Elizabeth Serves Up Comfort Food in Crowded Setting

Last month, Colin Alevras's ambitious Tasting Room restaurant closed its doors. Its dedication to painstakingly sourced, exquisite ingredients resulted in delicacies such as $40 entrées of exotic mushrooms that, culinarily exciting though they were, tested the adventurousness of customers who ultimately found the restaurant wanting. At about the same time, Elizabeth opened across the street. The two eateries could hardly be more different.

Where the Tasting Room was uncompromising and required its customers to trust the chef's expertise, Elizabeth makes no such demands. Its menu of easy comfort food is designed to sate, not to challenge, and its attractive decoration of green baize and playing cards unsubtly evokes immature adult fun. Accordingly, the front bar is the focal point of the restaurant. Standing drinkers crowd around the banquettes of the front room and mill precariously around customers eating at tables in the middle dining room. The backmost garden room, whose ceiling on clement days is open to the sky, is the only one where there's a chance for peaceful, un-spilled-upon dining. Accordingly, too, Elizabeth does a brisk business in comped desserts, by way of apology for grievously sloppy, backlogged service.

The cooking, by John Iconomou, is straightforward but not plain or uncreative. A summery gazpacho ($10), mild-flavored, green, and creamy with puréed avocado, is poured over a big scoop of super-tangy passion-fruit sorbet, for an appetizer that stimulates as it refreshes. There's another hint of Spain in a rich salad ($9) composed of garlicky chorizo bits, pieces of almond, and juicy corn kernels, which all mingle under the oozy influence of a runny poached egg.

Steak tartare ($12) doesn't have the nuance it ought to: The bowl of coarse-cut raw beef, capers, and quail egg is overpowered by too heavy-handed a dose of horseradish, which obliterates any but its own crude flavor. But a little helping of light ravioli ($11) with a delicate filling of fresh ricotta, sharing a bowl with brightly seasonal green fava beans and slivers of summer squash, is excellent, just buttery enough and transportingly well-balanced. Enlarged, it would serve well as a main course.

Conversely, the main course that tries to fill that niche, a pea risotto ($14), would be better as a side dish. It's well-made and tasty enough, enlivened with shreds of Parmesan and leaves of mint, but a big bowl of the green rice is just too much of it. My friend tried to pair it with a heartily crisp grüner veltliner from Salomon Undhof ($12) but, true to Elizabeth form, the wine didn't arrive until we were ready for the check. A grilled skirt steak ($19, in the menu's top price bracket) is small but satisfying, thin, flawlessly cooked, and doused in light, tarragon-sweetened bearnaise sauce. Even the accompanying roasted fingerling potatoes are excellent — better by far than the side of bland, bready, wedge-shaped garlic fries ($5) visible in their paper cones on nearly every table.

The best dish might be the one that's the most unabashedly crowd-pleasing — and, the waiter said, the best-selling: a $14 cheeseburger capped with a giant Saturn's ring of cheese that's given a crisp edge on the grill before being melted onto the meat. It's a messy affair, spilling wantonly from its bun upon first bite, in a shower of shredded lettuce and juicy beef.

Elizabeth, 265 Elizabeth St., between Houston and Prince streets, 212-334-2426.