Sometime in March, I wrote a restaurant review containing the F-word. A week later, I received a piece of mail from a reader, drunk with indignation that I'd exercised such poor judgment as to include an obscenity in a food column. (He was also angry -- justifiably so -- because I'd made a joke about a particularly unappealing medical condition.)

The thing is, genre writing is tricky. It makes you realize (as I've noted before) that there are, contrary to what you might read in reference books such as the dictionary, only 467 words in the English language. And none of them is a synonym for "tender."

As a result, your hand is occasionally forced into the idiolectic slop bucket. So: Boom Shiva has a tasty motherfucker of a menu. Deceivingly casual, it reads like a lunchtime carte: noodle bowls, sandwiches, salads, a dozen tapas items, along with an assload of microbrewed beers (more than 50 in total). But as each of the delicately plated, fucking brilliantly crafted little vegetarian gems arrived, and as I took a first bite of each, my gut response was the opposite of midday-meal indifference. Words began to falter. Jaws went slack, and all that began to come out was either incomprehensible exclamation or inartistic expletive.

Luckily, the place is laid out more like a bar than a proper dining room, with an easy, elbow-on-table recline, and its namesake is one of the fiercer, naked-er deities. So there was nary a lightning bolt or raised eyebrow as a languid "fuuuuuucking hell" was released from table three after consuming the fat, ingeniously crafted bundles of warm, creamy cannelini bean and sun-dried tomato mash, whipped with lemon, roasted garlic and packaged in wide ribbons of soft, cool zucchini ($7).

Undeniably warranted was the vaguely sexual groan emitted the moment chunks of sweet-roasted, sumac-dusted acorn squash and cold Fuji apple slices were dipped into chef Corey Mintz's masterful pink-peppercorn-orange-caramel sauce ($7). When asked where the gorgeous, lingering heat came from, Mintz paused and asked, mostly to himself, "Which peppers are those crazy hot ones?" His fingers snapped, "Scotch bonnet. I steep one of those fuckers in the caramel."

His passion was contagious, and I proceeded to take the Lord's name in vain at every opportunity. The crisp slabs of black-bean-studded polenta and their "Jesus Effin' Christ!"-inducing accompaniment of roast tomatillo salsa ($7). The bowl of beautiful chilled soba noodles ($9) tossed with a dash of sesame oil, black and white sesame seeds, papery skeins of toasted nori, pickled ginger, kimchi, tamari and steamed vegetables: a dish that held two ingredients that are anathema to my palate had me cussing like a sailor. Choruses of appreciative "fucks!" were spat reverently at the lovely bitter jade pile of steamed rapini ($6) sitting on dark, sweet veins of balsamic glaze, scattered with lemon zest and fine shavings of parmesan.

The inelegant language continued upon my second visit, this time aimed at the larger dishes: the Santa Fe salad ($10) composed of black beans, toasted corn, red grape tomatoes, avocado spears, crunchy tortilla points, drizzled with a hot, stingy coriander-lime/Cajun dressing, as well as the abundant tangle of slippery udon noodles ($13) mixed with Ponzu sauce, steamed broccoli, shiitake mushrooms, pineapple and grilled tofu wedges.

It's counterintuitive that food of this lofty calibre and nutritional virtue manages to elicit such a profane reaction, though, I guess, it's also a weird testament to its universality.