Seafood shrine is a great catch.

• Cuisine: Coastal Italian
• Vibe: Breezy fine dining
• Occasion: Business or bargain lunch, romantic date, dinner for an occasion
• Don't Miss: Lobster with burrata, brodetto di pesce, garganelli with sausage ragu, zucchini torte with frozen yogurt
• Price: Appetizers, $11; entrees, $18; dessert, $9
• Reservations: Recommended
• Phone: (212) 582-5100
• Location: 240 Central Park South, between Broadway & Seventh Ave.

Chef Michael White is either really confident or completely out of his mind. These days everyone is scaling back and lowering prices. Everyone, that is, except for White and partner Chris Cannon, who just opened Marea, a haute seafood restaurant on Central Park South.

The main dining room is furnished with high-gloss rosewood, chocolate leather banquettes, silver-coated seashells and roaming silver trolleys lined with liqueurs. And what's most compelling about Marea's dining room isn't the decor, it's that the seats are always filled with guests.

White and Cannon established themselves as serious restaurateurs at Alto and Convivio, prominent Italian restaurants in Manhattan. And instead of ­downsizing during the slump, they've expanded their empire with a new 150-seat restaurant.

White's always been known for ­rustic, hearty cooking and his way with pasta and meat. At Marea, he's venturing into seafood and delicate crudos with an extensive seafood menu that rivals the selection at Milos and Le Bernardin.

So do the prices. When you're serving seafood, you really can't afford to cut quality. Marea's menu is filled with astoundingly fresh fish — lobster and zucchini-filled squid with roasted tomato, sea scallops with orange and arugula, and rigatoni with shrimp ragu and seppia. The menu is divided into crudi (teeny bites) antipasti (small bites), pastas, fish and meat entrees, and whole fish sold by the pound.

I think every table should start with the lardo crostini smeared with sea urchin, an unexpected and clever combination of flavors. There's a lot of originality here, especially in the pairing of fish and cheese, like a phenomenal antipasti of burrata and lobster with eggplant funghi and a basil-seed vinaigrette. My favorite pasta dish is the house-made spaghetti tossed with garlic, crab, sea urchin and oven-dried tomatoes...

• Cuisine: Italian
• Vibe: Buzzing trattoria
• Occasion: Group dinner, casual date, night out
• Don't Miss: Blue crab crostino; fettuccine verde with white Bolognese; almond semifreddo
• Price: Appetizers, $13; entrees, $22; desserts, $8
• Reservations: Recommended
• Phone: (212) 925-3797
• Location: 377 Greenwich St., near N. Moore St.

• Cuisine: Italian
• Vibe: Rock 'n' roll trattoria
• Occasion: Business lunch, romantic date, family affair
• Don't Miss: Squid-ink tagliatelle, Scuderia pizza, buttermilk panna cotta
• Price: Appetizers, $9; entrées, $18; dessert, $8.50
• Reservations: Accepted
• Phone: (212) 206-9111
• Location: 10 Downing St., between Bleecker and Houston.

Stand at the corner of Downing St. and Sixth Ave. and take a look around. What you may be seeing is the core of a New Little Italy, complete with neighborhood feuds and family businesses passed down to the next generation.

The old Little Italy, to the east and downtown, is slowly fading away. But here are Bar Pitti, Da Silvano, Silvano Bistecca and Scuderia, which just opened six weeks ago.

Thirty years ago, Silvano Marchetto opened Da Silvano - it's upscale, it's hard to get into, it's like a celebrity supper club of sorts. But if you're not fancy enough to get into Da Silvano, you can sneak into Scuderia.

This restaurant was opened by Silvano, his daughter, Leyla, and two other owners. Da Silvano's got white tablecloths and $38 veal Milanese. Scuderia got album covers on the walls and a $9 grilled cheese. Nothing in the decor says what kind of food it serves. It looks like a record store where they still sell vinyl and blast classic rock. It serves comfort food - pizzas, pastas, paninis, soups, salads and ice cream sundaes.

Scuderia is really an Italian diner. Bacon and eggs? It's called the Occhio di Bue pizza, and it's topped with mozzarella, thick and crispy pancetta, pecorino, spinach leaves and a sunny-side-up egg. I never thought I'd love jam pizza, but at Scuderia, it's wonderful. If you ordered a jam pie in America, it would come slathered with strawberry jelly, Velveeta and Spam.

Scuderia uses fig jam, sharp blue cheese and speck (ham), so it's actually Mediterranean, not just Italian, and much more cosmopolitan. The kitchen's great skill is in building bacon and eggs, and jam and ham, on a construction site of flatbread. Peanut butter & jelly sandwich? They've got that, too.

The tramezzini section - crustless white-bread sandwiches - were a gruesome discovery. The prosciutto and mushroom tramezzino tasted like soggy Wonder Bread with baloney, mushrooms and mayonnaise. The artichoke and fontina-stuffed tramezzino was just as dreadful. Skip the sandwiches and focus your attention on the seafood.

I loved the squid-ink tagliatelle with fresh fish and a great, garlicky tomato sauce. The frittura mista is a generous heap of battered calamari, tilapia, shrimp, green beans and sweet potato with a homemade tartar sauce. I'd order the brick-flattened Cornish hen for the jus-bathed potatoes.

Oh, and stash a few salt packets in your pocket before you go to Scuderia. A lot of dishes needed it. The gnocchi tasted like warm potato blobs in a tasteless butter-and-sage sauce. Who would've thought minestrone soup would be a low-sodium experience? But an order of rock-hard meatballs was too far gone to be saved merely by salt.

If nothing else, Scuderia is a great spot for dessert. Even if you do snag a table at Da Silvano, cross the street for dessert. My favorite is the buttermilk panna cotta - silky and smooth, yet unusually light. Then there's the tiramisu - a do-it-yourself collection of lady fingers, zabaglione and a cup of liqueur-spiked espresso.

The only bad one in the bunch is the gnocchi dolci, stuffed with pineapple and pine nuts in maple syrup.

Is the food fabulous at Scuderia? No. But it's not bad either. Not bad at all.

Vesta Trattoria
21-02 30th Ave., Astoria; (718) 545-5550

Lunch, Mon.-Fri., noon-4 p.m.;

Dinner, Sun.-Mon., 5-10 p.m.; Tue.-Thur., 5-11 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5 p.m.-12 a.m.

CUISINE: Italian
VIBE: Warm nabe spot
OCCASION: Casual date, neighborhood bites, family or group dinner
DON'T-MISS DISH: Three-meat lasagna, lamb shank, baby Jesus cake
PRICES: Appetizers, $8; entrees, $14; desserts, $5.50
RESERVATIONS: Accepted

Have you ever had wine by the shot? I hadn't either, until a few weeks ago.

I don't mean shot, as in a one-ounce shot of whiskey. I mean a port glass of Primitivo - a spicy, medium-bodied red from Puglia - for $2.50. This is a wine you could drink all through dinner.

But why bother? If you can drink wine by the shot, you can try many more wines and pair them more closely with each course you order. And still walk out of the restaurant without weaving.

Where did I run across this clever idea? At the corner of 30th Avenue & 21st Street in Astoria, Queens - a little place called Vesta. Queens may sound like a long ways away, but this trattoria is closer from midtown than most of downtown. Here's how I think of it - the lamb shank I had the other night is just over the 59th Street bridge.

Giuseppe Falco is the co-owner of Vesta and the host. In the kitchen is Michelle Vido. Between them, they've worked at Monkey Bar, Sapa, The River Cafe, Little Giant, Trattoria Del Arte and Bond 45 - big-deal Manhattan restaurants. And they're serving big-deal food on 30th Avenue, right across from the 99 cent store. The menu isn't complicated: three types of pizza, lasagna, linguine, gnocchi, calamari, chicken, steak, some simple sides and a few nightly specials. With only a couple of exceptions, these are all wonderful.

It's not so much that Vido reinvents these dishes. She doesn't overdesign them, she doesn't overpresent them, she's not trying to be a culinary architect, and she doesn't crowd them with unwanted ingredients. In fact, there's no fashion to this food whatsoever - only flavor.

What you're left with after a meal at Vesta is a series of vivid impressions. Some are impressions of taste - the preserved lemons in the charred green beans, bits of toasted hazelnut in the cous cous, sweet shreds of pork in the three-meat lasagna, the cracker-like crust of the pizza, the cipollini onions that pop up and here there on the menu.

But some impressions are more complicated. You order the braised lamb shank. Out comes something fit for Fred Flintstone. Where is the electric knife, you wonder? But with one touch of the fork, the shank comes undone. It falls into pieces, as if insisting you have a little cous cous with each bite or a little caramelized onion. And of course, you eat the perfectly-crumbed exterior pieces first.

Vesta's a pretty plain place - as warm as it is simple. The diner feels at home here and the food feels at home here. The portions are huge and very well-priced. Even if the portions were tiny, they'd still be worth coming to Queens for.

In every dish there's a dash of sophistication - the prune reduction under the roast salmon, the way Vido sears the gnocchi, the spiced sausage on the pizza, the clementine and Grand Marnier sauce on the panna cotta.

And now a few words about the baby Jesus cake - La Torta del Piccolo Bambino Jesu Christo. It looks so humble, so unassuming - a square mass of cafeteria cake without frosting, only dense with dates and drenched in a caramel sauce. As for how it tastes, I leave that one up to you.

Vesta is a genuine step forward for neighborhood cooking - the idea that every neighborhood deserves a really good restaurant.

Recession-proof dining.
1762 First Ave., at 91st St. (212) 996-9426
Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun, noon-10 p.m.
CUISINE: Tuscan Italian
VIBE: Humble neighborhood spot
OCCASION: Neighborhood dining, family dinner
DON'T MISS DISH: Grilled calamari, venison ­pappardelle, wild boar meatloaf, tiramisu
AVERAGE PRICE: Appetizers, $7; entrees, $14; dessert, $5
RESERVATIONS: Accepted

Why aren't more people talking about Cipolla Rossa?

Maybe it's the location — First Ave. near 91st St. Maybe it's the narrow storefront. It has a bright yellow awning and it looks more like your average takeout joint than a real restaurant.

The only reason I knew about it was the wild boar meatloaf.

Someone had tipped me off, knowing I'm fond of game. So, I trekked up to Cipolla Rossa on a cold, rainy Saturday night and waited 30 minutes for a table. As it turned out, the meatloaf wasn't meatloaf. How can it be meatloaf if there are no eggs, bread or ketchup in it? How can it be meatloaf if it's not as heavy as lead? This one wasn't.

It tasted more like a moist Italian terrine — wild boar poached in olive oil and seasoned with rosemary, bay leaves and a tart hint of juniper berries. Maybe that's how they make meatloaf in Florence. That's where the chef, Pierluigi Sacchetti, is from. He likes game, too. Sometimes, he makes pappardelle with rabbit ragu or tagliatelle with venison stew or spaghetti with walnut-wild boar meatballs.

He has a way of taming the robustness of game, encouraging its delicacy, its subtlety. Eating the tagliatelle with venison stew you almost forget it's venison. You're not eating venison just for the sake of venison. You're eating it for what it contributes to the complexity of the dish. Cipolla Rossa is a good place to break in a game - shy friend.

You wouldn't expect such serious cooking from such a chintzy-looking restaurant. What makes Cipolla Rossa endearing are also its shortcomings. There are only 16 seats in the restaurant. The phone rings in the dining room because that's where the cashier is taking delivery orders. In the front of the house, it's a one-man band.

Angelo Amato, one of the owners, is also the maître d', server, busboy, sometime-sommelier and life of the party. On Angelo's night off, the chef works the front of the house. Perhaps that's why Cipolla Rossa is so welcomely inexpensive. (I should also mention that the bathroom is through the kitchen. "One coming through," Angelo shouts before you pass through the swinging door.)

And let's face it, this is also the kind of place where you're going to end up sharing your food with strangers. Where food is concerned, "rustic" is a word that's ­basically been ruined. But let's dust it off. At Cipolla ­Rossa, rustic means a kind of coarseness in construction, but not in flavor.

For example, the ribollita soup: black cabbage, onions, carrots, celery, canellini and three-day-old bread — a ­stalwart vegetable porridge. Or the squid ink tagliolini. The chef cuts the pasta by hand. Each strand is slightly ­irregular, so the shrimp reduction broth — brodetto — clings to every noodle.

The ­noodles themselves are buried under an avalanche of seafood — clams, calamari, mussels, shrimp, salmon and cod. This costs $12!

Not everything is wonderful, but there are a few dishes you really must not miss: the grilled calamari, the eggplant parmigiana and the crispy, beer-battered sweetbreads with sliced pear. And why not close with the tiramisu? Gigi makes it with mascarpone, espresso, cocoa, custard and savoiardi — a Piemontese version of lady fingers, only better.

Happiness is a plate of pesto pasta.
268 Sixth Ave., near Bleecker St., (212) 982-3300
Seven days a week, noon to midnight

CUISINE Italian
VIBE Downtown sidewalk scene
OCCASION First date, group dinner
DON'T MISS DISH Pesto pasta, veal meatballs, eggplant parmigiana
AVERAGE PRICES Appetizers, $7; entrees, $13.50; dessert, $6.50
RESERVATIONS Accepted for parties of four or more

Wasn't last week a miserable one in New York? The markets were down and so were some of the candidates.Some people lose their appetite when things seem gloomy. Not me. All I wanted was a bowl of pesto pasta. And nobody makes better pesto sauce than Bar Pitti. If you've ordered it, you know exactly I'm talking about. Every New Yorker should eat it at least once.

But it was late in September, so my chances were slim. High basil season was long over. Would they still be making the pasta? There are a thousand types of basil, but Giovanni Tognozzi's very particular about picking the right one. It's only available through August and sporadically through September.

Tognozzi is the owner of Bar Pitti and a powerful man when it comes to pesto. Somehow I got him talking about the recipe. He mixes the basil with olive oil, Parmesan, pignoli and garlic. More pignoli than garlic, he says. Then he stops himself as if he has said too much.

"They're all my recipes," he says. These days he's no longer working the kitchen; he works the front of the house.

The pesto's not on the menu. You have to ask for it. Beg, really. When I ordered the pesto, my server said they were out of it. She was teasing.

"I was going to surprise you, but you looked too miserable. We have it." She brought it to the table. Its perfume is hypnotic, its flavor intense, and suddenly everyone in the restaurant was ordering the pesto pasta. It's a word-of-mouth kind of place. And that's just one of the things that makes it a New York kind of place.

Only tourists eat from the regular menu. All the best dishes are scribbled on a blackboard in Italian - veal milanese, bruschetta, panzanella, polpettini and osso bucco. Servers translate. They carry the blackboard around like one of Moses' tablets. They never write down your order, but they remember everything. When the servers are too busy, diners pass the blackboard from table to table themselves.

It's a small gesture, but it's one of the things that make Bar Pitti really feel like a community, a community that includes everybody. Locals, tourists, celebrities - they all come to sit on green plastic chairs.

When basil season ends, it's time for the polpettini, the little crusty balls of braised veal and Parmesan cheese.

The recipe for these wonderful polpettini spawned a lawsuit, a feud between Bar Pitti and Da Silvano, the restaurant next door.

"It's my mother's recipe," says Tognozzi. No one really knows who won.

I also love the eggplant parmigiana. I think it's the way they cut the eggplant, with long silky ribbons of it layered with ruby-red tomato sauce and gooey gobs of mozzarella and Parmesan.

Sometimes there's tagliolini tossed with sweet bits of fresh crab, parsley and tomato, glossed in white wine and olive oil. Sometimes there's perfectly charred sepia or braised oxtail with polenta. This isn't rocket science, but it is genius.

There's a good reason some restaurants survive. It's the same reason people sit on the bench outside Bar Pitti waiting in the cold to be picked, waiting to pay cash, waiting to eat the same wonderful food they've been eating here since 1992.

If you're looking for a sign of the times, Convivio is it.

45 Tudor City Place, at 42nd St. (212) 599-5045
Sun.-Thur., 5:30 p.m.-10:30 p.m; Fri.-Sat., 5:30 p.m.-11:30 p.m.
Cuisine Southern Italian.
Vibe Warm Tudor City haunt.
Occasion Business lunch; group dinner.
Don't Miss Dish Four-course prix fixe or the sweetbreads piccata, tuna & caper ravioli, roasted squab.
Average Price Appetizers, $13; entrees, $25; dessert, $11.
Reservations Recommended.

Sometimes, a restaurant doesn't really need a makeover. All it needs is a make-under.

Convivio is a perfect example. Just six weeks ago, L'Impero shut its doors on a quiet block in Tudor City. Two weeks later, it reopened as Convivio. A quick wardrobe change, a few tweaks to the menu and voila, a new restaurant. Sort of. It's the same chef, Michael White, same owners, and yet everything feels different.

The banquettes are brighter, burnt orange, instead of somber blue. The service is still efficient, but somehow friendlier. The room is warmer, the atmosphere more relaxed. Now it's less a jacket-and-tie kind of place, more jacket-and-loosened tie. If you're looking for a sign of the times, Convivio is it. Even the dishes carried over from L'Impero, including the prix fixe, have gone down in price. Not a lot, but enough to seem empathetic. After all, the easy times may be over - for now anyway.

But the drop in price at Convivio doesn't mean a sacrifice in quality. If you have any doubts, order the sweetbreads.  Sometimes, sweetbreads can look, and even taste, a little too anatomical. But Michael White's sweetbreads look and taste almost ethereal. They're glossed in a chive-speckled piccata sauce that cuts right through the unctuousness of the sweetbreads. This is my favorite dish on the menu.

I apparently like my quail skewered, too. Who knew? But when it's on a kebab with chunks of pancetta and shiitake mushrooms, and drizzled in a vin cotto, the logic of skewering quail seems perfectly clear. In a way, these two dishes are emblematic of what Michael White does best. He works well with bold flavors and resilient textures. Clearly, what appeals to him is the rusticity of southern Italian cooking.

It's almost as simple as meat versus fish. The pastas with meat sauces always trump the pastas with seafood, except for a wonderful ravioli of braised tuna and capers, which has all the sweetness (and some of the salt) of the sea itself. Sometimes, the delicacy of the fish on the menu is overwhelmed, and sometimes it's underwhelmed. A heavy, mint-laced yogurt kept arguing with a very creative swordfish involtino. The crab gnocchetti was served in an innocuous sea urchin sub-bisque.

And the shrimp in the calamari-tossed spaghetti were too few and too tiny. Eating them was like playing a game of connect-the-shrimp.

Somehow, you can always tell when a chef likes to eat. What tells you that Michael White is a good eater is the pasta at Convivio - any pasta with meat sauce. Take your pick - ricotta cavatelli baked with goat ragu in a buffalo mozzarella and pecorino "hoodie." Or perhaps, a fusilli with chunks of pork shoulder topped with a fonduta, or orecchiette with sausage, tripe and wild fennel. These are superb dishes to settle down to on a chilly night in late November or even late August.

You may want to spend some of the money you save on the wines. This is one unusual, impressive selection of wines by the glass. The Carjanti Gulfi 2005, a Sicilian white, is amazingly adaptable. And where else can you find a Mariposa Panevino 2006 by the glass? It's a deftly balanced, irresistibly aromatic Sardinian wine. For dessert, don't miss the beignet, the Tudor City equivalent of funnel cake.

A block north of Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, old women sit in lawn chairs along the sidewalk, fanning themselves with the crossword puzzle. Kids play catch in the middle of the street. A cyclist stops to high-five a friend through the large open window of a restaurant.

It's a new spot, open only since December, but already it seems to belong to the old neighborhood. It's called Miranda. Inside, the tables are set with dishtowel napkins and grandmother china.

Most nights, the co-owner, Mauricio Miranda, greets you at the door. And if he's not there to greet you, you might want to come back another night. That's how much difference his presence makes. The other co-owner is Miranda's fiancée, Sasha Rodriguez, who is the chef. She and Miranda met at Verbena, a defunct Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park. He was a server and she was a line cook. Together, at Miranda, they make a perfect marriage of Mexican and Italian food.

It's interesting to see how naturally the ingredients of those two cuisines can be wedded. Instead of risotto, there's Mexican rice, as wonderfully glutinous but flavored with tomato and cumin.

These combinations completely transform familiar dishes. You order the garganelli, and out comes a dish that looks like baked ziti. It's every bit as fulfilling but a hundred times better. What makes the difference is tangy chunks of longaniza sausage.

Or take the arancini. You expect it to be made with ground veal or beef, but instead it's studded with spheres of chorizo and served over a garlicky tomato fonduta.

Eat a few of these dishes and you begin to realize how close the connection between Italian and Mexican cuisine really is. Sometimes, there's only one ingredient of separation.

The food here is neighborhood food, comfort food, every-night food - but with a twist. A perfect example is the chicken soup. It gets a spicy kick of habanero chili and a nudge of lime. The pork tenderloin feels almost pleasingly wintry, except for the mole verde sauce, which is really a bright taste of summer. A special of fluke, baked in parchment paper, is a delicate fillet balanced on a sticky mound of Mexican rice, julienned zucchini and a beet leaf that tastes unmistakably of the earth.

When Mauricio stops by the table, he is usually brimming with excitement. Sometimes, he's showing off a bottle from his interesting collection of wines, many from small or organic producers. (I liked the Torrontes 2006 and the Alentex rosé.)

Sometimes, he's proudly presenting his small mounds of hibiscus leaves - jamaica (ha-MIKE-uh) - from his grandmother's garden in southern Mexico. It appears in a drink called Kika - a blend of homemade jamaica syrup, port and prosecco that looks and tastes like a fizzy Kool-Aid cocktail.

The second coming of the Meatpacking District.
355 W. 14th St., at Ninth Ave. (212) 691-0555
Seven days a week, 5:30 p.m.-11:30 p.m.
CUISINE Southern Italian.
VIBE Grown-up Meatpacking.
OCCASION Trendy date; group dining.
DON’T-MISS DISH Spaghetti with tomato & basil; scallop crudo; roasted capretto.
PRICE Appetizers, $12-$17; entrees, $22-$37; dessert, $11.
RESERVATIONS Highly recommended.

In the past three weeks, I've eaten at Scarpetta three times. And every time, I ate too much. I ate polenta and panna cotta. I ate borlotti bean soup and imported burrata, braised short ribs and boneless veal shank. I ate scallops seared and as crudo. I ate cod and capretto. I ate ravioli, raviolini, tagliatelle, spaghetti, stromboli and lots of mascarpone butter.

Wait, there's more. I ate "pie" and "cheesecake." Not to mention yellowtail, octopus, tuna and fritto misto. And all the homemade bread I could get my hands on.

I probably went up a size, which is not something I want happening every week.

I blame Scott Conant. He has a wonderful way with the simplest ingredients. Polenta, after all, is just boiled cornmeal. Until you add milk, cream and Parmesan and layer it with preserved truffles and a couture mix of mushrooms.

Then it becomes almost opulent. Or the spaghetti - just eggs, water and flour. But the spaghetti at Scarpetta embraces its humility. It wants nothing more than a wash of fresh tomato sauce and basil. It costs $22 and earns it.

So many chefs in New York are busy serving arguments. Conant serves conclusions.

And to think, all this happens in a room that was once The Village Idiot - a place where you could buy a five-dollar pitcher of beer, spill most of it on your waitress, listen to the jukebox and gamble at the worn-out pool table.

How do you get from The Village Idiot to Scarpetta? That's what the Meatpacking District is asking. Florent is about to close after 23 years. Mark't was replaced by an Apple Store. Sascha quickly became Merkatto 55. Nothing lasts forever in this trendy corner of town.

Scarpetta suggests the direction the Meatpacking District might be heading, bringing an uptown crowd downtown for an uptown esthetic. The mirrors in the dining room wear orange leather belts and lean forward, so that diners facing the wall get a panoramic view of the room. The roof retracts.

I prefer dining in the cafe, next to the bar. The tall, wood-strip walls give it the feel of an urban sauna. But Scott Conant could open a halal stand and his uptown following - remembering his success at L'Impero and Alto - would flock to it.

In a way, Conant seems to be cooking from an idealized barnyard full of fat, contented animals. His goat - capretto in Italian - is caramelized on the outside, soft inside. His roast chicken is soothing, crisp and baptized with a sauce of chicken livers, currants and almonds. The veal shank - in too many restaurants, a Neanderthal hunk of meat - is surprisingly feminine, brightened by a lemon gremolata and reclining on a saffron-scented chaise longue of orzo.

As for the so-called "pie" and the so-called "cheesecake," order both. The apple pie crust is made of polenta and the caramel sauce has a pronounced bite of pepper. The cheesecake is indeed cheese-deficient. It tastes like Key lime cake batter topped with torrone, a convincing substitute for Marshmallow Fluff.

I have fond memories of The Village Idiot from the days when I was underage. But now that I'm overage, I'm quite content to find myself sitting in front of a bowl of spaghetti at Scarpetta.

CUISINE: Northern Italian.
VIBE: Elegant and deafening Murray Hill spot.
OCCASION: Casual date; breakfast; neighborhood dining.
DON'T MISS DISH: Cabbage with farro; caviar-topped potato with egg; monkfish and foie gras.
PRICE: Appetizers, $9-$24; entrees, $20-$43; dessert, $5.
RESERVATIONS: Highly recommended.

323 Third Ave., at 24th St., (212) 683-3035. Breakfast, lunch and dinner; seven days a week, 8 a.m.-3 a.m. Dinner served seven days, 5 p.m.-midnight. Bar menu available till 2 a.m.

Whoever heard of a month-long wait for a reservation at a restaurant at 24th and Third? But that's what you get when brothers Joe and Jason Denton open a restaurant in Manhattan. Most of their places - 'ino, 'inoteca, Lupa - have been rustic, wine-focused spots. But at Bar Milano, on the border of Gramercy Park and Murray Hill, they're challenging themselves and their clientele with upscale cooking that shows real imagination. The Northern Italian food is not always successful, but it is often enough to justify the wait.

Consider the cabbage. You'd hardly expect this appetizer to be the best thing on the menu. But what a cabbage! Such a humble leaf until it's stuffed with farro, dried currants and cherries and anchored in a chicken and cabbage consommé. Then it becomes a Cinderella story. The anonymous oysters that accompany it - dredged in farro flour - are almost an afterthought.

Or imagine the patata imbottita - thinly sliced potato wrapped around two egg yolks with a salty caviar cap in a warm puddle of fontina. It's breakfast by another name and every bit as satisfying. The veal chop is just as pleasing - veal two ways in a single chop, crusty and breaded Milanese-style on one side, naked and tender on the other.

One sign of the culinary aspirations at Bar Milano is what they do with foie gras. At most places, it takes a solo turn. Here, it plays a supporting role, which makes it all the more interesting. They pipe it into a savory quail mortadella. They use it to moisten a seared monkfish that would otherwise be too dry. Accompanied by sweet cipollini onions and chanterelle, porcini and morel mushrooms, it is a perfectly balanced entrée.

Not everything works, of course. Most of the pastas are disappointing - the shrimp ravioli was reminiscent of take-out potstickers. The tagliatelle Bolognese, lightly glossed in a hanger steak ragu, wasn't robust. Neither was the veal-stuffed pasta, served in a faint reduction with stale drifts of breadcrumbs.

This is not to fault the ambition at Bar Milano. The two chefs, Steve Connaughton (Lupa) and Eric Kleinman ('inoteca), have obviously set an example that motivates their staff. Our server was extremely well-versed in the subtle nuances of every dish on the menu. And in answer to a question, one of the owners brought out a 1984 cookbook called "Pâtés and Terrines" to show us the photograph that inspired the quail and foie gras appetizer.

The only distraction in the dining room at Bar Milano is the noise - at times unbearable - which echoes off the marble walls and glass wine cabinets. If you ordered the seven-course tasting menu, you'd be deaf by dessert. We gave up trying to talk by the arrival of the stracciatella parfait, tiny chocolate cones filled with goat's milk gelato. The real din is in the bar, which is to the dining room as a concession stand is to a movie theater.

Most nights it's shoulder to shoulder with people who seem to have no intention of leaving the bar. Nobody has ever accused the Dentons of not knowing how to turn a profit. You'll need a stiff drink to brave the crowd. I'd suggest the killer Corpse Reviver.