Middlesex Lounge is the latest creation of the minimalist geniuses Chris Lute and Matthew Curtis, who always seem to capture the very now, from Miracle of Science (a few doors away) and Audubon Circle to Cambridge 1. Even for them, Middlesex Lounge is a remarkably stark room, and it is so much better than anything else around that it makes me wonder: what do their houses look like? What is their office like? What do they wear? What’s on their iPods?

To start with, there isn’t much of a sign marking the entrance. You have to know where you’re going. But when the front door opens, it’s not an empty room, even at 5:30 pm. (By nine, when the DJ starts, it’s a crowded scene.) There are low, rolling, bench-like seating platforms. There are square tables the exact same height made of inch-thick plywood. These things are arranged into alcoves along the walls, with the center open, but people can move them into any sort of arrangement.

Middlesex Lounge is a place where there’s nothing retro or revived, no camp, no irony. A while back, someone got so aggravated with ’60s and ’70s revivals that he started a movement calling for the progress of time. This is where the group could hold meetings.

They could also have food — and as at the team’s other restaurants, it is quite good. (This menu is dinner-only; the restaurant also offers a weekday lunch with pressed sandwiches.) There are 10 possibilities, no desserts. Fairly arbitrarily, we started with shrimp shumai ($5) and "ten tiny tacos" ($8). The former, a typical Cantonese dim sum, are a half-dozen barrels of shrimp as sweet and fresh in their bamboo steamer as I’ve ever had in Chinatown. The soy-garlic dip was impeccable.

The "ten tiny tacos" are even better, perhaps because there is so little quality Mexican food in Boston. There’s a choice of black bean or pulled pork, but our server allowed us to mix, so that’s what we did. Each taco is a neat canapé on a single cupped taco chip. Each contains a slice of jalapeño, like the nachos of old, but also a big leaf of cilantro, a slice of avocado, and a smidgen of salsa. The beans or pork really make no difference in the strong flavors of the trimmings, but each of our 10 bites was excellent.

We followed with the Kobe-beef burger ($14) and the porcini ravioli ($9). The latter were only six ravioli, each stuck with a toothpick; this served to remind us to savor each one as an individual dumpling of wild mushroom, in its sauce of garlicky cream. The burger arrived as a large, flat patty pressed into toast (the sandwich press still lurks somewhere) and cut into four fingers. On the side were little deconstructed piles of sea salt, cracked black pepper, and a brownish mince with the sweetness of ketchup, but with a different flavor ... caramelized onions! So you can put together a burger of traditional flavor profile, but without actual ketchup. The only weak spot here is the word Kobe, implying supremely tender and expensive beef, but tasting rather run-of-the-mill.

There are no desserts. Apparently one eats, one drinks, one perhaps dances. For a sweet, one walks a block to Toscanini’s. Perché no?

We were still hungry, so we added an order of jerk-chicken sticks ($5), perhaps as a tacit tribute to the Jamaican restaurant and dance club, Rhythm & Spice, that used to be in this space, or perhaps as a tribute to Miracle of Science, which opened with a menu almost entirely of skewers. The standard order is three; we added an extra ($1.50 additional). We were glad we did, as the skewers are thick and juicy, with plenty of spice — the appropriate allspice and hot pepper. The mango dip is more like applesauce, not very mango, but very cooling on the palate.

It was too early for the bar drinks, but there’s a wine list and an excellent list of bottled beers, including some unusual ones, as well as Guinness stout ($4) and Harpoon IPA ($4). There is also a fine list of non-alcoholic drinks that includes San Pellegrino limonata or aranciata ($2), but not the weirdly Campari-like "Sanbitter."

For more great minimalism, check out the bathrooms. First you have to get through unmarked (that no-sign thing again) doors nine feet high and two inches thick. Then you have a sink that looks momentarily like soapstone, but is actually the definitive contemporary counter surface: sealed and tinted (black, in this case) concrete. Very cool.

On the rocks

Two hard blows for New England fish lovers as the commercial striped-bass season ends and summer bluefish runs into its slack period: new studies show that the codfish population on Georges Bank is still in decline, and more serious conservation may be indicated. Cod schrod isn’t the most flavorful of fish, but the local catch has been a sweet standby, and airmail snapper is just not the same thing.

Then I was reading the new book, Striper Wars, by Martha’s Vineyard activist Dick Russell. It chronicles the efforts to get the striper back on our tables when populations crashed in the 1980s. Those stories, which pull in everything from lying power companies to nuclear-plant outflow, as well as commercial overfishing, are important history, and enjoyable reading now that big stripers are back. What is frightening is Russell’s opening, about losses of the crucial Chesapeake Bay breeding population to a commercial fishery for its prime food fish, menhaden. Once more, the striped-bass pyramid is crumbling at the base, and the villain is what we used to tout as good ecology — a fishery for a species no one used to eat. Today, we eat farmed fish (more good ecology until you think it through) fed on fish meal made from menhaden. And, to ensure that we live long enough to see the striper population crash again, we take omega-3 fish-oil pills made from, alas, Chesapeake Bay menhaden. So once more the striped bass, a fish that fed early Americans well (while codfish provided a cash commodity), is headed for the rocks — unless we step in with a vision of the whole marine ecology.

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