As someone who spent two weeks in Umbria and Tuscany last summer, I’ll say that the good news and the bad news about this restaurant are that the food is not very Umbrian. That’s good news because Umbrian cuisine is relatively simple and depends on ingredients that are hard to find here. The Umbrian region is landlocked, but Bostonians still expect seafood (although some very good seafood is trucked into Umbria, and the freshwater fish aren’t bad). It’s bad news because Umbrian food is relatively inexpensive, and Umbrian wine, with a few exceptions, is very inexpensive. Umbria the restaurant is a big-ticket evening, and the wine list is especially high, sometimes triple retail at the lower end. The chef, Bricco’s Marisa Iocco, has a distinctive style that combines complementary flavors into a new but orderly spectrum.

Food starts with the good news: in Umbria, the bread is unsalted and very, very dull, but Umbria Ristorante has excellent bread with a garlicky white-bean spread. There are slices of a crusty loaf with big holes, the better to absorb the spread. There are also sesame bread sticks and cheese bread sticks, all delicious.

For our appetizers, we began by dividing a pasta course, the strangozzi umbri ($16), four ways. This is a spiral pasta, in a creamy sauce that has a spectrum of flavors, from wine and truffles to wild mushrooms and olives. The pasta is baked in a wood oven and has real chew, and the dish combines classic Umbrian flavors. One-fourth of the American portion is an ideal pasta course, even a little too filling as an appetizer.

But we also tried real appetizers, notably the polpette di polenta ($12.50). These are balls of white cornmeal with some veal meat in another oven casserole, all of it swimming in a good, clean tomato sauce. I suspect this is more like what Umbrian peasants would eat for dinner than an appetizer, but it’s good eating in a more-familiar Italian style.

"Bufala mozzarella" ($15) is a deconstructed caprese salad, rather popular in Umbria these days. Ours had a finer quality of fresh mozzarella, the addition of nice green asparagus, and somewhat weaker tomatoes, especially the slices of heirloom tomatoes (probably from heirloom greenhouses in November). The tiny sub-grape tomatoes were good, the fresh basil leaves were fine, and the long, fennel-flavored cracker on top was terrific. The "chef’s caesar" ($9) was more consistent: a fairly ordinary caesar salad with the nice variation of fried flavored bread balls instead of croutons, and the brilliant variation of batter-fried sardines instead of anchovies. Insalata mista di stagione ($9) is the house salad, very nicely done but distinguished only by the goat-cheese toasts.

Also on the menu was a special of risotto ($21) made from oxtail beef, truffle oil, grape tomatoes, and spinach. This doesn’t sound like much, but again the creamy sauce organized the flavors along a clear spectrum, so every mouthful was intense and complete. The risotto wasn’t crunchy or even al dente, but for me the essence of the dish is the creaminess with distinct grains, not the chew.

Umbria is a meat-and-dairy region in which the animals are kept indoors in the summer, producing an oddly vegetarian landscape of farms. Lamb scottadito ($27) pays homage to the Umbrian love of meat with two large chops of exquisite lean lamb, and also to the ancient Etruscan love of lentils and beans with an underlying stew of white lentils. The other garnish is a fennel-bulb salad.

The rabbit trio ($25) features a leg rather like a chicken leg, two wedges of loin meat roasted with rosemary, and a soft, peppery rabbit sausage. It’s a lot of rabbit on one plate. I’d go with the loin, chop the leg meat into more of the sausages to make them firmer, and use the sausages as an appetizer or a pasta sauce. Alternatively, the chef could make the "confit leg" more cured and spicier, in the style of a French confit duck. The garnishes are fried squares of white polenta, a wild-mushroom stew, and some stewed tomato.

If Boston were in Umbria, it would be a fortified hilltop city — and even harder to drive in — but we would have dishes like the merluzzo ($26), a sweet piece of scrod wrapped in meaty ham and seared, with buttery chard and mashed parsley root. Again the three flavors work with each other unusually well. For extra greens, the side dish of rapini ($5) has chopped broccoli rabe done with lots of garlic and a little red pepper, to good effect.

The wine list is almost all Italian, and interesting, but overpriced; nothing is less than $30. Our 2003 Santa Cristina ($37), from Antinori, approached triple retail for a wine the maker intends for food pairings, a Chianti-merlot blend as soft as merlot although rather more aromatic. Still and sparkling mineral water is $6 a bottle. Prices are more normal for the excellent cappuccino ($3.25), coffee ($2), and tea ($2).

Dessert chef Lee Napoli gets a separate credit, and rightly so. The knockout is the simple dish of gelato and biscotti ($8), in which the three little scoops of rich chocolate ice cream are served in a shell of hazelnut brittle as beautifully transparent as fine-art glass. The dessert also brings some beautiful fruits and berries and some tasteless biscotti. I was similarly pleased with the goat-milk panna cotta, served in a cookie shell with a very Umbrian garnish of honeyed figs.

A hazelnut-chocolate torte ($8) is a superb wedge of chocolate brownie pie with strongly flavored hazelnut gelato and chocolate sauce with toasted hazelnuts. The same duplication was not so effective in the chestnut semifreddo ($8): the semi-frozen mousse had flecks of chestnut to good effect, but the candied chestnuts were just that, and the chestnut-chocolate wafer was not a winning combination.

Service was excellent, other than a pause after ordering when the restaurant was nearly empty. As it filled up, courses came at a reasonable pace, and our waiter, who later confessed to being a Sardinian, was helpful and accurate. The crowd seems as sensible as the patrons of the Trattoria Il Panino that used to be here; perhaps the upstairs bar and nightclub floors also share a clientele. The downstairs room was always nice, and is perhaps a little more so with the open kitchen, heaps of redware, a visible wood oven, copper pots on the wall, a chicken on a rotisserie (apparently for aroma), large dome lights, some exposed brick, flagstones on the floor, and a lot of street-side windows. It all sounds loud, but isn’t by today’s standards, although it could lose the soft-rock radio soundtrack. I wouldn’t change much else.

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