R. Wesley's Bistro

The restaurant is R. Wesley's, and the end of the world is Sullivan Square, a intersection-cum-traffic circle-cum-undergirding for Route 93 whose sense of place has long since disappeared amid a snarl of bus-access roads and parking lots and freeway pilings. The restaurant has a cozy corner space, with warm mustard-colored walls inside and green wicker chairs and white tablecloths spread with white butcher paper.

Only a mile or so from the culinary mecca of Olives, R. Wesley's has absorbed some of the Olives lessons but not all. In the hands of a master, this sort of New American food can seem fresh and inventive while constantly reminding you of the fundamentals of sound cooking. Wesley's has moments of sparkle, of reward, of adept grillwork, but as at so many nouveau bistros, originality becomes a kind of shtick in itself -- more reliant on a battery of specialty ingredients (balsamic vinegar, shiitake mushrooms) than on felicitous flavor combinations and careful cookery. If you look around the room at what the other diners are eating, you'll have a pretty good idea of what your dinner will look like: huge, slightly oversauced, served on a wide plate ringed with green onion rings and chopped tomato.

Almost a year and a half old, Wesley's has garnered some good word-of-mouth buzz, at least among the generous of appetite. The prices are pretty high, but so's the curb weight of the portions -- indeed, size may be the most salient feature of the dishes here. One entree of bow-tie pasta, clocking in just shy of $17, not only provided dinner for the young woman who ordered it, but also made decent-size meal, reheated, for two people the next night.

Then there was the salad of field greens ($5.95). When it arrived, we thought we'd been led astray by a typo: this was a field of greens. The dressing was "maple balsamic"; a cruel critic would say that the salad smelled like an Italian food store and tasted like a pancake breakfast. I am not a cruel critic, but I would go so far as to identify the dressing as a bit heavy for such already flavorful greens.

A rival heavyweight starter was the fried calamari ($6.95). As with the salad, the waiter graciously brought the huge plate to our table and began apportioning the food out between two of us with that grand back-to-back-spoons technique, something I'd begun to fear was a lost art in the age of tapas. "This is without a doubt the best calamari you will ever have," he said. "It's the pepper in the batter." It was certainly the most calamari we'd ever had, a whole bay's worth of little squidlings chopped up, fried to a golden brown, and piled onto a platter of greens that would have made a respectable two-person salad on its own. (Very respectable: without all the dressing, it was noticeably perkier than the salad we'd ordered.) A scribble of red (cocktail) and white (tartar) sauces topped off the production.

A plate of mussels in brandy-cream sauce ($8.95) didn't pack quite such a biosphere-depleting quantity of mollusca, but it must have put a serious dent in somebody's bar. The alcohol in the brandy was still noticeable, providing a heady ethyl accompaniment to a plate of enormous (and by this time, certainly dead-drunk) bivalves. They were so big as to almost distract us from the romaine salad ($5.95), an overdressed judgment error in which crouton crumbs (or something), oil, and vinegar formed a sort of yellowy paste on the lettuce.

Wesley's kitchen-sink approach to ingredients provided a theme for the evening, as green onions, chopped tomatoes, and shiitake mushrooms showed up on plate after plate. Perhaps what we're seeing here is the traditional bistro vegetables-of-the-evening removed from their supporting-actor roles and abstracted into garnish.

The aforementioned bowtie-pasta dish ($16.95), which included smoked salmon, peas, shiitake mushrooms, and tomatoes, came in a quite serviceable vodka cream sauce, and if the whole wasn't exactly a model of synergy -- in other words, not quite more than the sum of its parts -- it was undeniably composed of good parts. Same for the pork-and-leek dumplings ($13.95), which were a truly curious creation: pork and chopped leek filling inside fat half-moon dumplings, crimped and closed in the manner of potstickers, then pan-fried (I'm guessing). Very Chinese, right? Wrong -- they were served in a very non-Chinese cream sauce, like ravioli, and accompanied by shiitake mushrooms and a diced pork sausage.

That was pretty and novel, but Wesley's (the name is that of R. Wesley Smith, the co-chef and co-owner with his sister Angela) saves its truly grand gestures for red-meat entrees. The two we tried leapt out at us, the first almost physically. The prime rib ($17.95) was a tank-sized cut, hulking on a mountain of potato wedges and greens, with a giant rib protruding from one side and a wood-handled steak knife thrust into the top. Various flavors surfaced in the sauce: gorgonzola, balsamic vinegar, caramelized onion.

Probably the most thoroughly well-executed piece of kitchen work, though, was both the simplest and the most exotic: ostrich ($19.95). Ostrich turns out to be a sort of red meat, here served as a filet-like steak, grilled and topped with a red-wine reduction sauce. The meat is leaner than beef, with a rich taste that hints mildly of game. The sauce was deep and surprisingly complex -- a lovely accompaniment to both the meat, stuffed with asparagus and a large prawn, and the garlic mashed potatoes that came on the side.

Desserts were your basic modern cousins of cake and pie: a sour-cream coffee cake with a plate full of warm thawed strawberries and blueberries, as well as a chocolatey baci cake, with hazelnut mousse and splashed with chocolate syrup. The wine list offered some pleasant and inexpensive whites (which at $2.75 a glass were the bargain of the evening), as well as a memorable, if slightly pricier, Rioja ($5.25) -- flavorful, sprawling, and big. Hmm, do I detect a theme?