A new and improved Casa La Femme in the West Village.

140 Charles St., and Washington St.
(212) 505-0005
Dinner: Sun. - Tue., 5p.m. - midnight: Wed. - Sat., 5p.m. - 3a.m.

Cuisine: Egyptian
Vibe: Sultry and exotic lounge
Occasion: Intimate date, group grazing
Don't-miss dishes: Salataa tamatem, grilled lamb chops, baklava
Average prices: Appetizers, $8; entrees, $20; dessert, $7.95.
Tent prix fixe, $55 per person.
Reservations: Recommended.

How often do you get to eat dinner in a tent? And when you do, the bathroom is usually the great outdoors. But at Casa La Femme, a new restaurant that opened six weeks ago in the West Village, your table is tented in white organza from Egypt. At Casa La Femme, there’s a glass chandelier and chair in every bathroom.

In fact, just about everything in the 200-seat restaurant is imported from Egypt — the walls, wood tables, 250 chairs, cheese, hand-carved bar up front, three limestone fireplaces and the fire pit in the center of the dining room. (Can you imagine the shipping costs?)

The owners, Medhat Ibrahim and Anastasios Hairatidis, have taken the idea of “setting the scene” to a new level. I’ve now eaten at all three Casa La Femmes, and I like the newest location, 140 Charles St., the best.
The first Casa La Femme opened back in 1991 on Wooster St. in SoHo. But in 2004, the SoHo restaurant lost its lease and moved to east midtown until 2008. Somehow, I don’t think uptown moms with strollers were the target audience for northern Egyptian cuisine.

The new Casa La Femme looks like honest exoticism, not like Egypt by way of Disney’s Epcot — especially if you reserve one of the tented tables. You could hide out in your tent all night, but then you’d miss the belly dancers.

And though you can’t eat decor or the belly dancers, they both make the food taste a little better. The menu is ­mostly a grazing menu, so start with some ­mazzas, Egyptian for starters. The best part is the pita, which resembles one of those puffed-up Jiffy Pop pans, except these are speckled with parsley, rock sea salt and sesame seeds. Think of the pita as an edible plate to smear with a terrifically smoky baba ghanouj, with a dab of tahini.

Or toss the salata tamatem on top with Gibnah Domiaty, a really creamy Egyptian cheese with minted grape tomatoes. The lamb chops fatta, cooked with the fat on as they do in northern Egypt, are seasoned with red pepper, oregano and rosemary. Oddly enough, the best thing on the menu at Casa La Femme is the French fries — Egyptian-style fries that are cooked in fat and spiced with rock sea salt.

As lovely as everything is, the menu is a little uneven. The chicken — the firakh mashwaya — was oversumac-ed and too ordinary to order. And the warak enab, stuffed grape leaves, were too cold and slimy, an occupational hazard among grape leaves.

Hummus deserves to be wonderful, not the bland thin hummus they serve here. As for the accessories, the baklava — dampened with cinnamon syrup — is delicious. Skip the wines (the list is limited and pricey) and order a cocktail instead. I like the Lemonada — a citrusy cocktail with lots of fresh mint and a splash of Champagne.

At Casa La Femme, you may not be in northern Egypt exactly, but while you’re there waiting for a camel to poke its nose under the tent, the recession feels a long way away.