This basement restaurant used to be the Istanbul Café, but now it’s Grotto, a semi-Italian bistro. It still has bare-brick walls, but they are now hung with oil paintings of women and food. The floors are now white tile, and the ceilings are painted red, with small chandeliers and spotlights. One of the old screens remains near the doorway. It’s still somewhat crowded, yet romantically isolated from the street or the world of Beacon Hill.

The menu is a little confusing, as the cheese plate is listed as an appetizer, not a dessert, and there is a prix fixe ($40) "Chef’s Whim" dinner in four courses, but the courses are also daily specials à la carte. While few individual dishes are knockouts, they all are consistently good, and the overall impression is greater than the sum of the dishes. Some restaurants just have "it," and some don’t.

Food begins with salty Tuscan bread, and a fruity olive oil for dipping. My favorite appetizer was the Tuscan fondue ($11), which comes to the table as a small chafing dish of distinctively truffled oil. To this, the server adds a ladle of melted cheese, and then a small plate of medium-rare steak tips and sautéed portobello mushrooms. You get actual fondue forks and can dip the meat or mushrooms in the truffled cheese sauce. The cheese is not as sticky as Alpine fondue, so there’s enough left for using up more of the bread, with the danger of getting very filled up.

A special on soft-shell crab ($11) was sautéed in a pillowy beer batter and served over some arugula, wilted arugula soon enough, but it made a fine appetizer. The typical bistro salad with beets and goat cheese ($8.50) is here improved by making the sliced beets into sandwiches with goat-cheese filling, using slightly candied walnuts, and served with baby-spinach leaves, which make a better contrast with the sweet ingredients. On the other hand, a salad of Boston Bibb lettuce, red onions, and Italian dressing ($8.95) is just that, and not so exciting.

If you elect to appetize with "three of our favorite cheeses" ($11), you will get very small slices of exquisite cheeses — a cow’s-milk blue cheese, a truffled sheep cheese, and a creamy goat cheese — along with a fine pile of grilled toasts and toasted walnuts (not candied this time).

Pasta here is homemade, and especially impressive on the free-form lobster lasagna ($21). We had this made up without lobster for a vegan guest, and the fillings of asparagus, tomatoes, mushrooms, English peas, and a little spinach, with a wisp of a cream sauce — no thick cheese layer — made delightful eating. The pasta was toothsome, even a little hard to cut, but addictive.

Ricotta gnocchi ($19.50) are classically somewhat heavy, decently flavored with parmesan and bits of stewed morel mushrooms, and a little cream sauce. Almost as substantial is the cavatelli ($10/appetizer; $18/entrée), in a thick, buttery sauce of salty pancetta and smoky sausage with peas and mushrooms. This is like eating a very smoky chowder, only with excellent pasta instead of crackers or potatoes.

A special on swordfish ($22) was light, white fish rolled around a sweet stuffing, with a tomato-olive sauce enlivened with capers and pine nuts. This was the most authentic Italian treatment of the night, and very unusual and successful with swordfish.

Semolina-crusted golden trout ($20) is two fillets sautéed with just a dusting of pasta flour, mounted on wilted spinach, with some pancetta and cream dressing the spinach more than the fish. Our weakest fish dish was monkfish osso buco ($20), an idea I generally like. This time the fish was a small steak of the tail, hard to cut, and still on the bone, although it had a nice Mediterranean sauce with lots of capers and olives, sliced fennel, sun-dried tomatoes, and more of the cavatelli.

The wine list at Grotto is quite good, with many Italian bottles and many half bottles — the romantic size. Our bottle was the 2002 Panizzi Vernaccia di San Gimignano ($35). This was a crisp, light, Tuscan white with lots of aroma and a refreshing, slightly bitter finish. It was more like the way French whites tasted a few decades ago. Tea ($2.10) is served so that it brews; cappuccino ($3) and decaf ($3) were both very good.

All desserts are $7. The chocolate-lava cake is like many such little half-cooked cakes served these days, only the chocolate is more pronounced and bitter, and the gelato (cinnamon? coffee?) makes a better contrast. The trio of sorbets, another ubiquitous bistro dessert, is also among the best of its kind, particularly the true-flavored guava. The orange sorbet is a little sharp, like Italian orange soda, and the apricot is not so distinctive, although certainly good. Blueberry pie is free-form, like a fried pie, but has too much crust per fruit. I did like the peppermint (I think) ice cream with this. The weak sister, but hardly a problem, was the panna cotta, which had a lot more gelatin and less cream than the competition, making it harder to cut and eat. Most of the flavor was in the ginger-blackberry sauce.

Service at Grotto was quick and accurate, and extra helpful with two vegans in our party. Moderate prices and handsome presentations helped carry us over any rough spots, and the feeling of youth and adventure is what a neighborhood bistro ought to have, even when the neighborhood is downtown.

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