By Paul Reidinger

IF YOU'RE A chef, there's no more dramatic way for you to nail your colors to the mast than naming your restaurant after yourself – and that means using your full name, not just your comfortably half-anonymous first name, or an amalgam of the first names of you and your partner(s), or some other such sophistry.

We've seen enough of those latter kinds of places in recent years – some good, some not so; some still around, some defunct. But we haven't seen (and we'll never see) too many places like Restaurant Gary Danko. Use of the chef-owner's full name suggests ego, of course – the assumption being that enough people remember Danko's early-1990s tenure at the Ritz-Carlton Dining Room to be favorably inclined toward his own venture – but then, ego is a necessary accoutrement to the successful chef. So is boldness, and a willingness to be judged; when you and your restaurant bear the same name, there is no place to hide if it doesn't come off. So you make it come off, as (Mr.) Gary Danko has so gorgeously done.

Gary Danko is a reminder of the many elements that make up the art of restauranting. Of course there is the food, which despite its huge importance often manages to be overstated in this food-happy town, at least in relation to the other indispensable facets of a restaurant's life. For when we eat restaurant food, we are not experiencing it – we are not scrutinizing and pondering and appreciating it – in some kind of test-kitchen vacuum. Our emotional response to the food is intimately and inextricably bound to the way we feel about our surroundings: the interior design, the other patrons, the light and sound, the attitude and performance of the staff.

Gary Danko has grasped this holistic principle as well as any restaurateur I'm aware of. His restaurant – an artful blending of blondish wood paneling, glass, crystal, spot- and backlighting, nooks and alcoves, and sound-dampening patterned fabrics of muted colors – is beautiful without being showy. The staff, to a person, give every sign of being genuinely glad to see you, without straying into obsequiousness. The other patrons are a fabulous urban mix of every sort of person in every sort of combination. You are glad to be there; if you aren't happy when you come in, the gloom soon lifts.

And the food! The food is unobtrusively divine. It is worth the money, whether you spring for the $74 tasting menu (the accompanying wines add $35) or put together a meal from the regular menu, where you get three courses for $55, four for $64, and five for $74. I thought three courses would be plenty, until I remembered that Danko and his onetime maître d' Nick Peyton (they worked together at the Ritz) had helped develop a name for themselves by offering that once-rare thing in our republic of Velveeta, the cheese course. In the past few years quite a few other restaurants have jumped on this bandwagon, but the cheese service is bred in the bone of Gary Danko, and with the cart trundling about the dining-room floor, resistance is useless. The cheese service alone would make the restaurant worth a visit, even if everything else on the menu were forgettable.

But of course everything else on the menu turns out to be unforgettable, from the little amuse bouche of roasted eggplant soup with a bit of lobster and a dab of crème fraîche to the larger courses that range with ease among cuisines, ingredients, and techniques, etching, in their fluid movements, Danko's own distinctively Californian signature. Ahi crusted with coriander, peppercorns, and rosemary and served with piperade (a purée of tomato and red pepper thickened with egg). A lobster salad with avocado and beluga lentils, dressed with a singular vinaigrette of citrus and cardamom. Lobster again (heaven for the lobster lover), roasted and served with black trumpet mushrooms and herbs atop a bed of buttery potato mousseline. A wintry soup of sweet dumpling squash, poured tableside from a petite copper pan over a bed of smoked bacon bits and minced roasted apple.

Our sole disappointment: a $40 half bottle of Condrieu from E. Guigal. Condrieu is one of the few white wines produced in the Rhône Valley, and after a few sips I understood why the best Rhônes are red; the Condrieu lacked the refreshing citrus acidity so characteristic of other French whites. In its place was a smooth, bland butteriness – quite Californian, alas.

The cheeses – a formidable and changeable array, from a flinty Basque Garrotxa to a cheddar-like Belgian Oud Brugge to a decadently rich Vacherin Haut Rive – chased away that stray cloud. And dessert – an island of almost cream cheese-like panna cotta jutting from a red-grapefruit soup, and profiteroles stuffed with amaretti ice cream – chased away even the memory of it.

But that's about the only chasing to be found at Gary Danko. The restaurant's temper is otherwise luxurious and civilized; the pace is leisurely but never sluggish, the service attentive but never intrusive, the well-trained staff's tone warm but not fawning. You wonder why all restaurants don't work as well – but of course, if they did, Gary Danko wouldn't seem quite so special.