I invited old friends with a home in Bedford, Pennsylvania (pop. 3,000), to join me for lunch at Hundred Acres. I wanted to prove to them that we New Yorkers remain in touch with rural values—or at least with rural eating.

Bedford is a country town with a lot of history—George Washington slept there. Hundred Acres is a new spot in Soho from the owners of Cookshop.

The woman from Bedford looked at the menu and said, “Arugula? In Bedford, we still think arugula is a fish.”

She sure liked the way the place looked, and so did I. There are three rooms—a bar with white subway tiles and a lot of dark wood, a middle room of pale elegance with wonderful photographs of old windows that are even better than the real things, and outdoor dining that isn’t quite outdoors because a glass roof covers the patio. The pretty touches throughout include an urn filled with what looked to me like branches from stately cotton trees. (That’s how much I know about agriculture.) The rooms are open, bright, and cozy, an unusual combination.

My friend got excited when she saw the burger, which is made from grass-fed beef and goes for $18.

She said, “I’ve never had grass-fed beef before.”

When I expressed surprise, she added, proudly, “I have had free-range chicken.”

“How was it?” I replied.

“Tasted like chicken,” she said.

Hundred Acres, I have to say, is kind of high-falutin’, despite the name. That burger isn’t actually called “grass-fed.” Nope, it’s “pasture-raised.” This kind of pretentiousness might be fine if the food we ate had turned out to be a big step above ordinary, but it wasn’t. It was just a lot more complicated than it had to be, with plenty of unnecessary extras.

Southern-fried rabbit is pretty darned good, cooked like KFC extra-crispy. It comes with a walnut honey sauce that’s basically goo.

Grilled walleye pike is an excellent sandwich, once you scrape off most of the fresh dill that makes it taste more like gravlax than fried fish.

Fried stuffed squash blossoms resemble fried chicken fingers served in Chinese restaurants, way too big and dipped in way too much flour.

Liver and onions was a disaster. You’ve undoubtedly heard meat described as “shoe leather.” Never has it been more appropriate. The slab of liver was cooked two steps beyond well and shaped like the sole of a boot. A topping of pickled cherries only made it worse.

Expect a lot of marinating here. It’s everywhere, sometimes to good effect. I sort of liked an absurd-sounding open-faced sandwich made with sliced tongue, pickled ramps, and lots of butter. Must have been invented by a renegade Jew living in West Virginia. We ordered it to be shared, and when the waitress brought it, she quipped, “Tongue for the table?” Nice.

The burger, by the way, tasted the way good grass-fed beef usually does: plenty of flavor, not particularly juicy. The fries were first-rate, nice and fresh.

I spotted an appealing and unusual summer wine, a 2007 dry muscat ($39) from the Languedoc-Roussillon, crisp and bright.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with the rhubarb crostada (heavy crust) or the chocolate layer cake (commercial-tasting), but the blueberry pie, vivid and tart, had plenty of life.

My pals from Bedford were more impressed than I was.

I asked them if the food at Hundred Acres was better than what they ate back home.

“It’s much, much better than Bedford,” she replied.

38 Macdougal Street, New York, NY; 212-475-7500; www.hundredacresnyc.com