The era of swaggering, multi-story dining emporiums seems to be fading away in Manhattan. Understatement has returned, most notably with full-service restaurants that call themselves bars.

It's a linguistic throwback to the days when every restaurant wanted to be thought of as a bistro, luring in lonely Manhattanites desperate for homey comfort. Now, it seems, New York residents want to belly up to bars for gourmet grub and fancified mixed drinks. For the past couple of years, restaurants (rather obnoxiously) have been transforming their bars into eating adjuncts—try getting a pre-dinner glass of wine at Babbo or Gramercy Tavern. The sound you hear at those bars isn't the buzz of conversation; it's the clang of cash registers.

The new restaurants that refer to themselves as bars often have well-regarded chefs on the premises, and, of course, mixologists on duty, although I've heard that these guys now want to be known as "bar chefs." The man in the kitchen at Bar Blanc, maybe the fanciest and best of the new spots, is Cesar Ramirez, and the full-time pastry chef is Daniel Keehner, whose talents are not wasted. The three people who started the restaurant, Ramirez among them, are generally referred to as "a trio of Bouley alums"—products of David Bouley, Inc.

Let's start by stating the obvious: Places with pedigrees like this don't come cheap. Dinner for two with tip, tax, and a decent bottle of wine can easily exceed $100 per person. That's what happens when bar patrons no longer settle for pickled eggs. What you get for your money is a white bar, white banquettes, bricks painted white, waiters in white tuxedo shirts, and silver lamps.

Naturally, the customers tend to wear black.

The food is colorful and complex, perhaps more complicated than it need be. Predictably, it's tasty and prepared with enormous finesse. Sometimes it's small—my amuse-bouche was a single cheesy brioche bun the size of my thumbnail (and I have small hands).

The only dish that missed the mark was a lamb lasagna so refined it forgot it was food. It's circular and prepared with four sheets of thin pasta, the top one with a sheen resembling fondant icing. Between the layers is a substance more like lamb goo than lamb ragu. Silly it might be, but it tasted fine—although I kept imagining a lamb leg crammed into a blender.

A "market special" of organic squab was a fabulous bird: meaty, salty, and satisfying. Desserts could not have been better, the presentation pure restaurant and the flavors satisfyingly simple. Don't miss the lemon soufflé with huckleberries.

Wasn't it Sigmund Freud who reminded us that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Well, in Manhattan, a bar is no longer just a bar.

142 West 10th Street, New York, NY; 212-255-2330; www.barblanc.com

South Gate has top names: food by Kerry Heffernan, design by Tony Chi. What it lacks is an identity.

The restaurant is on the ground floor of the Jumeirah Essex House and comes courtesy of the folks who developed Dubai. (They sure know how to build a city, but their culinary credentials aren't the greatest.)

The restaurant is all glitter, glass, and shiny surfaces, with wine racks replacing walls and a no-tablecloth, we're-not-fussy declaration. The T-shaped bar is particularly enticing, gorgeously integrated into the room. The hotel and the restaurant have separate entrances, which lessens the startling dissimilarity between the marble, brocade, and gilt formality of the hotel and the ultra-contemporary, Vegas-with-values look of the restaurant.

Who actually walks in is fascinating. On my first visit, almost all the customers, some of them kids, were dressed casually and dining informally, as though this were a hotel coffee shop. On the next visit, almost everyone was decked out meticulously and dining with an enormous sense of culinary purpose. I suppose a restaurant can't be responsible for who the cab drags in.

Heffernan is one of my favorite chefs, but I've always thought of him as a wood-paneling, plush-carpeting kind of guy: He's somewhat formal, very structured. Here his cooking is predictably excellent, but many of the combinations are exceedingly quirky—butter-poached lobster accompanied by a Korean trencherman's chunk of kimcheed cabbage, sauteed foie gras with a small side salad sitting in the sauce, spicy seared calamari with a cauliflower-custard flan. I loved his soups, especially a creamy celery root version presented as an amuse-bouche. (You'll beg for a bowl.)

The wine list is first-rate and the wine service knowing. Desserts are very formal and painfully correct. Waiters are everywhere. You'll have no chance of making it to the bathroom without someone leading the way, and you won't finish a course without a waiter interrupting to ask if everything is okay. The answer: Not yet.

154 Central Park South; 212-484-5120; www.154southgate.com

Brasserie Les Halles, like its Chef-at-Large, Anthony Bourdain, has a certain ill-mannered charm. The restaurant reminds me of the grubby spots I used to visit in Paris, the ones that titillated me because they appeared to be in violation of health codes.

Bourdain, yet another chef who hates the drudgery of preparing food, recently went back to the restaurant to play line cook. You might have seen him last night on No Reservations, the Travel Channel show where he slouches, smirks, drinks, smokes, swears, pontificates, and eats bugs (possibly the attributes of a modern Renaissance man). Although he claimed on the program that "the cooking life has been a long love affair," he also pointed out that it had been eight years since he had worked in a kitchen.

When I phoned the restaurant to ask his role there, I was told he acts as a "consultant," although it's hard to know what a place that specializes in the hoariest of French dishes would need from an American who wasn't much of a chef back in the days when he worked at being one. I visited Les Halles on Park Avenue this past weekend and found the butter and the fries quite good. Perhaps churning and frying are Bourdain's culinary specialties these days.

I had planned to go twice, but once was enough. I entered and was led to a miniscule table covered in white paper. It was in front of a banquette that appeared to have been slashed, probably by an understandably dissatisfied customer. The lighting is so dim and the furnishings so battered that it was difficult to accurately assess the damage.

Next to the table was a marginally better one, and my guest and I asked to be seated there. The surly hostess, who had heretofore said nothing, snarled "no," and when I pressed for an explanation, she said it had been reserved. I was suspicious, since it's hard to imagine anyone going to the trouble to reserve a specific table at a restaurant where none are desirable. It was a falsehood easily exposed. When we asked the people finally seated there if they had indeed reserved it, they told us that they had just wandered in, having no idea where they might be placed.

We ordered wine and our waiter, much friendlier than the hostess, brought the incorrect vintage. We substituted another, which arrived warm to the touch, and he promised us an ice bucket that never materialized. We gamely pressed on, ordering three appetizers, two main courses, and three desserts.

The first, a flavorless and fatty house terrine, tasted like truck-stop cuisine, but in retrospect we regretted discarding it, because it was markedly superior to a crab cake that was mostly breading and spongy escargots acrid from undercooked garlic. Steak au poivre, although properly cooked, was another variation on the theme of acridity.

The duck confit looked reasonably attractive. The waiter assured us it was made on the premises, but he was the same fellow who had misled us about the wine bucket (not to be confused with the hostess who had lied about the table). Regardless, the duck leg wasn't any tastier than those that come from a can. The so-called "truffled potatoes" accompanying it were greasy diced spuds.

Desserts were an improvement, which I attribute to Bourdain not being the Pastry Chef-at-Large. Profiteroles came with good ice cream and even better chocolate sauce, but the choux pastry was inedible—cold, soggy, and undercooked. The crème brûlée would have been fine had it been freshly made, while the crêpes suzette, prepared tableside, were at least done earnestly. The gentleman pressed into service had good intentions, but no idea how to make this classic French dessert. He worked hard, used too much of everything, and presented us with mushy crêpes drowned miserably in an alcoholic, orange-flavored bath.

Last night's episode of No Reservations might inadvertently have provided an explanation of why the food at Les Halles is so dreadful. The number of tables has almost doubled since Bourdain worked there, and the kitchen is feeding more than 600 people a day.

What's more appalling than the food or even the absurd title of Chef-at-Large is that the smirking Bourdain has somehow become the de facto public face of the restaurant industry. It's as if Steven Seagal had been named president of the Screen Actors Guild.

411 Park Avenue South; 212-679-4111; www.leshalles.net

The barrel above the front door suggests a weinstube, one of those inexpensive Mitteleuropean wine bars featuring rustic dishes prepared by the proprietor's frauchen. The interior follows suit—it's barrel-shaped and jammed with inexpensive, rickety blonde tables.

Bar Boulud does have a decidedly homey appeal, that's for sure, although the food happens to be pure French and the wine prices soar into quadruple figures. Economical it is not. It's located on pricey real estate across from Lincoln Center, and the cuisine comes from chef-turned-entrepreneur Daniel Boulud, most famous as the owner of the aristocratic restaurant Daniel.

Boulud is following the lead of chefs who can't say no to a restaurant project, but at least he's staying with what he does better than anybody else in America: upscale French comfort food. It's clear from the menu and the food on display that he's satisfying his love of pâtés and terrines—basically meatloaf done up with cream, brandy, truffles, foie gras, and anything else that costs a lot. For hamburger-loving New Yorkers, this is another way to indulge a passion for ground meat.

There are eight such items on the menu, and the best to me was the tourte de canard, which is duck, foie gras, and figs enclosed in a thin pastry shell. (The pastry is leaden, as is to be expected. Such wrappings are more about French tradition than French cuisine.)

The worst that can be said about the rest of the food is that the recipes are relentlessly conventional—lamb stew, roasted chicken, boudin blanc. The best is that such a style of cooking is terribly missed. (If you haven't been missing boudin blanc, you'll start longing for it after you taste Boulud's exceptionally creamy version.) My only complaint is that many Bar Boulud dishes are underseasoned, which often can be said about French food. They're also undersalted, which almost never can be said about French food.

One warning: If you happen to admire fresh greenery, this is not your place. The kitchen loves to marinate plant life. The decorator made a feeble gesture toward satisfying a need for vegetation by placing a bizarre, bush-like object resembling a Chia Pet at the bottom of the stairs leading to the washrooms.

The wine list is exceptional, although all those bottles costing thousands makes me think Boulud is hoping that tuxedo-bedecked swells will stop in après-opera. I can't think of any compelling reason to drink Château Pétrus in this ambience, although the wobbly tables provide so much incidental movement that you won't have bother swirling your wine.

1900 Broadway (between West 63rd and West 64th Streets), New York, NY; 212-595-0303