I recently read that the big new trend in restaurants is Mediterranean. Zini, the “Café Med” that Mindy Reed and her late partner, Nicolas Klontz, opened in May, is apparently one of the leaders of a culinary movement.

“Oh, yes,” Mindy said when I mentioned it to her last week. “Nicolas had a real gift for being a bit ahead of things.”

It's a smart trend. As Mindy pointed, Mediterranean cuisine is not only healthy but it's also rich in flavors and extremely varied. Zini Café Med takes its dishes primarily from Italy, though Mindy is looking at other regions for future additions.

At their first restaurant, Zin, Nicolas often ventured onto North African shores for Moroccan flavors and dishes. He had planned to extend Zini's palate into that area, too. There's already a couscous and a paella on the menu, “more Mediterranean than Italian,” Mindy commented. The couscous dish combines the grain with sweet-sour lamb stew, chickpeas and Merguez sausage (a spicy lamb sausage with North African origins) and it has proved to be one of the restaurant's best-selling items.

Zini not only serves lunch and dinner, it also has a tapas menu (the tapas are primarily Spanish), which makes for exciting reading. I asked whether people ordered more from the regular menu or from the tapas menu — I was having a hard time deciding which way to go myself.

“Tapas,” Mindy said. She believes it is the promise of a tasting adventure that captures customers. “And even if you don't like it, it's only $4,” she said pragmatically.

Actually it could be as little as $3, or, at the top reach, $7 for one of the two pasta plates. These, however, deliver much larger portions than would normally be considered “tapas.” One of them is spaghetti with a veal and ricotta meatball, (the meatballs at Zin have always been a signature dish), the other is a delicious fettucine Bolognese. It's made with veal, which gives the sauce a lovely sweetness.

“It was Nicolas's favorite,” Mindy said. I can well understand. It's a classic given new freshness by the execution.

I loved the grilled calamari stuffed with Spanish chorizo, garnished with fried parsley and capers. It's one of those dishes in which every element appealed to me and the combination was irresistible. It turns out that is one of the best-selling tapas.

The biggest seller on the tapas menu, though, is something I'm going to try next time, the grilled artichoke heart with asparagus, Serrano ham, Manchego cheese and a fried egg. I'd only resisted it because I wanted to try an entrée from the main menu, the seared Atlantic salmon, cannellini and flageolet beans, with a prosciutto bacon salad. It proved to be a delicious combination of flavors and textures, with the two beans joining forces to deliver both earthiness and crisp freshness.

As is to be expected from a lady who combines being wine director and pastry chef, there's a very good selection of interesting wines, red, white or sweet, to go with any aspect of the meal.

The desserts presented a pleasant dilemma: I wanted both the mascarpone cheesecake with a balsamic glaze and the cappuccino semifreddo and white chocolate gelato with a shot of espresso. I have a weakness for semifreddo (half cold or semi-frozen) because it seems lighter than most ice creams.

But Mindy is the queen of cheesecake - her chevre cheesecake at Zin's has become locally famous. She told me the mascarpone was actually the dessert she had planned for Zin “but we ran out of mascarpone and voila!” she laughed.

I tried and loved both the light, silky, freshly flavored mascarpone cheesecake and the highly caffeinated semi- freddo.

Mindy is currently training one of her staff to make her desserts “the way I like them,” so that she can spend more time managing both restaurants. But she is also being helped by her new partner, her older son Salomon Salgado, who has worked at Zin for four years and alongside Nicolas for two.

“We're both excited about doing this together,” she said, “using everything we learned from Nicolas and realizing his dream the way he would have wanted.”