My friend from Brooklyn entered complaining.  "I don't like the décor," he said, even before he hung his coat on a wooden peg and sat down on the uncomfortable metal stool I was saving for him.  "So prefab East Village."

You know a place isn't pretty when people from Brooklyn are sneering at it, and Terroir appears to have incorporated design elements from studio apartments, dorm rooms, and Ikea.  It's retro, the first restaurant in the East Village to pay tribute to the mess the neighborhood used to be.  The floor appears original—damaged, unsightly, and left over from the bike shop that used to occupy the space.

But there are several likeable aspects of Terroir, a creation of Marco Canora and Paul Grieco, the inseparable twosome also behind Hearth and Insieme.  Besides Canora's food and Grieco's wine, there's the clientele.

The tiny place has 24 seats, most of them occupied all the time, and usually by young women.  The first time I stopped in, I was one of five men in attendance.  The second time, one of nine.  The waiter said it's always that way—his theory was that the website DailyCandy, which adores Terroir, is luring them in.

Here's what else I like: The few guys who have discovered this place don't appear particularly suave, leaving plenty of opportunities for the rest of us.  This is, word-for-word, the pickup line being used by one of them on a blonde seated a few inches to my right at the restaurant's communal table, which happens to be the only table:  "You know who my favorite painter is?  Norman Rockwell.  Want to know why?  All that fancy stuff in fancy museums, I don't get it.  You put a police officer next to a kid—now that I understand."

He was so inept I almost choked on my bruschetta, and believe me, the bruschetta here goes down easy.  The best of the six kinds are the celery-laced tonnato (tuna) and the garlicky baccala (dried cod), both overloaded with toppings.

"Terroir" is a French word used in the wine world to express a sense of place.  In the case of this establishment, the owners are going for the triple play—terroir in wine, food, and ambience.  Their hero is the late Bartolo Mascarello, a traditional Italian winemaker whose face you'll notice everywhere, even on the T-shirts of the staff.  (He's the guy who looks like Che Guevara's dad.)

Mascarello's Barolo isn't available by the glass, but try a three-ounce taste of the 2003 Barolo from Fratelli Brovia for a crash-course in terroir—the wine is rough, coarse, dry, earthy, and might remind you of razor blades, but, by golly, it lets you know where it's from.  A Sicilian friend I brought to another meal here said the Brovia Barolo had lippuso—that meant her taste buds stood at attention.

For a more pleasurable but equally terroir-driven wine experience, order the 2006 Montlouis-sur-Loire from Le Rocher des Violettes.  It's a French Chenin Blanc fully of juicy minerality, and no winemakers produce better Chenin Blancs than those of the Loire.

The menu is probably too ambitious for the modest surroundings, with more than 40 items, most of them prepped down the block at Hearth.  In these cramped conditions, those most suitable are the hand-held snacks.  A third fine bruschetta is the salty black cabbage and pork sausage.  The chicken liver version, in theory the most familiar, tastes the least like Italy—it's dark and rich, reminiscent of  the 2nd Avenue Deli.  Two other swell snacking selections are the sweet, fried, beet-and-gorgonzola risotto balls and the veal-and-ricotta meatballs, stellar and delicate, a tour de force of the type.

There's also a non-terroir issue at Terroir, one having to do with a room full of women.  Don't expect the one, tiny, unisex bathroom to be unoccupied much of the time.

413 East 12th Street, New York, NY; wineisterroir.com