By Paul Reidinger

EARLY IN THE spring I started receiving a flurry of e-mails and faxes from Michael Harrity, the owner of Carta. The news was, first, that chef and cofounder Rob Zaborny, the man responsible for executing the around-the-world-in-80-dishes menu (rotated monthly) that had made the seven-year-old restaurant so distinctive and so successful, was leaving at the end of May ... to spend 80 days (and then some) traveling around the world, of course.

Subsequent bulletins mentioned the search for a new chef and the proffering of a greatest-hits menu – all of which was a tip-off that Carta as we'd known and loved it was nearing the end of the line. The other shoe finally dropped over the summer, when Carta became Paisley's. "It is all new at the restaurant formerly known as Carta!" proclaimed a July fax. "New look, new menu, new name," if not yet new stationery, which still referred Web browsers to www.cartasf.com.

That little slip makes a nice addition to the ironic-oversight department, but it's also reassuring to those many of us who will miss Carta that Paisley's is really a kind of reincarnation of the departed restaurant, not a completely new endeavor. The menu card, for one thing – with its noticeable tilt toward small plates over large and its three-course, $13.95 lunch deal – will certainly seem familiar to Carta-goers, as will the kitchen's ongoing emphasis on the foods of the Mediterranean.

The space, too, continues to be rather cavernous. When Carta opened in 1995, in an old catering-kitchen locale, there was just a handful of tables at the front, near the door, while the kitchen took up at least two-thirds of the square footage. It was a little like sitting in one of those '30s roadsters: two dainty seats behind a mile of hood. But at the end of the 1990s Carta went on an expansion bender, moving into the storefront next door and becoming rather vast, apparently in the expectation that the new economy (whatever that was) would keep people filling the seats.

As we all know now, things didn't quite work out according to plan, new economy-wise, so Paisley's customers will find plenty of room to roam. The space, with its several dining rooms, front and rear, its nooks and half-screened alcoves, would be the perfect place for some scene from a spy film, except that spy films have gone the way of the new economy, or perhaps the other way around. In any event, Paisley's feels comfortably spacious and relaxed: you are aware of the other diners, but you are not forced to eavesdrop on their conversations, as was the case in Carta's first cramped, sound-conductive incarnation. (If you want to eavesdrop, in other words, you do so at your convenience. Not that you would. But you could.)

The kitchen seems not to have lost a step from its glory days. The only dish we didn't care for was the burger ($8), made from grass-fed beef. But this was hardly a surprise, since hamburgers in California are almost invariably bad. We were told the patty was so thin that it would be difficult to guarantee a medium rare-to-rare arrival, but the burger turned out to be a big tasteless blob of ground beef at least an inch and a half thick, and well done. The house-made potato chips on the side did provide some compensation.

The rest of the food seemed Carta-esque in its casual precision. We very much liked, at lunch, the tomato soup ($5), with its little crouton island topped by saffron aioli; it wasn't fancy, but tomato soup shouldn't be fancy. And the luxurious aioli reappeared in a pork tenderloin sandwich ($6.95), slices of tender meat layered with grilled red bell peppers and eggplant on a toasted sesame kaiser roll. (If you like basil, you might prefer the alternative offering, pesto, over the aioli.)

Grilled Mediterranean flat breads ($5.95) are, with their crackery crusts and lively toppings, the local version of good thin-crust pizza. At Paisley's, the toppings for the nonvegetarian version include chicken, ground seasoned lamb, grilled peppers and eggplant, and white cheese – quite eastern Mediterranean and, cut into neat squares, easy to eat.

We found a certain magic in the shaved-fennel salad ($9), which combined roasted organic beets, candied walnuts, shavings of manchego cheese, and fresh peaches in an unlikely symphony of sweet, tart, aromatic, and crunchy. Simple yet highly effective: the mark of confident cookery. House-made ravioli ($8), filled with eggplant, fennel, and red onion and swimming in a tomato coulis, seemed none the worse for lacking the customary ground meat. And – a large plate at last – the grilled king salmon ($13), a filet atop cucumber slices in a vinaigrette, with a tomato-laden crouton nearby, suggested that the kitchen has a nice touch with fish, steering skillfully between the shoals of overelaboration and starkness.

If there is an issue at Paisley's, it is the service. The staff are friendly but can be erratic. You ask for something – more water, some ketchup, a dessert menu – and have no reason to feel sure that it will be brought. It might or might not be. But at least they're all smiling, as if they'd like to teach the world to sing.