Restaurant Review - Nice & easy

Small independent restaurants are precious things, delicate artifacts of a gentler age, upholders of time-proven standards on the one hand yet facing everyday extinction on the other. That usually goes double when the independent restaurant’s menu, chef and culinary accent are French.

Textbook cooking seems almost required in such places - as well as a certain Gallic chic. Service and décor must be amusing - and yet laced with drop-shoulder attitude. Serious students of the form usually add 10 points for an understandable menu, but subtract 10 when the establishment is housed in a miniscule cottage. They chop another 10 when the staff numbers less than the fingers on an ordinary hand - and five more when the only way to get water glasses refilled at bill-paying time is to stroll into the kitchen and turn the tap yourself.

Capitalist ecology being at once cruel and relentless, the survival of such places is necessarily iffy. And that pretty much describes Buckhead’s latest, softest attempt at doing the French thing, Café de Nice.

The cottage is very small, the menu intelligible, the prices affordable, the alcohol license nonexistent (you can bring your own bottle). At its best, the food is not only authentically French, but memorably charming.

Ah, I thought, settling in on the plant-filled back patio - a jug of wine, a basket of warm and crusty rolls, a bottle of herbed olive oil and a plate of sliced socco (chickpea pancakes - a specialty of Nice) all laid out before me - how bad can this be?

OK, the imposing view of the gravel parking lot is to be studiously ignored. That’s easy enough given the smiles of the solitary waitress and the attractive olive-pattern tabletop covering. The order of socco - a healthful mix of chickpea flour, olive oil, salt and pepper - is large enough for two ($3.95). We keep saying, “Ooooh, we’d better stop eating these.” But we don’t quit until the plate is bare.

The next course (if you take my advice), mimosa eggs - hard-cooked, stuffed with tuna and mayonnaise and arranged on mixed spring lettuces - is every bit as good ($6.95). Fresh, lightly dressed greenery, sweet tuna, eggs and chopped yolks is a combination delectable enough to make a normal person forget all about cholesterol, and is one of the best light lunch or supper plates imaginable.

Spicy, chili-fired merguez sausages with more of the green salad - the sausages dense and meaty, the salad agreeably room-temperature - suggest the makings of a substantial, active-person’s supper ($6.95 for four, special). Unfortunately, the more-or-less traditional side dish to these lamb links, pommes frites, is omitted in favor of a handful of commercial potato chips.

Depending on your luck, the authenticity factor can fall even farther and then shoot up when least expected. A relatively expensive entrée, salmon in puff pastry with tomato coulis ($12.95) had me dreaming sugarplum dreams of coulibiac with hand-made sauce. The actuality was something less - soggy, greasy, reheated strips of glue-like stuffing and leathery bread surrounding two strips of mildly flavored fish alongside a river of tasty red sauce. Mixed cauliflower and a glop of heavy, greasy potato gratin did not help matters. A chain cafeteria manager would need a double dose of Pepcid after such a meal.

Ratatouille flan is better, containing the essence of the Mediterranean specialty, if not necessarily the individual vegetable flavors or textures involved ($6.95). Tasty and refreshing, it is served cold in the summer, warm in the winter, with salad.

Soups of the day (I tried cream of mushroom and broccoli) have ample texture and taste just as described ($2.95). Relatively simple desserts - cr me caramel, chocolate mousse - are rich and hearty in the right ways.

Regulars praise the pan bagnat, a foccaccia sandwich containing tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, celery, tuna, black olives, eggs and, at 50 cents extra, anchovy ($5.95). One regular praises Café de Nice in general, not as a magnet of haute cuisine and polished service, but as a spacey little place that operates on Mediterranean time offering decent meals to women and families. There’s not a lot of commotion, particularly at night, she said. You can take your husband and your bottle of wine and your own sweet time.

She says I should cut the little place some slack. She may be right.

Café de Nice, 580 Pharr Road, 404-264-1678. Mon.-Fri. 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and Mon.-Sat. 6-9 p.m. Cash and credit cards accepted.??