sweet-tangy, it combined mint jelly heated by serrano chilies and enriched with mango — but there was so much of it, it swamped the plate. It was good with the lamb. It was god-awful with the potatoes and veggies. In the future, it may be applied more discreetly.

It was wonderful to face a wine list where we could choose good, tasty bottles at a fair price. Given the lighthearted style of cooking, I was happy to find a Montes sauvignon blanc from Chile to start (and it suited the appetizers perfectly), and for the entrées, a food-friendly Coppola Merlot, both under $30. There are plenty of higher-end bottles if you’re accompanying a high-end steak dinner; the choices run the gamut of taste and price.

This is one of those “two and three-quarter star” places — the cooking has some flaws, but it still is full of delights. The dishes I liked, I really liked. They weren’t just good, they were “wake up and smell the cooking” good — with extra credit for originality. Add in the comfortable surroundings and very considerate service, and you get a winner. Foodie girls like to ramble, too.

ABOUT THE CHEF-OWNER

Moe Sadighian’s parents came to San Diego from Iran in ’78, at the time of the revolution against the Shah. His mother died young, and he was raised by his dad, a businessman who started an auto-repair business here. Even as a kid, young Moe was a demon businessman.

“I started working when I was 10 years old, with a paper route,” he says. “At 11, I started my own business, cleaning apartments. At 13, I started selling NSA water-filtration products — it was a pyramid sales thing. And by 15, I was clearing six digits. I bought my first piece of property in La Jolla when I was 16 years old. [He’s now 36.] Later, I had a chain of mechanic shops; I own a communication business in which I own the satellite.

“I graduated from San Diego State with an international business degree and a communications degree. I’ve always loved cooking and taking care of people on the side, so I also went to San Diego Culinary Institute, just for me, not for business. Then I went to San Francisco for six months to study at Cordon Bleu. At that time it wasn’t money that got you in, it was your thesis, a dish, a video — the real deal, not just people with money.”

I asked him why he went into the risky business of restaurants. “I like a good challenge. I don’t want to take no for an answer. I’m the kind of person who puts my mind to it, and I get it done, and I get it done right. I don’t take short cuts. I take criticism with pride; feedback is very important to me. My wife, who’s my best friend — I’ve been married almost eight years now, we have two beautiful kids — she’s always supported me in all the decisions we make together. We’re about to open another restaurant. I bought the Sun Cafe, the oldest restaurant on Market, between Fourth and Fifth, and we’re gonna put a really fun casual place, Mexican traditional. And I have offers to open Tabule in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills.”

In Tijuana, his enterprises include the original Tabule, a steakhouse called Kobe, Mint nightclub, and Los Mariachis, the biggest restaurant in TJ at 40,000 square feet. He learned Mexican cooking while living in Tijuana for five years, picking up a lot of skills through his friendships with top chefs there. I asked him why he decided to open Tabule in the Gaslamp, rather than a more adventure-prone culinary district like North Park. “That’s exactly why,” he said. “Because the food here downtown is so square — steak, Italian, sushi, some Thai. I don’t think everything should be square peg. I believe in opening people’s eyes — showing them, teaching them, being patient with them. I like to say we have everything that everyone else has and nothing that everyone else has.

“I’m not here for the conventioneers, I’m here for the locals. I sized the place right. I priced it right for the locals. We have incredible martinis — I’m a mixologist by trade. My wine list is exceptional. It’s not there to sit on a shelf collecting dust; it’s priced so people can enjoy it. I don’t have a shark mentality, take a bite and move on — that’s for conventioneers. So we get a lot of local companies that come here and buy out the place for an evening.

“The service and the food are very, very important to me. All the recipes are mine — all the drink recipes, all the food recipes. I train everybody in the kitchen in everything, like circuit training, so they can all cover every station and so they understand where each dish is coming from. The turnover rate among my staff is less than 1.5 percent. And our service has what we all the ‘living-room mentality.’ When you come into the restaurant and you see the decorations, the earthy tones, the orange glow, we want you to feel comfortable, like you’re sitting in your own living room. We're not about turning covers. We don’t hover over you while you’re eating, waiting to take your plate away. Our servers work as a team, and they feel like it’s their own business.”

Tabule

• 3.5 stars
• (Very Good)

535 Fourth Avenue, Gaslamp, 619-238-0048, tabulerestaurantbar.com.

• HOURS: Daily 11:00 a.m.–midnight or later.
• PRICES: Soups, salads, starters, $6–$22; ceviches, $13 average (abalone much higher); lavash wraps, $10–$14; pastas about $15; entrées, $12–$35; desserts, $7.
• CUISINE AND BEVERAGES: Eclectic, Mexican-based global fusion, including steaks, duck, and seafood in unexpected preparations. Smart international wine list with choices for all tastes and budgets. Full bar featuring creative martinis.
• PICK HITS: Gohan Tabule (rice appetizer), linguini nere; duck breast with pomegranate. Chef’s favorites: mesquite-grilled duck taco, Thai baby-back ribs.
• NEED TO KNOW: Street-side patio dining available. Four lacto-vegetarian dishes, two vegan dishes. Most steaks are naturally raised Brandt beef. Reservations strongly advised, as on some nights restaurant is completely “bought out” for parties.