Koreana used to be a rather posh Korean-and-Japanese restaurant; then it had a bad fire and was closed for a year and a half. Generally, if a restaurant doesn’t reopen within a few months, it doesn’t reopen at all. But Koreana did reopen, about a year ago, and it’s more posh, more modern, and more focused on fine Korean food than before — although it still has excellent sushi and such. Almost every table is equipped for broiling or boiling dishes right there. Especially on weekends, Korean-American families sometimes outnumber non-Asians, and the kitchen shifts effortlessly between different styles of food. Servers are apt to warn non-Koreans off the imported croaker (a fish), and rightly so, but they also gave me two warnings about the skate-wing appetizer ($15.95), which was my favorite dish over two visits.

The warnings were accurate enough: this is a platter of raw skate, and it is dressed in a very hot chili sauce. But if you can get past those two ideas, the skate is like ceviche in that the acid sauce firms it up nicely, and the hot chili sauce with sesame seeds is so sweet-hot-savory that we were sneaking it into our bland table-broiled dishes. It’s also a large appetizer, as the price suggests. You could just have this for dinner, or share it with several friends. In addition to quite a bit of skate meat (a little stringy and chewy, but no more fishy than tuna sashimi), the dish involves a lot of sliced daikon radish and cucumber, and a good bit of cress.

Another appetizer for several might be the sushi regular ($15.95). This is a half-dozen tuna rolls (strong on the algal-seaweed wraps) with two fingers of tuna, one of salmon, a cooked shrimp, a slice of cooked octopus, one of a fish like striped bass, and another of a whiter fish. I thought the sushi chef did especially well with the tricky mackerel, a cooked sushi that tends to taste fishy unless made carefully.

Koreana’s seaweed salad ($4.95) is chunkier than some, and has a little red-leaf seaweed to set off the jade and emerald-green shreds. Shumai ($5.95) come in shrimp or crab; these sometimes-bland dumplings get a Korean-style dipping sauce with some heat, and a sprinkle of green soybeans for richer flavor. The scallion pancake ($9.95) is one of the best around, somewhat doughy but not at all greasy, with a bright sesame-seed/vinegar dipping sauce. With eight pieces, this is as filling as pizza.

Tofu soup ($2.95) is based on a beef broth, with some slices of brisket and a lot of scallions, so it is almost like a Vietnamese pho. But for hearty soups, my pick is the nabe yaki udon ($13.95), listed with the noodle dishes. This was served in a cast-iron pot on our first visit, and in a Korean stone bowl (which kept it simmering) more recently. Either way, it’s a big bowl of rich broth, full of fat noodles and some of the usual garnishes like broccoli, scallions, sliced fish sausage (kamaboku), mushrooms, chicken, and a tempura shrimp. There’s also one I haven’t seen elsewhere: twisted strips of a gelatinous substance with flecks of black and green. Must be good for your nails, whatever it is.

Most of the Korean entrées and some of the Japanese ones come with a large array of little side dishes, which vary from day to day. One visit it was spinach salad, bean-sprout salad, a mild kimchee, two fresh cucumber pickles in kimchee-like hot sauce, cardboard-thin slices of salted daikon, an olive-colored seaweed salad, and a kind of shredded-leek slaw. Another time it was a couple of silver-dollar bean pancakes, a seaweed-cucumber salad, four chunks of cold squid in a spicy sauce, a stronger kimchee, and four cold, thin slices of kamaboku.

To get these things, you could have something as basic as shrimp teriyaki ($15.95). This is a very nice platter of 13 shrimp in the shell, in a sweet teriyaki sauce (try to peel them with your teeth so you get all the sauce), with a stir-fry of broccoli, onions, mushrooms, carrots, green pepper, and a covered bowl of sticky but good rice.

To light up the propane grill at the center of your table, you need at least two dinners from the "barbecue table menu," but they can be different things. We had scallops ($16.95) and the classic bulgogi ($15.95), the sliced-steak dish that timid American visitors to Korea can always rely on. The beef is marinated in the Korean answer to teriyaki sauce, while the scallops (a lot of fine sea scallops sliced across the equator for easier grilling) are awash in a real teriyaki sauce. The server puts the first ones on the grill, and things seem to start slowly. However, the grill will eventually caramelize them nicely, along with a few stray mushrooms and lengths of scallion that come with the beef, and a caddy of sliced garlic and green pepper. (The caddy also had a fermented bean-paste dip, an acquired taste that I haven’t acquired yet.) I’m not sure which dish produced the pile of lettuce and shiso leaves (they taste citric and unlike anything else) that serve as wraps, but they elevate the Korean barbecue to a real treat. (Cheat code: if your side dishes include those thin daikon pickles, they make incredibly taste-enhancing wraps for either beef or scallops.)

Koreana has Asian beers, sake, and a dizzying variety of cocktails based on soju, a kind of distilled sake that gets in under the liquor-licensing radar with its own exemption. The green tea, surprisingly, comes as a glass of hot water with a tea bag. With large dinners, there is usually a complimentary "rice punch," a teacup of clear, cinnamon-flavored liquid with a couple of pine nuts floating in it. The punch is lovely, and the pine nuts, in this context, are exquisitely flavored. For desserts, you can choose among three flavors of ice cream ($2.99), four flavors of ice cream wrapped in mochi ($3.99), and "ice cream cake" ($3.99). The mochi-wrapped ice cream looks almost like a large marshmallow (three to a serving), and the ice cream inside seems sweeter than the regular ice cream. The ice-cream cake is actually a strip of four wafers with a thin wafer of cake on the outsides, and an unusual ice cream, perhaps a malt or mocha flavor, inside. Ice creams are served with what would be lobster forks in my house.

Service, early on a weeknight and a Sunday, was excellent. The atmosphere is cosmopolitan and sophisticated, a 180-degree turn from the quaint and rustic feeling that characterized Cambridge’s first Korean restaurant, 35 or so years ago.

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