The world is made of glass ... and brick

By Paul Reidinger

MODERN INTERIOR DESIGN must have a virtue or two, but warmth isn't one of them. Contemporary aesthetic themes generally seem to turn on spareness – stainless steel, chrome, and stone – and their tone is accordingly clean and a bit hard. The not-quite-four-year-old restaurant mc2, over in the Barbary Coast, very much answers to that description (brick, plate glass, chrome, halogen spotlights), yet by some alchemic magic the effect is one of elegant warmth. You stare at the long brick wall at the back of the dining room and find yourself thinking of a hearth flickeringly lit by flames; of course, there are no flames, not really, but you sense them, and you smell the fragrant smoke from the wood-burning oven in the display kitchen, and you believe. That is the triumph of the design.

The restaurant recently reopened after the sort of recasting that has become a commonplace in the aftermath of the dot-com debacle. Mc2 had overcome its slow start to become, at the end of the millennium, the locus of many a tech-industry, money-is-no-object party; now, in an era when there is virtually no tech industry and money is very much the object, the fancy, pricey fusion menu has given way to Todd Davies's more straightforward, new American cooking, the tables are set farther apart (enhancing the feel of relaxed spaciousness) – and lo! it all works quite gorgeously. Mc2 might have been born in an age of concept and frenzy and excess, but like a rosebush emerging from a long, cold winter, it has benefited from a heavy pruning. With superfluous nonsense pared away, the restaurant's fundamental strengths – a stunning setting, a professional and experienced staff, and a first-rate, fairly priced bill of fare – are more apparent than they could ever have been in an age of funny money and showily empty effects.

Suddenly, tarte flambée, the ham-and-cheese pizza of Alsace, doesn't look like quite such a poor cousin on the menu. The restaurant's principal owner, Adi Dassler of Adidas fame, grew up in Alsace; his goal originally had been to open a simple tarte flambée café. Somehow the whole thing turned into a mushroom cloud of money, ambition, and Philippe Starck bar stools, but by some miracle mc2 is still perhaps the only place in the city where you can enjoy Alsatian pizza ($7), a large square of blistered, cracker-thin crust topped with white cheese, shreds of ham, and finely minced onions. (There's a vegetarian version too, with mushrooms supplying the meatiness.)

You could have just that and not go away unhappy. But the menu offers many other pleasures, from the hearty – a salad of grilled beef tenderloin ($13) with frisée, balsamic onions, and Gorgonzola – to the stylishly simple, a bowl of harlequin soup ($9) that brings together swirls of creamy lobster and parsnip bisques.

In keeping with current practice, the line between appetizers and main courses has been blurred to encourage sharing. You can create your own, informal tasting menu. (Suitable wines, including an attractively brisk pinot gris from Alsace, are also suggested and are available in two-ounce, and quite inexpensive, pours.) Monterey calamari ($8), for instance, given a peppery rub, then roasted in the wood-burning oven and served with pipings of smoked-paprika and watercress aiolis, is big enough to be a decent-size meal. The blue-cheese soufflé ($9), served with endive, slices of ripe pear, spiced walnuts, and syrupy aged balsamic vinegar (the real stuff), is much smaller but makes up for it in richness.

Baked arctic char ($13), meanwhile, turns out to be just a few bites of mild fish, more first than main course, even with the ballast of fingerling potatoes and applewood bacon. (Char is a relative of salmon.) But mesquite-grilled rack of lamb ($16) provides, in addition to a fair amount of flawlessly tender meat, a hefty substratum of mashed potatoes, and like some monument of a lost civilization, an arresting cylinder of eggplant-zucchini caviar topped with a slice of fire-engine-red roasted tomato.

The long and the short of all this? You're going to have room for dessert, even the creamsicle ($7), a multifaceted affair that includes a pair of chocolate crepes topped with orange ice cream and, on the side, a handsome little champagne trumpet filled with orange soda (we weren't told exactly what kind but were assured it was one of the boutique brands) in which bobbed, like apples in a barrel, a pair of globes of vanilla ice cream.

If that sounds too elaborate, or caloric, the cookie plate ($7) – an array of house-made chocolate-chip, chocolate, and oatmeal-raisin cookies – will do just fine, because sometimes the modest and the simple is all we really need. Mc2 will never be a humble corner bistro; its setting, its physical basis, is too splendid for that. But its makeover suggests that even within a cathedral of modernism, it's possible to generate enough warmth, through honest food and human attentiveness, to ward off the chill of postindustrial style or economic implosion. Or both.