About eight months ago, the deluxe Boston Harbor Hotel (disclosure: more than 10 years ago, I was paid to write a program for the hotel’s annual four-month wine festival) closed its formal dining room and moved chef Daniel Bruce into a smaller room with a set-back view of the water taxi and doings on the harbor walk. Like many a bistro, the new space has a bar and a noisy wood floor, but the food and service are actually more elaborate than the (very fine) standard of the old dining room. I have long considered chef Bruce to be one of the top toques in Boston, the most attuned to wine/food match-ups, and arguably the most fluent with local produce. The new set-up gives him more opportunity to focus on these interests, and better control. While I cling to my doctrine that there are no great restaurants, only great dishes, Meritage challenges my belief system because everything we tasted was excellent, and there were more than a couple of great dishes.

The concept takes some getting used to, however, as the menu is bewildering on first and second glances. The dinner menu consists of 24 dishes, each offered as either a $15 small plate or a $29 large plate. You can decide what to have as an appetizer and what as an entrée, but before you do, you have to work through the list several times, because the dishes are arranged in six categories according to the intended wine pairing: sparklers, light whites, full-bodied whites, fruity reds, spicy/earthy reds, and robust reds. If you think, well, I’ll pick a wine and go from there, well, it’s a 30-page wine list. As the name of the restaurant suggests, the list is strong in California " Meritage " blends and the French Bordeaux they emulate, but the list doesn’t lack tempting choices of just about anything. There are three pages of California chardonnays, but there are also three choices of Alsatian gewürztraminers. Most of the prices are higher than I usually pay for restaurant wine, but there are bottles in the $20s. Those tend to be versatile food wines, though, so it’s back to the menu.

As our waiter explained, and I imagine explains often, most people start with the food and order only small plates, so they can try more. The staff was quite good about organizing all our individual choices into courses and pouring our two half-bottles of wine. The alternative approach would be to have the five-course tasting menu with wines included, a relative bargain at $85. One of the most amazing dishes was on the tasting menu our night, but several others weren’t, so it might be best for first-timers to do what we did for review purposes: all small plates and one diner assigned to the tasting menu. Or it might be best if each diner has the tasting menu, so you don’t have to share a knockout like the soft-shell crab. Or it might even be best to splurge on a bottle of great red wine, and just have a big plate of the amazing ostrich, a salad, and cheese. Oh yes, the salad isn’t listed on the menu (doesn’t go with a wine, perhaps?), costs $11, and works well as a palate cleanser. If there were such a thing as a great restaurant, it might be because there are a lot of best ways to dine there.

This is the kind of restaurant where a server gives each diner three bread items with a pair of tongs. What’s the hurry? You’re not going anywhere; you’re already there. Because people expect something appetizing, there is a thin slice of a loaf crusted with sunflower seeds, almonds, onion, and (delightfully) cumin seed. Because this is New England, there is a semicircle of brown bread with raisins. Because you’ve never had anything so good, there is a potato roll with a good crust and a completely fluffy interior. The spread is sweet butter in a covered cup.

But everything takes off with the amuse-gueule, a complimentary sake cup containing cold cream-of-fennel soup with a pretty glob of parsley oil floating on top. It’s like two sips of all-cream vichyssoise, food for demigods.

The star of the first course is the pan-fried soft-shell crab. While soft-shell crabs aren’t very meaty or tasty in the molt phase, Bruce seems to regard this as a challenge. He sent out the two most delicious deep-fried morsels I have ever tasted, flanking a bit of fresh corn salsa. The wine pairing was the 2001 Lange pinot gris from Oregon, not a bad attempt to tame the pinot grigio grape, but he could have paired these crabs with Boone’s Farm.

Our appetizers turned out to be mostly about produce. My favorite was the grilled sea scallops with Oregon morels and Virginia ramps, because fresh morels and scallops are so delectable, and the chef ties them together with a wisp of a white butter sauce and a couple of ramps sautéed to reduce the garlicky quality of the wild onions. Pan-seared red grouper with wild asparagus is a beautifully flavored white fish in a light broth, but the dish is stolen by the wild asparagus, which looks like enlarged wheat and is sweeter than any green vegetable this side of Chinese broccoli. A " yellow tomato and lime ceviche of blue point oysters with wild arugula " is really four oysters on the half-shell with some bits of yellow tomato, but again the sensation is the sharp-flavored, dark-green, thin-ribbed leaves of wild arugula, supplemented with micro-beet greens.

The salad our night was wrapped in thin slices of English cucumber to make a cylinder of refreshment. I thought it was expensive for what it was, but necessary to the meal. But the special salad of Bibb lettuce and porcini mushrooms with the tasting dinner was special because it had porcini-flavored oil in the dressing, and almost went with its wine, a 2000 Bourgogne chardonnay from Louis Jadot. Actually, one of Jadot’s lighter Beaujolais might have been better. For chardonnay, I preferred the 2000 Bernardus with grilled black sea bass in a saffron broth. But I will always think of sea bass as a fish best enjoyed steamed Cantonese-style (and with beer at that), so I preferred the " flash smoked pan seared Pacific black cod basil count neck clam and tomato chardonnay sauce. " Despite all that menu action, this was the tastiest piece of scrod in history, with three nice little clams and a salty broth/sauce that deserved a couple of potato rolls in addition to its filling of potato balls and tomato bits. I also liked the grilled Bob White quail served in tiny quarters over some green chickpeas I momentarily thought were spring peas, and under some shredded baby artichoke. This is another dish that matches any wine, although it's listed for robust reds.

But this was the course for the " cocoa and cardamom crusted ostrich fan fillet. " Now, I’ve had ostrich before, and it doesn’t taste like chicken or even duck. It’s red meat, and somehow even redder meat than beef. It looks and tastes like raw beef even when cooked medium. Chef Bruce keeps it rare, slices it thin across the grain as with seared tuna, and somehow uses the rather subtle crust spices to bring out some meatiness. I particularly liked this with our red wine, a half-bottle of 1996 Château Greysac ($23). I felt we had to have some wine from the Bordeaux/Meritage part of the list, and this was the cheapest half. My recollection of Greysac, a sixth-level " cru bourgeois " Bordeaux from earlier vintages (when I could still afford Bordeaux), is that it runs rather fruity. It’s almost 40 percent merlot, and thus a good illustration of the Meritage idea. But one so seldom gets fully aged red wine in a restaurant that I was surprised by the depth of flavor in this Greysac. It wasn’t as black-cherry-violets complicated as a higher-ranked Bordeaux, but it was far richer than a younger wine, and sang with ostrich as Burgundy (which I never could afford) might sing with steak. Our other wine, a half-bottle of 2001 Frog’s Leap sauvignon blanc ($22), went well with all the food, but fell apart a little as it warmed up.

The dessert menu is just as unconventional as the main menu, and again, it’s wine-focused. Bruce’s technique in pairing food with wine is usually to emphasize a single complementary flavor, although he is aware of useful contrasts and traditional pairings as well. He has decided that dessert wines have five typical flavors, and created a $12 tasting platter around each one: citrus, white fruit, red fruit, chocolate, and nuts. We weren’t having a dessert wine, so we had the chocolate plate (a no-brainer) and the white fruit (recommended by the staff). The chocolate plate consisted of restrained chocolate mousse in a candy cylinder, an all-out chocolate-espresso pot de crème, and refreshing white-chocolate ice cream in a chocolate-tuile shell. The white-fruit plate was more amazing, with a coconut-panna-cotta pyramid on perfect puff pastry, white-peach cubes spiced like apple pie on a bit of tart, and apricot mousse to die for. Incidentally, because we ordered all small plates, we felt not at all like dying of overeating, but rather like we could live forever.

We also had one of the three cheese platters ($12), picking from a platter a well-aged Swiss Appenzeller, a slightly sharper Italian cheese called Testun, and a Gorgonzola-like Great Hill Blue, all with seedless muscat grapes that actually had the orange-flower aroma of muscat wine. The tasting menu has both a cheese course and a dessert. The former was Boerenkaas, a Dutch artisanal cheese with a character more like an aged cheddar than a Gouda, paired with 1999 Tablas Creek Reserve Cuvée, a California Meritage attempt to duplicate the blend of a French Châteauneuf-du-Pape. This was an impressive wine, and good with cheese, but perhaps one to come back to in a few years. The dessert was a duet of a sort of raisin crumpet with apricot ice cream, and blueberries in a white-chocolate mousse, paired with Banyuls, a French dessert wine that tastes like an unfortified ruby port. Here Bruce was matching all four classic aromas of Banyuls (arguably the only wine that goes with chocolate desserts), but I just thought, " Nice wine, nice dessert. " It did go well with the complimentary truffles and Linzer cookies that come with the check.

Meritage could be tuned, but almost everything would be fixed with a more explanatory menu; even the noise would be less of a problem if we didn’t need so much guidance from the waiter. It’s not exactly a new restaurant, as Bruce has been doing wine dinners at the hotel for more than 14 years, but it is such a significant refinement that it reopens the question of great restaurants, at least for me. Others who believe in great restaurants should measure them against Meritage.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com