It’s been an Anglophile brewpub (Commonwealth Brewery) and a seafood-and-sports bar (Commonwealth Fish & Beer). Now this large, useful restaurant space near the FleetCenter is recast as Anthem, a trendy bar and bistro. The bar part, where you look up at bottom-lit bottles of vodka hovering like alien spacecraft, makes dramatic sense, and the establishment may do well with the downstairs bar-disco. This column, however, is concerned with the food, which attempts a split mission with some grace. At one extreme, Anthem has brought in chef Robert Fathman (Azure, ex-Federalist), who certainly can execute a convincing $30 entrée. But his budget here is for $10-to-$20 dining, and the menu has to include enough familiar bar food to prevent the winter-sports fans from bolting in alarm (knowing how to pronounce Jiri Welsch and Chris Mihm doesn’t leave a lot of memory space for "ragout" and "risotto").

Some of the results, like the "Figgy Piggy" ($17) of Niman Ranch pork shanks, offer brilliant budget gourmandise, while the "Mighty Meat Loaf" ($9.95) is a solid choice. But sometimes the missions get scrambled, so delicate Maine rock shrimp, just in season, are lost in a Buffalo-wing-flavored po’ boy. And the signature fried Twinkie — I couldn’t make this up if I tried, but apparently Fathman can and did — nods toward and away from so many culinary fads that it may end up in traction.

It was a big room, even when filled with shiny industrial brewing tanks and pipes. That’s all gone, except for a few polished-copper air vents. Now it’s dark, with some red-velvet curtains to control the drafts (successfully), black chairs and tables, and white linen surmounted with brown paper, as if to express the duality of fine dining and bar food. Much of the dining room is out front, within wraparound windows that make it pretty but loud. It’s opposite the open kitchen and the bar, so you have something of the dramatic feeling of the new Davio’s, although not on the same scale.

The eager servers hand you menus and drink lists on clipboards, and recite specials — one night it was a burger and fries or steak frites, basically the $10 and $20 versions of the same food groups. All our appetizers were very good. The familiar caesar salad ($7.75) isn’t huge, but it’s freshly dressed, made from whole leaves of romaine, a long, flat crouton, whole anchovies, and light cheese. The universal fried calamari ($8.25) was a good portion nicely fried, and came with a good dip of homemade tartar sauce.

Moving into gourmet territory, the tuna tartare ($9) is in the familiar cylinder, on the familiar long plate, but flavored with peppers and maybe eggplant, so it resembles Adriatic ajvar spread, plus sesame seeds. The fall-vegetable risotto ($8.50) is still on the winter menu, and still features some spring vegetables like asparagus, summer vegetables like green beans, and carrots — everything crunchy, including some of the rice, but effectively contrasted with plenty of creamy cheese. I make my own risotto softer, but this is a very attractive way of doing the "al dente" style.

With entrées, it may make sense to go either to the lowest prices or the highest. My favorite was the "Figgy Piggy" ($17), two braised shanks of pork (smaller, lighter, and a little sweeter than lamb shanks) on one of those long plates, dressed with a sweet reduction sauce full of fig morsels, on a platform of cheesy polenta, with a nice, bitter sauté of broccoli rabe for contrast. This is grand gourmet stuff for half the usual downtown price!

At the other price extreme, the "Mighty Meat Loaf" ($9.95) isn’t all that mighty, but it isn’t precious either. The mixture of beef and sausage tastes like 1950s meat loaf, the mashed potatoes on top are real but not overly buttered or garlicked (again, veritable ’50s), and the bread-crumb topping is as dry and crisp as Japanese panko, but not overstated, providing just a sprinkle of crunch. The only real giveaways that a chef was involved with the dish are a pile of lightly sautéed vegetables and a wonderful salad of cucumber, peppers, onions, and such, pickled in mustard seeds.

Our middle-priced entrées were conceptually confused. The skate wing was a handsome span of sautéed ray over a classy ragout of mussel meats, giant limas, calamata olives, and cherry tomatoes. The confusion was a dating-bar ration of salt; both the skate and the ragout were over-salted and quite peppery as well.

The rock-shrimp po’ boy ($13) is also confused. The idea of Maine rock shrimp, now in their short season, is that they are small and sweet, some of the only un-frozen shrimp that ever hit the Boston market. You do subtle things with them. That could include frying them and eating the fried shrimp in a bun, like a New Orleans po’ boy sandwich of fried oysters (which are also subtly sweet). But you would need a cheap and unobtrusive bun, and you would not need to put vinegar-chili sauce all over the shrimp as though they were Buffalo chicken wings. A dip of (rather good) blue-cheese sauce continues the Buffalo-wing mixaphor, and not even the pickled salad can rescue things.

If the Fleet is your ultimate destination, you can insulate yourself with a draught Sam Adams Winter Lager ($4.29), although this year’s batch is somewhat lighter than I remember it. There’s also an "Ade of the day" ($3.50). One day, it was lemon-lime, in a large water glass, but not sweetened, so it tasted like the basis of an old-time daiquiri. Cappuccino ($3.50) is very good, and so are "Really Good Coffee and Tea" ($2.50 and $4). The tea is loose-leaf in a filter pot, as it should be, but the shiny-metal pot is hot to the touch, and steals heat from your brewing tea. But my cup of English breakfast was entirely acceptable, and there’s also rooibos, the queen of decaffeinated herbals.

Okay, the Twinkie ($5). It’s batter-fried, so you get two logs of something like a filled doughnut. This would work fairly well if the chef made his own Twinkies out of sponge cake and vanilla and cream. Using commercial Hostess Twinkies might work, if there weren’t actually whipped cream to contrast with the "creamy" filling, and actual berries and berry sauce to contrast with the non-vanilla of the contemporary product. I suppose everyone will order this once, and it certainly makes for an anecdote, but if it tasted better it would make a better joke, honest.

The pandowdy of the day ($6) comes in a cast-iron pan with malt ice cream on top. Ours was apple, and not really hot enough (so why the iron pan?), not really a pandowdy (which has browned crust stirred into it, not bits of crisp on top), and too sweet; thus, it was utterly outshone by the excellent ice cream. The same thing happened with the warm chocolate cake ($6), although the cake had good chocolate intensity to contrast with the ice cream. My favorite dessert was a tot of Benjamin tawny port ($6). This is an Australian port that has a lot of aged, tawny richness at a retail of $10 to $12, when you can find it. I don’t begrudge Anthem the mark-up, since the restaurant found it.

This location has proven tricky, but Anthem’s design gets a lot of the modish feel of the South End into a large, tricky space. It’s not going to steal customers from the South End or the North Station sports bars, but it should fill the niche for a quality alternative near Government Center and the Fleet.

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