The Dogwood looks like a hundred other neighborhood bars in Greater Boston, but it has much better food. I don’t know why this is so, although it would be easy to blame chef Mike Graney. However, he must have had the backing of the owners to put in the wood-fired pizza oven he uses so skillfully. And some responsibility must be credited to the customers, who order enough of the food to pack the place even on some weekday evenings. (It should be added that the Dogwood also sounds better than a lot of neighborhood pubs, especially when Rob Gonzalez is at the piano on Thursday and Friday nights.)

The menu’s strengths are the daily-special entrées and pizzas, but chef Graney has not neglected basic bar snacks, and has developed a reputation for blueberry pie as well. His forte is Italian food, but he has a weakness for Mexican dishes that I want to encourage.

Among the appetizers, my solid favorite is the warm tomato salad ($6.95). The chef gets considerable flavor out of off-season tomatoes by doctoring them with vinegar and slightly cooking them, presenting them like bruschetta on garlic bread with a romaine salad alongside. His version of the Caprese salad ($5.95) falls short only with the tomatoes — this time uncooked — but the fresh mozzarella and leaves of fresh basil have been remarkable for several seasons.

Buffalo wings ($5.95) are my favorite bar offering or snack pick. They’re the classical presentation of fried chicken wings in hot sauce, with blue-cheese dip and celery. But I may switch to the honey hot wings ($5.95). These are dry-fried (the honey is in the light batter, I think), which lends them a superior crunch, and served with a bit of hot sauce for flare, plus blue cheese and carrots as well as celery. I eat the whole thing, but it would be ideal for opposites-attract couples where one partner eats only meat, one only veggies.

Fried calamari ($6.95) is another solid rendition of a ubiquitous bar dish, usually featuring large fresh-fried rings and horseradish-based cocktail sauce. There is also a daily soup, which can be very good. A recent soup was Portuguese kale ($2.25/$3.25), a hearty bowl of kale, kidney beans, and garlic sausage in a salty broth.

The true specialty here is thin-crust pizza, especially the " evergreen " ($12.95 large/$8.95 small). The pizzas are all named after trees, for some non-Italian reason — perhaps the Dogwood’s proximity to the Arnold Arboretum. The evergreen is green with pesto and spinach, and highly flavored with garlic and feta cheese. Every table has a large can of tomatoes that serves as centerpiece, candle stand, and pizza platform.

Entrées rotate. I think the chef does especially well with lamb shanks, but he also has a lot of variations on chicken cacciatore and pasta primavera. A recent " Hunter’s Chicken " ($10.95) was prepared en bianco, with a sauce based on white wine, not the usual tomato sauce. This kind of sauce often comes to the table heady with uncooked wine, but at the Dogwood it’s finished properly with the alcohol cooked off, the better to flavor boneless chicken, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, and lots of linguine.

Pork tips ($11.95) were both marinated and grilled to get the flavor of char; while not up to the regular-menu steak tips, they were very good, served with baked rice, undercooked broccoli, and a house salad. This was not a very original platter, but satisfying, and all the components were done well.

There are things that could be better at the Dogwood, starting with the tasteless white dinner rolls. But my overall impression, from a lot more visits than usual because this is one of my neighborhood haunts, is one of reliability and satisfaction, with spikes of ecstasy when I can get an evergreen pizza.

Drinks start with a good list of draft beers; I spent some of the summer studying Magic Hat #9 ($3.75), a spicy amber ale. (The Dogwood does suffer in neighborhood comparisons because it’s a few blocks from Doyle’s, which has a longer list of microbrewery drafts, including an amazing recent batch of Harpoon cask-conditioned bitter.) There are some reasonably priced glasses of wine, such as a recent Santa Catalina merlot ($4.25) from Chile.

Desserts begin, and perhaps end, with " Try Our Blueberry Pie " ($3.25/$3.95 à la mode). This is baked in individual bowls, with a very acceptable crust and a filling spiced rather like an apple pie — to good effect with out-of-season blueberries. Although the ice cream is fairly tasteless, it goes well with the pie because the latter is served hot. " Extremely chocolate cake " ($4.25) I find more " multiple chocolate " than " extremely chocolate. " The cake is average, but it’s soaked in chocolate sauce and frosted with chocolate frosting, and there are chocolate chips in the frosting. I once participated in an effort to make an apple pie whose filling was thickened with applesauce instead of starch. This sounded like a good idea, but in fact it tasted like a fast-food fried pie. It turns out that you need some contrasting starch in each bite to show off the apple flavor. This sometimes also applies to chocolate desserts, where chocolate chips in a vanilla ice cream or cake actually have more flavor than some multi-chocolate concoctions.

This rule even seems to work for " Oreo cookie bash " ($4.25) at the Dogwood, which is less a matter of crushed Oreos in the dessert than of Oreo-like layers of chocolate cake and vanilla filling.

The Dogwood is not remarkable in appearance, although decorated with local paintings. TVs are tuned to sports. The background music, if it isn’t live, could well be disco. Quarry-tile, wood, bare-brick, and burgundy-painted surfaces all give out some noise, with a semi-open kitchen giving out some more. The piano player needs a mike to sing, but it’s friendly noise, and doesn’t drown out the flavor of the food or the company.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com