I’ve tracked these women through a lot of disguises, from the original Michela’s with grilled everything by Todd English, to the posh Rialto, to the family-friendly Red Clay, to the more conventionally Mediterranean version of Red Clay, and even to the pseudo-spa-food of Blu. But what are a couple of nice dames like Michela Larson and Jody Adams doing in a bar called Noir? Has it really come to that? Or was it always a little noir underneath all that sunny Mediterranean cuisine?

After two visits, I deduced that Noir is pretty good, but it isn’t very noir, in the sense of film noir. I think our heroines just went with an association to Harvard Square that started in the Brattle Theatre with Bogart festivals and eventually crystallized around the movie Casablanca, the best-lit of all films noirs, with the eponymous restaurant nearby, as well as the lamented Blue Parrot.

Film noir used dark lighting, lots of fog and smoky rooms, and seedy bars. Since indoor smoking is now illegal, Noir has an outdoor café in warm weather, but the only seedy things in the Charles Hotel are the packets of garden seeds you sometimes see at Henrietta’s Table.

Here’s the explanation for Larson and Adams’s latest venture: "Designed to reflect the intense, decadent atmosphere of 1940s nightlife, Noir is the right place to meet friends after work, a date before a show, or to round out an evening you hope never ends." The drink menu suggests a definition of film noir as "driven by lust, deception, and uncontrollable desire."

I visit the scene to meet people before a show. This is not a very good way to use Noir. First of all, with its windows, it’s about as un-noir as can be before the sun sets. And the restaurant isn’t even black. It has a gray carpet, dark wood over the bar, mirrors, a painting of a martini, and hanging red lamps that look like upside-down lipsticks, if you have a clean mind.

Another problem is that the sandwich menu isn’t served until 10 p.m.; before that, there’s only one real entrée on the menu, a "mini Tuscan steak" ($16). This is an excellent small piece of sirloin, rare as ordered. It comes with a portobello mushroom and some wilted greens, shavings of parmesan, even a little endive and a tiny red potato. But it’s really a deconstructed salad. The only sandwich, a "mini PLT" ($6), is crunchy fried pancetta with soft baby-lettuce leaves and sliced tomatoes on a little French roll, more like a good four-bite snack than a meal. And after that, everything is a bar snack.

Spinach-bacon-Gruyère dip ($7) with pita toasts is much too salty. I’ve recently learned two new reasons why chefs over-salt, in addition to the obvious motive of making people thirsty: they do so instinctively as a result of working in hot, sweaty kitchens; and their palates become fatigued as they taste, so they add more salt as the day goes on.

Spicy shrimp ($10) are eight of medium size, not even served on a salad to plump up the platter. Crispy squid ($10) are actually crisp, and have a nice dipping sauce of hotted-up mayonnaise. Simple lettuces ($9) are a big salad of field greens, with a few sliced radishes and a good vinaigrette. All this stuff is cooked upstairs and brought down for reheating and re-plating in a small kitchen behind the bar, but this is done reasonably well.

Roasted nuts ($3) offer a pretty good assortment of almonds, cashews, peanuts, filberts, pistachios, and wasabi peas. Marinated olives ($4) are actually a best buy, a goodly bowl of giant greens, smaller blacks, and small kalamata-style olives, marinated with rosemary and lemon.

The drink menu includes some wines by the glass, bottled beer, and a list of modern concoctions — most using Stoli vodka and sweeteners — that no self-respecting film noir character would touch. I tried the "blue cheese martini" ($12), which is really a regular (and somewhat weak) martini with three giant green olives stuffed with blue cheese. Because of the oil-water thing, the pungency of the blue cheese doesn’t affect the drink, but it’s a tasty olive. The sweet drinks were even weaker-tasting, I thought, although they had effects.

Noir is a good place to eat with friends in the early evening, but not if eating is especially important, as you have to order a lot of those steaks to make much of a dent in your appetite, and then the price runs up. We would’ve been better off with the pedestrian sandwich menu in the Regattabar itself.

So I wait for a rainy, foggy night. I put on a dark shirt and a red tie, a trench coat, and a fedora. I practice talking out of the side of my mouth. At 10:30 p.m., I walk in. Noir is now actually dark, with bordello-red accent lighting. Groups of young people hang out. No one else is wearing a trench coat or a tie. At the bar, most of the customers seem to be off-duty chefs and waiters. They wear baseball caps and talk about customers from hell. They drink beer.

I go up to the bar, which is white marble. Bad. Martini glasses are inverted onto a bed of crushed ice all along the bar. Good. I order a Maker’s Mark bourbon on the rocks ($8). It’s the first satisfyingly strong drink I’ve had at Noir. The soundtrack is Aretha Franklin. Should be something torchy, but okay.

I order a "Noir Dog, 100 percent pure organic Niman Ranch pork hot dog on a ficelle" ($5). A ficelle is a flat, chewy, French bread. Nope, here a ficelle is a wide, soft, white bread, a little too much roll for the small but salty and tasty hot dog. The dog comes with some mustard and French-fried onion rings. That’s okay, and the potato chips are more than okay. The plate also has four gherkins, those little pickles French restaurants serve with pâté. Problem: the music is now early Beatles.

After refusing another bourbon, I top off with a "black on black" cookie ($1). It’s about a quarter-baked chocolate cookie with chocolate chips. If you like cookie dough and chocolate, it’s an excellent cookie, but it has a film noir quotient of about minus-six.

I order a George’s Meatloaf Sandwich ($9) "to go, for my wife." In film noir, nobody with a wife lives to the end of the movie. I eat most of the sandwich in the car on the way home. The George in question is apparently Foreman — those light grill marks are a dead giveaway. That said, this one is on a dense loaf that works well, filled with thick slabs of a mustardy meat loaf, and greased with Russian dressing and thin slices of pickle.

So Noir in late evening is a hangout bar for restaurant people. It’s a nice crowd, they’re regulars, and if hotel guests dropped in, it would seem like a nice bar — if not especially glamorous, ’40s, or decadent. More mature guests might feel old because the patrons are young, or because they remember what film noir is supposed to be. They could have a satisfying sandwich and a strong drink, if they ordered something simple.

But the only reason to name this place "Noir" is that it used to be called "The Tini Bar."

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