THE PERSIMMON HAS its admirers and aficionados, but I cannot count myself among them. Although the fruit – which pops up here early in winter – is known as the apple of Japan and is full of healthful beta carotenoids, its squishiness when ripe is a little too similar in texture to that of abandoned Halloween pumpkins melting into staircases. And the crinkly skin, like Saran wrap damaged by sunlight, doesn't help. Give me instead the Asian pear, any Asian pear, crisp and sweet – the real apple of Japan. We all have our irreducible likes and dislikes, and these are two of mine.

Why a Mediterranean restaurant should be called Persimmon is something of a mystery even beyond the matter of my prejudices. The word, oddly, is as appealing to me as the fruit itself is not – it is reminiscent of cinnamon, and who doesn't like cinnamon? – but the persimmon has nothing to do with the Middle East and makes no appearance on Persimmon's menu, which is otherwise replete with such familiars as tabbouleh and lamb shish kebob. To cloud matters further, there is, on the front of the menu card, a handsome drawing of two laurel-garlanded women gathering persimmons in some antique epoch – perhaps in anticipation of Alexander the Great's arrival, the great conquerer famished and fatigued after slashing his way through Afghanistan or India, a pair of non-persimmon lands?

Persimmon, the restaurant, opened last spring on a stretch of mid-Nob Sutter Street whose varied populations might help explain the place's free-form mixing of signals. The immediate neighborhood is dotted with hotels, theaters, and apartment buildings; hence the presence of tourists, theatergoers, and locals, a hodgepodge of constituencies with widely varying needs and expectations. The Persimmon strategy apparently aims to appeal to all these disparate groups, and while one consequence of such an eagerness to be liked is a certain blunting of excellence, others, more attractive, are liberal hours (daily from early morning to nearly midnight) and the offering of burgers, pasta, and Caesar salad in addition to Arabian favorites, so as not to completely terrify out-of-towners whose idea of exotic is Chi-Chi's spicy salsa.

It is not as if there is no excellence. Persimmon's finger-lickin'-good hummus ($4.50 for a plate with pita triangles, or included in either of the mezze combos, $11.50) could be the best in the city. The chickpea spread, flavored with garlic, lemon, and paprika, is the sort of dish you might as well order an extra one of because after a taste or two you will experience a craving and know that a single plate won't suffice. As to the fellow travelers on the mezze platter: We found the baba ghanoush to be lovely (silken, smoky), the tabbouleh decent, the spanakopita a bit flaccid. The only outright stumble among the appetizers was the four colors and pita ($4.50), a combination of tomato and cucumber slices, black olives, and feta cheese with mint and olive oil; the supermarket-in-winter tomatoes, the cubes of usually pungent-salty feta could have passed as tofu, and the stark presentation would have been well suited to a mise-en-place lesson at cooking school.

Falafel's reputation as the hamburger of the Middle East might not be enough to lure Marvin and Madge from Muncie, but I, as an inveterate falafelhead, needed no convincing, and Persimmon's falafel sandwich ($7.95) was a pita bread positively gravid with crunchy, well-spiced balls. So well-stuffed with falafel was the pita that I almost found myself wishing for more of the buffering ingredients: the shredded lettuce, the tomato, the tahini and yogurt sauces. Fortunately some chicken fesenjone ($11.95) had landed across the table – cubes of chicken breast adrift in a veritable lake of pomegranate-walnut sauce my companion likened to mole. I borrowed a bit of the sauce to moisten the falafel, and as there was more than enough, I met no objection.

Some of that sauce would have been a welcome addition to the luleh kebob ($9.50), a kind of charbroiled boudin (skinless sausage) of seasoned beef. The cylinder of minced meat was tasty but a bit dry, as was the accompanying mound of basmati rice. Again, the prospect across the table was one of considerably greater, and appealing, dampness: moussaka ($10.95), the classic Greek dish of eggplant slices layered with tomatoes, cheese, potatoes, onions, and mushrooms. I am never sorry to miss eggplant, but the moussaka's pale red sauce – some conflation of tomatoes and yogurt or perhaps sour cream – was extraordinary in its own right and just the thing for dunking chunks of slightly parched luleh kebob into.

Persimmon's look is pleasantly eclectic: booths and tables, a plum- (or persimmon-) red color scheme, trellises mounted overhead for a faint al fresco effect, a small statue of a French chef near the door. It does not feel either of the Mediterranean – east or west – or of Muncie, or perhaps it feels a little of both, a haven so disjointedly and amiably cross-cultural that people of many cultures can feel at home there, a little, for a little while, even in the presence of the strange other, the tourist laying down with the local.

Persimmon. 582 Sutter (at Mason), SF. (415) 433-5525. Daily, 7 a.m.-11 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible.