Come with me to the seventh circle of West Roxbury, yea, unto the very gates of Dedham. Down Route 1 we go. Remember the old neon chicken sign at Fontaine’s? It’s gone, and in its place is Spring Street Café — an interesting and useful cross between a diner and a North End trattoria. Our dinner there was not consistently excellent, and my guess is that this is a small enough restaurant to have some nights better than others. You have to remember that many days here start with coffee and muffins at 6 a.m.

At dinner we begin with a basket of good, crusty Italian bread and a pour of peppery extra-virgin olive oil. (The reader sighs: "Every other week the olive oil is flowery. All of a sudden it gets peppery?") Yes, peppery is another character of virgin olive oil, usually refined out of "pure" olive oil. This pepperiness is good, if you don’t magnify it in mayonnaise.

Garlic bread ($2.95) comes as six large slices of the same bread, broiled with so much garlic in the butter that it tastes momentarily like metal, but the second bite is delicious. My favorite appetizer, though, was pan-fried Italian greens ($7.95). I mean, salad — even salad wilted with pancetta (unsmoked bacon), oil, and garlic — is good for you; but fried slices of polenta make it satisfying in a whole other dimension. The dressing is a creamy sauce of blue cheese, perhaps putting the salt total over the top for some. (The pancetta probably also does well in linguine carbonara, which we didn’t order.)

Fried calamari ($7.95) is a decent job, nicely fried rings with slices of hot pepper that are also battered and fried, accompanied by a very good, and obviously homemade, marinara dip. The house salad ($4.95) is a regular Italian salad with supermarket lettuces and vegetables, but twice as big as is typical.

A special on grilled chicken ($16.95) brought chunks of boned breast meat, lots of sautéed vegetables (mushrooms, zucchini, broccoli), and a fine, cheesy risotto that made the platter. Another special on linguine puttanesca with shrimp and scallops ($16.95) was not al dente pasta, but good, with a funky sauce aromatic with anchovies and highly flavored with salty capers and olives. The seafood was good, but not exceptional.

Penne pasta with pesto ($11.95) was again decent pasta, not al dente, with some basil flavor in the non-seasonal-herb sauce. But the dish was swimming in oil, a sign of a careless or rushed kitchen.

Coffee and decaf are quite good, as one might expect from a place that does breakfast business. The wine list is short and cheap; we had glasses of a house Chianti ($6) that was fine, inexpensive wine for this food, and a Canyon (California) merlot ($5) that actually had some dusty fruit on the palate. It was hard to smell either wine because they were large pours in small glasses.

The only dessert (unless one wanted to have one of tomorrow morning’s muffins and pies) was tiramisu ($4.95), cut into medium squares, and well soaked with coffee liqueur.

Service at Spring Street is just fine on an uncrowded weeknight, and probably good even when it fills up; it’s that kind of menu. It’s also the kind of menu that stops short of real distinction most of the time, in favor of a kind of solidity and reliability. Certainly a modest-priced version of a low-end North End restaurant is highly welcome at the edge of West Roxbury and Dedham, and a few dishes, like the pan-fried greens, suggest that the kitchen is capable of fine dining on its better nights. And for many Bostonians, this sort of Italian food has been a staple for many decades.

The room is not entirely comfortable in winter, since the heat is either too high or too low, so the staff turns it on and off over the course of a meal. When the heat is off for a while, the room is drafty. The dining part of the room is out front, in what feels like a built-up former porch. There are about 20 wooden tables, simple wainscoting with a cute strip of tin ceiling material as a decorative accent, quarry tile on the floor, and blackboards for daily specials — which are often good bets.

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