The Dutch

SO here is where you want to be right now, all of you who care about good food and the theater of eating it: sitting in a booth in the back of the Dutch, alternating bites of red shrimp and fried green tomatoes with hits of dry Vouvray.

You may have a steak to follow, crusted perfectly and with a super-bass mineral tang. The Dutch is the song of the summer. It is exciting.

The restaurant is on the corner of Prince and Sullivan Streets in SoHo, a beautiful leafy corner that for years held the Cub Room, which, whatever it was at its start, ended as a B-list celebrity hangout. Now renovated, the restaurant has three main dining areas, all white brick and rubbed wood and high-gloss ceiling paint, with comfortable seats and good sconces and chandeliers throwing beautiful light: A-list in the extreme.

In the oak-lined oyster bar up front are men in good suits and better sneakers drinking clear-whiskey Manhattans and sucking down giant head-on, steamed Hawaiian shrimp. Across from them, in the airy, high-ceilinged and very loud bar area, sits a tall blonde in a backless black cocktail dress, swiping her iPad languidly. Behind her: about what you’d get if you handed out meal tickets at the TED conference or the Apple store a few blocks away.

It is beautiful up there in the bar with the wide windows open to Prince Street, and it is a fine place to eat in late afternoon or late morning or on a whim, a place to trade jabs, bites of caviar, forkfuls of elegant beets with smoked egg yolk to cut the sweet. But for dinner you should endeavor to be seated in back, along Sullivan Street, where the lights hang low in shades that might be pencil tops as rendered by Claes Oldenburg. It is darker in the back of the Dutch, the tables larger, and the sound level low enough that you can hear the hip-hop bounce beneath the roar.

What a scene. You may recognize people from television, from magazines, from Web sites and banks and funds and firms and other restaurants: the whole Gen X-Y food-crazy elite assembled to eat oysters and drink Cutty and absinthe and toast Andrew Carmellini, the restaurant’s chef and one of its owners.

Mr. Carmellini stands professorial and intense in the semi-open kitchen, wearing whites and architect glasses, acknowledging nothing, keeping his head down. He knows what he has done.

Once a protégé of Gray Kunz at Lespinasse and Daniel Boulud’s original chef de cuisine at Café Boulud, later the founding chef at A Voce on Madison Avenue, Mr. Carmellini was a star of both French and Italian cooking when he left the employ of others to open Locanda Verde in TriBeCa in 2009. Now, with the Dutch, he is cooking what he calls American food. By this he means the best casual-restaurant food he can come up with, out of all the larders available to him as an American who lives and works in New York City.

And so the South gets a nod straight away, with a chile-flecked cakelike cornbread that starts each meal, and receives another with those marvelous fried green tomatoes and Carolina shrimp in a fiery pepper sauce. There are hints of Asia in a terrific black cod with smoked mushrooms and a sparkling yuzu-chile broth, and of Mexico in the transcendent, meltingly delicious lamb-neck mole with chayote and red rice.

Yukon potato mash with gravy might have come from the best diner in your town, U.S.A.; crab meat with bloody mary sauce could have been delivered from the fantasy files of a food-obsessed resident of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A salad of summer lettuce with buttermilk dressing and the salty hit of Parmesan? That is your Montauk summer romance right there.

As for beer-braised tripe served beneath a scattering of Fritos, with lime and avocado, Mr. Carmellini calls it barrio food. But the dish tastes of the secret New York you get to experience only after a lifetime of loving it. It is the culinary equivalent of Jay-Z playing cards in the kitchen of Rao’s with Harvey Keitel in the video for “Death of Autotune.” (Hova looks at his cards: “Oh, wow. Wow!”)

There is a wide stream of Italian food as well, appropriate to Mr. Carmellini’s heritage, job history and the neighborhood in which the Dutch has risen. A plate of creamy smoked-ricotta ravioli dressed in simple tomato sauce is a reminder that simplicity has its virtues. But veal pizzaiola gets the opposite treatment, with pancetta-wrapped porterhouse dressed with braised cheek, fried artichokes and a rustic, garlic-scented sauce of crushed San Marzano tomatoes and olives.

Ready for the clunkers? Try an appetizer of early melon with country ham and peppery arugula. It is better than decent. (Take that!) An entree of sea scallops with bacon, peas and pickled ramps? It is unqualifiedly good. (Faint praise!)

Now try umami-rich, miso-bathed asparagus with big hunks of bacon and a poached egg and think how good a word “unctuous” is when you are eating it. Rip through little sandwiches of fried soft-shell crab with a sauce that would lead Alice Waters into McDonald’s if it served it.

Mr. Carmellini’s rabbit potpie, the size and shape of a football, holds amazing richness beneath its Christopher Wren-like dome: butter, rabbit and divinity in equal measure. And that steak is a celebration worth reserving for: a honking big rib-eye for two that holds its own with the best New York chophouses, even with its fancy-Dan accompaniment of a slick green salad.

Finding wine to drink amid such flavor diversity could be a nightmare. But Josh Nadel, the restaurant’s sommelier, and Colin Alevras, its service director, have built a strong list and a staff that knows its intricacies. Simply say how much you want to spend, and answer all questions honestly. You will do just fine.

Dessert brings a list of options that are interesting if not mandatory: devil’s-food cake; stone-fruit sundae; a sweet rice pudding with mangoes, pineapple, passion fruit, macadamia nuts and coconut sorbet. You may want these. But what you really need is a slice of one of the restaurant’s excellent pies, served with a scoop of ice cream. That is the way we eat in America and have since we started running this town.