By Paul Reidinger

IT IS TRUE that you can find ribs on the menu at Town Hall Restaurant – braised beef short ribs, to be precise – but only at lunch, and you have to pay for them. But you can find plenty of ribs elsewhere in the restaurant, and they are free, if not edible: ribbed wainscoting on the walls, ribbed chair backs, ribbed glass candleholders on each table. The linearity is subtle but omnipresent – a motif – and it suggests a straightforwardness that turns out to reflected in both food and atmosphere.

Town Hall is the much anticipated debut of the brothers Rosenthal – Mitchell and Steven – as restaurateurs in their own right. For the past eight years, they have been running the kitchen at Postrio, where they have perfected a vigorous version of pancultural American cooking. That style is very much on display at Town Hall, but otherwise the two places could hardly be more dissimilar. Postrio, with its several levels, immense open kitchen, and sweeping staircase, has strong soundstage and celebrity overtones; Town Hall, by contrast, has a certain Yankee restraint and a casual conviviality one might romantically associate with colonial inns.

The 18th-century roadhouse note sounds immediately as you enter the restaurant and find, in an alcove on your right, a large communal table where walk-ins and other spontaneous seat-of-the-pants pilgrims can find (often immediate) seating. We had lunch there, after poor (which is to say, no) planning by yours truly, and while I was apprehensive at the start – sitting with strangers, no privacy; fine for the characters of The Canterbury Tales but not for us reclusive types – the groaning-board experience turned out to be a reminder of how civil people can be, at least when the theater of social operations is a table at which food is being served.

Addendum: at which excellent food is being served. For the food, swelling with refined heartiness, could scarcely be any better. It could be fancier – more elaborately plated and sauced – but the Town Hall style isn't fancy. It is, instead, a slab of wild-mushroom lasagna ($15), dribbled with salsa verde and served in a big earthenware crock. It is a seafood chowder ($8), heavy with mussels, diced potatoes, and bits of carrot and celery and topped with (a rare flourish) four little rounds of house-made sourdough crackers. It is a simple gratin of broccoli rabe ($5), enlivened by red chili flakes and topped with melted shavings of pecorino cheese.

Over the course of several visits, we found only one dish to be not quite up to speed. That would be the cioppino ($23), which struck us as underseasoned and overpriced, though served in a handsome crock instead of the all-too-familiar, and embarrassingly souvenir-ish, boat of hollowed-out sourdough bread. Cioppino is not the dish you want to muff in San Francisco. Luckily, given the honor roll of maritime ingredients – Dungeness crab, shrimp, mussels, and clams – the fix is easy: a bit of salt, a shot of Tabasco, a splash of pastis, and the pallid tomato broth will come to life.

The spicy, bay-infused tomato broth for the steamed mussels ($9) was, by contrast, quite lively – a paradox. And as the Rosenthal style tends toward the brawny, the mollusks were heaped up with fine, crispy-tender shoestring fries. More brawn: roasted veal herb meatballs ($9) in green-peppercorn sauce, the meat with a beautiful coarse texture, like a good French country pâté, the sauce full of creamy bite, and a svelte pad of mashed potatoes to turn a starter into a mini-main course.

Even a dish as presumptively delicate as roasted halibut ($19) gets a fairly heavy-duty treatment. The fish is accompanied by Brabant potatoes, cubed (like the dread rutabaga of my childhood) and fried just enough to give them a slight crust around a still creamy interior, haricots verts, and a velvety suffusion of what the menu laconically describes as "lemon pecan butter." I noticed the diced pecans in the sauce, and I will stipulate to the presence of lemon, but mostly I noticed – I tasted, I experienced – lots of butter.

Fortunately there is no weigh station as you leave Town Hall, no sentinel to inquire about your dessert foibles before allowing you to go. You might have gone easy anyway, settling, perhaps, for the appealing variety of three bars and a whoopie pie ($7), which are served neatly aligned, like specimens of some kind, on a square cutting board. The butterscotch bar reminded me of treats my mother used to make, the chocolate was densely fudgy in the true holiday spirit, the raspberry bar bracingly bittersweet.

But it was, of course, the whoopie pie, a New England delicacy like a marshmallow-cream hamburger sandwiched in buns of chocolate cake, that most powerfully commanded our interest. It was the one round item in a tiny realm of rectangles, and it required more concentration than the bars to eat without making a mess. I can't say we entirely succeeded; I can say the marshmallow filling could use a bit more marshmallow and a bit less thinner. Even so, we could feel it sticking to our ribs as we stepped back onto the town.