Lately I have fallen under the spell of an East Village restaurant called Foxface. The cooking there is hard to pin down, geographically. Stopping in a few weeks ago, I ate Low Countryish wild red shrimp on grits, with sweet corn off the cob and a potent saffron-lobster sauce. More recently, I had skinless pork sausage inspired by sai ua, the spicy and tangy specialty identified with the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. The soft tripe I enjoyed the other weekend had been simmered with ’nduja, the fiery and malleable Calabrian sausage, and then covered with a few thin shingles of shaved pecorino.

If I had started hanging around at Foxface sooner, especially during the cold months after its opening, in February, I might have run into a wider variety of cuisines and main ingredients. I did manage to get some of the elk osso buco while that was still on the menu. I never got to try the wild hare, though, stewed in red wine with a bit of chocolate and thickened with its own blood, a formula that students of very old-guard French cooking will recognize as lièvre à la royale.

Nor did I make it in time for the venison, left to bubble for hours in white wine with mushrooms and dark juniper berries. The Foxface dish I may never forgive myself for missing, though, is the kebabs served with preserved lemons and tahini, because the kebabs were made from ground lamb and camel.

Although these foods may lack any unifying cultural background, they did have one thing in common: They were all served on rolls. Apart from an occasional salad or soup, everything cooked at Foxface arrives in sandwich form. And with the exception of a muffuletta that briefly manifested a few months back, every sandwich at Foxface is filled with hot, cooked meat or seafood or vegetables.