ME: "Can I get a half-portion of pasta?"
WAITER: "No."
ME: "Can I order à la carte from the tasting menu?"
WAITER: "No."

You might interpret that to mean Bar Milano knows exactly what it's doing. Or you might say—my reading—that this is one of the most regimented restaurants on earth. Dinner at a military academy mess hall—Back straight, mister!—promises more laughs.

I guess nobody but me seems to mind. Bar Milano, from the owners of the beloved Lupa and 'inoteca, is already one of the most fashionable spots in New York. I ate at 5:45 p.m. on a Saturday. When I asked for a later reservation, the answer was, predictably, "No." At least this denial made sense. Every other time was booked.

Newly opened, wildly popular, and eerily formal, Bar Milano is a Manhattan phenomenon. Culinarily, it's flawed. The food, a reworking of dishes from the northern Italian regions of Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, and Lombardy, is bizarrely inventive. The most startling and off-putting of the dozen dishes I tried was seared, nearly raw tuna crusted in sweet spices served in combination with undercooked sweetbreads. That's Italian all right, but extremely southern, a preparation out of Dante's Inferno.

The sacrosanct tasting menu appears to offer the best opportunities to eat traditionally. I was finally able to beg one item from it, a soup from Emilia-Romagna called tortellini in brodo. The broth was bland but the meat-filled dumplings properly savory. In general, pastas are the safest choices here, although the ragu on my tagliatella alla bolognese was overcooked and tasteless. Skip the lobster risotto, which offers nothing. The tender, grilled octopus is overwhelmed by char and sweet lemon. A huge pork chop topped with mustard fruits was gorgeous but bland—one of my artistic guests compared it to a fashion model acting in a film.

What's occurring at Bar Milano is typical of what takes place when Italian food is served formally, with all the trimmings. You will find multiple hues of marble plus much burnished wood. All that's missing are, surprisingly, tablecloths. And the restaurant's formality is at odds with its storefront setting—you'll be looking out the window at the M-101 bus chugging up Third Avenue.

The servers, and there are plenty of them, move languidly, as though their tasks have been choreographed. They might make you feel cosseted. Or you might think you're trapped. One of my guests, his back to the room, said, "I keep thinking there's somebody who doesn't approve of me looking over my shoulder." The wine list is good, as well as fairly priced, although you might hate the ritual of "priming" glasses, at least as it's done here. The idea is to slosh a little wine from a newly opened bottle into the wine glasses, thus removing impurities and possibly enhancing the bouquet. It's interesting when it takes place tableside, but when it happens out of sight, as it does here, you might think the dishwashers went on strike.

With its inflexible ambience and precious cooking, Bar Milano offers precisely what we thought New Yorkers didn't want anymore. I suppose some of its popularity is due to the fine reputations of Lupa and 'inoteca. The rest might be attributed to nomenclature—everybody seems to love restaurants that call themselves bars. Bar Milano is everything an Italian bar is not—it's not informal, social, or relaxed, and you sure aren't going to eat well.

323 Third Avenue (at East 24th Street), New York, NY; 212-683-3035

I sent in an advance party, a blonde in a red dress, to reconnoiter. No food writer gets into Le Cirque unnoticed. The Maccioni family has an early-warning detection system superior than anything NORAD has ever deployed.

Her assignment: Report to me on the newly opened Le Cirque Wine Lounge, designed to serve snacks from the well-regarded main kitchen and wine from a glass-and-metal storage tower that dominates the room. (The sommeliers here could moonlight as firemen, so precipitous is their climb up the ladder.) When I finally showed up, she was sitting at the bar, drinking a glass of Prosecco that a kindly gentleman at the next stool had provided. She whined to me that the female bartender had her beat in looks. Some scout.

She did make one notable observation: Almost everyone at the bar seemed to be in the restaurant business. It's easy to get a free drink from people as generous as restaurateurs tend to be.

We moved to the lounge, which is orange-toned and decorated with what appear to be upside-down umbrellas hanging from the ceiling. I'm not crazy about orange, but the blonde said it flattered women of a certain age, and Le Cirque is known to attract plenty of them.

The lounge is spacious and open. The table tops are shiny, practically tortoise-shell. The service is predictably attentive. Many of the chairs are actually backless stools, best suited to patrons with taut abdominal muscles. Wines by the glass are expensive, but Le Cirque always has bargains on its list—try the 2005 Cuvée Alexandre Chardonnay from Casa Lapostolle ($38) or the 2003 Cuvée Arthur Minervois from Château Cabezac ($65).

Basically, the menu is a hodge-podge of snacks. I tried a few, and the best ones were stellar. The blonde had never tasted culatello, or even heard of it, so I lectured her on culatello being the heart of prosciutto and only worth eating if it had been produced by a passionate pig-farmer and hung in his barn to cure. The waiter, overhearing, said, "Yes." He said the Maccionis bring back their culatello from Italy, and it's the centerpiece of a wonderful cold-cut plate.

Country terrine is beefy beyond belief—the blonde said, "It's like biting into the thigh of an animal." The cheesy croque monsieur, in contrast, is delicate. The only dish to skip is the Alsatian-style tarte flambé—nice ingredients but a Celeste-like supermarket crust. There's also a disappointing condiment, mustard fruits with the consistency of gumdrops.

Our waiter appeared with a tray containing about half the desserts in the house. I'd been spotted, of course. This was no hardship, because Le Cirque's pastry department is consistently among the best. I particularly recommend anything vanilla: the classic crème brûlée, the cream-filled tiny donuts, the miniature floating island in a martini glass. The blonde was so enthralled by the floating island, meringue in crème anglaise, that she finally stopped griping about the "model-level bartender."

Le Cirque's lounge is an attempt by the restaurant to appeal to a younger clientele. I sent the blonde off to check out the main dining room, and she reported an average age of late fifties. We put the lounge clientele, including a woman draped in a feathered boa, at early forties. Nobody was a kid, but Le Cirque has always been one of the most grown-up restaurants in New York.

One Beacon Court (151 East 58th Street), New York, NY; 212-644-0202; lecirque.com

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; www.wineisterroir.com

Here's the high concept behind most chef-driven restaurants: Chef piles together ingredients nobody has thought of piling together before. Chef awaits applause.

Too often, when I encounter this sort of creativity, I look around desperately for a way to slip out of the place unnoticed (just so you know, not before paying the check).

I can't say anything different is going on at Elettaria in Manhattan's West Village, except I'm smitten with the food. Maybe it's because I crave the particular seasonings and spices being utilized here, but I'd prefer to think there's genuine inspiration at work.

Our waitress said she wasn't supposed to point this out, for fear of alarming timid customers, but the chef is predisposed toward Indian flavors. To this I respond: Where have you been all my life? I'm generally not a fan of Indian restaurants—the food to me is too heavy, too gooey, too inflexible—but I am insane about the flavors. I love coriander, cumin, cardamom, all the rest. And of course, everybody enjoys Indian breads.

The chef at Elettaria is Akhtar Nawab—so much for keeping the Indian roots of this restaurant secret. "Elettaria" means "green cardamom" in Latin, which I guess is the chef's way of showing he went to college. I have a few petty complaints: The signature tomato ravioli are too clunky; the piled-up presentations tend to blur the flavors; the no-potato gnocchi remind me of Tater Tots; and the desserts, while tasty and artistic, are a bit too dense and formal.

The frying is brilliant, especially the pan-roasted chicken, the pan-fried sweetbreads and, best of all, the crunchy, juicy, deep-fried quail. Still, it's the exoticness of the Indian influences that uplifts this cooking.

Indian food has always had considerable appeal to vegetarians, and to me the most irresistible item on the menu is diced sunchokes in a smoked sunchoke purée. This accompaniment to the chicken is so savory and toothsome you might suspect it was cooked over a campfire in bacon fat.

Elettaria is on West 8th Street, best known for shoe shops and other low-level commercial enterprises. The intriguing dining room incorporates a little of everything: Victorian, primitive, prairie, flea market, and antique shop. I imagine Frank Lloyd Wright's apartment looking like this when he was a college student.

The wine list is well-conceived, with two particular under-$40 bargains: For a white, the delicious 2007 Zolo, made from Argentina's Torrontes grape, which tastes like a cross between Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling. For a red, the medium-bodied 2003 Domaine des Schistes, a blend with impressive acidity and balance.

Elettaria is precisely what I admire, a modern American restaurant with a coherent and confident point of view.

33 West 8th Street, New York, NY; 212.677.3833; elettarianyc.com

So much to explain: The Merkato is a large marketplace in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Now along comes Merkato 55, a large restaurant in Manhattan's meatpacking district—to me more alien than Addis Ababa.

Marcus Samuelsson, the most famous Ethiopian ever raised in Sweden, popularized Swedish-style cooking at Aquavit. He's now out to do the same for African-style cooking at Merkato 55—the "55" refers to the address of the restaurant, not the number of questions I had to ask in order to understand the food here.

A friend summed up the unusual culinary challenges when he looked at the menu and said, "How often do you see goat in a pot?"

I was tempted, but the waitress told me something I didn't want to hear: The dish contained peanut butter. Skippy, in fact, which she said is the favorite of West Africa.

I switched to lamb meatballs in a pot. No peanut butter, but lots of other stuff: couscous studded with fruit, red sauce, and a fried egg. Her instructions: Stir it up. Before I did, I tasted each component: superb, particularly the smooth meatballs, rich in lamb flavor. After mushing, a mess.

My advice is to minimize the mixing and mashing. The peanut butter (the otherwise luscious chicken soup has it, too) tastes lovely when spread on benne, which is like a sesame bagel. The fried egg goes beautifully with meali, a sensational cumin-scented corn bread. There's another bread, za'atar, made with a spice mix and smelling strongly of sumac. All three cost $6 and are worth the price.

As you might expect from a restaurant representing an entire continent, there's plenty to like: duck with wonderfully crunchy, sweet skin, superior to Peking duck. Skewers containing venison, onion, pork belly, and apricot—I suggest pairing up the venison with the onion, and the pork belly with the fruit, not munching all four at once. The best dessert is the espresso pudding with espresso-almond crumble.

The cooking at Merkato 55 is refined, and the dishes consistently well-prepared. The knowledgeable waitresses are a blessing. The restaurant is on two floors—we were seated downstairs, in the less-attractive adjunct to the bar. The décor is mostly brown and black, sort of Serengeti Chic, and the dark, grainy tables downstairs have inlays that our waitress said represented African food poems.

Ours, she said, read, "When God cooks, there is no smoke."

Here's my version: "When God cooks, there is no peanut butter."

55 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY; 212-255-8555; merkato55.com