What used to be a pretty casual Figs, not the best Figs in the chain by any means, has been transformed into a modern steak house. Owner Kathy Sidell Trustman grew up with a father who was a leading restaurant financier. Everything from the Metropolitan Club’s name to its design is calculated to give diners what they want to pay for. Since this column is about food, let’s start with executive chef Jeff Fournier, who has worked at several restaurants under Lydia Shire. At times, Fournier carries the Biba auteur’s penchant for deconstructing familiar dishes a bit too far, but fortunately he also learned about using good ingredients and a smidgen about experimental technique at the school of Shire.

The watermelon steak ($9) is actually a seared piece of watermelon. In some fashion that I don’t understand, the process makes it lose its granularity, so that it looks and for a moment even chews a little like seared raw tuna, which it resembles. The flavor isn’t sweet, although it isn’t meaty either, but enough of the browning comes through to make it a little like a piece of meat, and lots of fun, with a small side salad of micro greens.

The breadbasket also echoes Biba/Excelsior with a lot of choices: a sweet cornbread, a cakey poppy-seed-onion bread, a soft roll, and slices of French baguette. With them one can have unsalted butter, sea salt, marmalade, and a "fig-walnut romesco," a rather sharp condiment. A guest asks for olive oil, and gets a pour of flowery-spicy-scented extra-virgin oil so green we suspect it is Greek oil, but the waiter says Italian.

The seared sea scallops with bacon ($14) are two excellent sea scallops. It seems the fewer of these you get, the better they taste. The piece of bacon, about three-eighths of an inch thick, is meaty and mild, not smoky, but can easily be cut to eat with the scallops. The third item on the large plate, a cube of spice cake with a buttery frosting and a strip of baked pumpkin, seems superfluous. The arugula salad ($8) has a nice dressing on seasonally stringy arugula — actually more like Italian arugula, which is a weed — but the goat cheese coated with pistachios is on the side.

Now, this is a steak house, and the key steak is the dry-aged sirloin ($35). It’s a strip of excellent size, but not a lot of aged-meat flavor. A very good steak, not a great steak, with some fried potatoes. We added a side of wild mushrooms ($9), again good, not great, with mostly tame mushrooms and some shiitake, in a buttery sauce with a lot of salt.

Monkfish osso buco ($22) is not the traditional slice of veal leg nor the traditional sharp tomato sauce. It’s osso buco because part of the backbone is left on the piece of monkfish tail, but the sauce is a creamy one more suited to the fish, with grapes and onions. Our side dish for this was a half-order of penne carbonara ($14/half; $19/whole), actually more than we needed; it would be a full meal for many people. The penne were nicely cooked, though not al dente in the Italian sense. The carbonara was more cheesy than smoky, but a solid job.

If you’re bringing out-of-town visitors, the 2.5-pound steamed lobster (market price; recently $58) is a good choice. A lobster almost twice as big as usual, steamed, is easier for mainlanders to get into, and this one arrives strategically cracked. Then a local can make a meal of the legs and tail and the nuggets of meat along the body. Ours was somewhat undercooked, not a bad flaw if you spot it quickly, and the lobster was a January lobster, when bad weather means these crustaceans are less fresh and more often penned alive. This dish will only get better. Our side with the lobster was roasted asparagus ($8), not roasted but beautifully peeled thick stalks of green asparagus with an addictive shallot-butter sauce.

The wine list runs expensive but has budget choices. Since I was having only a glass, I was curious about the 2002 Burgess Cellars Merlot ($14), as I have always liked the winery’s jammy, intense, true-fruit zinfandels. The Napa merlot is very much in that style, with the depth and spice of a big Saint-Émilion Bordeaux, and showed well in the Metropolitan Club’s oversize glasses. Tea ($3) is served properly as leaf tea in a cast-iron pot, and decaf ($3) is very good, as is cappuccino ($4).

For dessert, I was actually most impressed by a trio of sorbets ($8), especially a rich tan one I found hard to identify, but decided was pear. Blood-orange sorbet is as tart as cranberry, so the tangerine sorbet, sweeter and more citric, reads as a different kind of flavor entirely. A parfait of Valrhona chocolate ($7) is wonderfully presented in a parfait glass with layers of whipped cream and divine chocolate pudding, topped with two chocolate breadsticks like straws in a milk shake, and a couple of checkerboard cookies below. A slice of chocolate cake ($7) comes from a tall layer cake: good, not great. Somehow, after all the fallen cakes and no-flour cakes, we’ve lost the knack for the four-egg génoise.

The restaurant is curtained and carpeted like an old-time steak house, but keeps some of the clatter of a loud bar. Our table may have been worse than most, but sound echoed from the walls, windows, and ceilings such that we could not always understand the servers. The background music, when we could hear it, was light jazz.

The Metropolitan Club is big, smooth, and expensive, with flashes of wit. It does not concede anything to its suburban location, and has already attracted some of the well-heeled crowd it is intended to serve. It will be interesting to see how it works out as a late-night spot with a bar menu.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.