Cafe Society Suffers From a Mixed-Bag Menu

Its name bespeaks sophistication, its neon sign competes with the fashionable Coffee Shop across the street, but Cafe Society feels like a restaurant desperately in search of a personality. Deco-pink walls, mirrored columns, and Warhol-print banquettes collide in an awkward interior that seems to grasp ambitiously for both comfort and glamour and achieve neither.

Much as the restaurant fails to settle into one social niche or another, customers can meander among mediocre representatives of Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and other cuisines, piecing together a patchwork meal. Side by side among the starters, one finds Maryland crab cakes, Sicilian meatballs, and Cantonese spare ribs. The ribs ($10), which are served on a pile of shredded cabbage, in a silver-covered dish, taste of impatience in the kitchen. They're tough, fatty, and gloppy with sweet barbecue sauce, three failings that slow cooking is designed to rectify with the gentle force of insistent, harmonizing heat.

What chef Matt Jaffe's menu calls "A Spanish Bocadillo" ($11), I call a wholly unappetizing appetizer. A couple of slices of firm sheep cheese and roasted peppers are strewn beside an open-face sandwich of stale, flattened bread capped with leathery dry ham. It's hard to tell if the sandwich, which seems to have been pressed and allowed to cool, is "deconstructed" or just decrepit. The whole plate is drizzled with an insipid reddish oil.

A sidebar of sushi rolls logs more successes than most of the menu. It is, predictably, the sort of heavy-ish sushi that thrives on the basis of spicy sauces and elaborations, rather than impeccable freshness. The "Brick Roll" ($15), named for its shape and color, is pressed together from spicy chopped tuna, eel, shrimp bits, and slithery avocado, all dressed with a squirt of red-pepper mayo. I think there's a morsel of rice in there, too. It's far from subtle, but rich and flavorful, without a doubt. So is the "Rock N Roll" ($15), a fat roll swathed in pinkish, chewy soy skin, and filled with fried calamari morsels and lumps of crab.

A main course of rigatoni tossed with Bolognese sauce ($19) is made interesting with sweet dried cherries thrown in, and by the fact that the Bolognese's meat is duck. Alas, the usually tender bird is tough and dry here, all the succulence cooked out of it. The bird is rich and moist when it's served Peking-style ($25), though, a breast and leg of tasty meat, even if the Pekingese art of crisping the skin while rendering out the fatty layer underneath is barely attempted here, let alone mastered. The five-spice glaze is keenly flavorful, as are the roasted plums that stand in for plum sauce; the accompanying green-tinted eggy crêpes, however, are not suitable for swaddling the duck meat, having the consistency of breakfast pancakes.

A dish of miso-seasoned Chilean sea bass ($24) fails to meld its sweet and savory flavors with grace as this kind of dish should. Instead, it overbalances toward the salty, savory end, with heaps of shiitake mushrooms, cooking wine, chives, and miso doing their pungent best to drown out the delicate (if hardly fresh) fish. Fig ratatouille is no more congruous than it sounds: a scoop of dun, cloying jam leaning against an Australian lamb chop ($27) that — like much of the rest of the restaurant's meat — tastes like it was cooked too fast and too hot, so the fat stays separate from the tough meat instead of melting into it, infusing in flavor and tenderness.

Some restaurants marginalize themselves by choosing too narrow a niche. Cafe Society errs by trying to straddle too many niches, embracing all options at once and mastering none.

Cafe Society (9 E. 16th St., between Fifth Avenue and Union Square West, 212-675-4700).