Chinese food in New York tends to be taken for granted. Affordable and available on every corner, it’s an easy fallback cuisine but rarely worthy of note. Yumcha, which opened in the West Village in April, rides a welcome new wave of restaurants that streamline and re-envision Chinese cooking in a variety of ways. Yumcha’s take on the multifaceted cuisine is artful but modest.

Angelo Sosa, executive chef of Yumcha, worked under Jean-Georges Vongerichten at several restaurants, and has picked up his flair for Asian flavors with a strong emphasis on ingredients. His new venture is less baroque than Mr. Vongerichten’s Chinese restaurant, 66, however, and cleverer and more refined than Xing, another new Chinese restaurant whose chef once worked for Mr. Vongerichten.

Yumcha occupies the comfortable corner spot that used to belong to the iconic Bar d’O. The space, like the menu, is manageably small and focused, with a dozen or so tables and a sushi-style counter facing the open kitchen. The red-and-white decor is clean and spare; all kitschy chinoiserie is relegated to the single restroom, where tortuous dragons twine around the walls and a cast-iron wok serves as a basin.

The careful orchestration of the kitchen is not equaled on the floor.With few exceptions, the waitstaff is reticent and unengaged. A glossy host and hostess lend their impressive stage presence, if little else, to the entryway.

Mr. Sosa’s arsenal of attractively balanced dishes effectively emphasizes vivid, clean flavors. Some of these succeed extremely well, such as a unique udon salad ($9) that tweaks familiar peanut-sauce noodles. Thick, wheaty udon noodles, heaped in a deep bowl with a light, nutty sauce, greet an unexpected guest: big, white scoops of airy sorbet. The sorbet couples the delicate consistency of frozen foam with the keen, unsweet flavor of lime and more than a hint of chili. As the sorbet melts into the sauce, the citrus complements the peanut and the dish evolves, becoming spicier and soupier. It’s a pleasure for several senses.

Another salad, of lightly cured jellyfish strips ($12), is less showy but just as effective. It owes its deliciousness to the invertebrate’s marinade and dressing, a thrilling, mouth-filling concoction of sesame unctuousness and citric tang that permeates the chewy, translucently ocher jellyfish and the micro-lettuces and baby cilantro beneath it.

Sometimes the kitchen’s attempts to impress aren’t so stellar, as in a plate of half a dozen frogs’ legs ($13) that are coated in a spicy sauce intensely (and deliberately) seasoned with scorched garlic – an acrid flavor that, however valid on its own terms, inevitably evokes memories of failed amateur cooking. These legs aren’t botched, just misconceived: Their firmly succulent meat cries out for better treatment but is shouted down by the unavoidable garlic, which an accompanying glass of pineapple juice (“pineapple consomme,” the menu reads) fails to quiet. Other dishes are improved by a single skillful touch, like the pork-and-shrimp spring rolls ($9 for a pair), which are crispy and hot and pleasantly filled out with chopped mushrooms but unexceptional save for the ginger-mustard dipping sauce, whose sharp, acute flavor elevates the dish beyond the sum of its fried parts.

A main course of veal cheeks ($23) sees the ultra-tender, lightly fatty chunks of meat braised in a sweet, richly spicy liquid redolent of star anise, cinnamon, and ginger. The provided spoon is the best tool for dealing with the broth, which is filled with rice, and the falling-apart pieces of cheek meat. A similar treatment of halibut ($23) calls for a spoon as well: The pale, fileted fish is slow cooked so that it becomes very moist and dense, spread with a thick, salty paste of Chinese fermented black beans and pieces of sweet sausage, and bathed in a delicate, lightly tart broth with hints of tea.

Sliced duck breast ($24) gets a crisp skin and a sweet hois-in-style sauce that complements its meaty taste; a soft rolled pancake filled with chives tries and fails to improve the classic scallion pancake. Along more delicate lines, three pretty skin-on pieces of yellowtail snapper ($22) are simply steamed and strewn with toothsome wood-ear mushrooms, baby basil, and crunchy, faintly fragrant slices of lily bulb. The pure flavors harmonize beautifully in the absence of elaborate culinary trickery.

The selection of teas (the restaurant’s Cantonese name means “drink tea”) ends a meal very well: “Cloudy Flower Mood” ($8 a pot), made with whole flowers, is particularly good. Desserts are less essential: peanut butter “cheesecake” ($8), served in a glass with crunchy bits of chocolate, is the best.

A few featured cocktails ($12) are made with tea as well, including a watery, missable green-tea martini and a refreshing pinkish blend of sparkling wine and rose-jasmine iced tea. Several wines can be had by the glass – the bright, rich $8 Chappellet chenin blanc is a highlight – and a few more by the bottle only, mostly under $45.

For a new restaurant, Yumcha is remarkably well calibrated, with an energetic feel that makes its foibles easier to ignore. The becoming modesty of the restaurant’s scale, paired with the sometimes exceptional, balanced, and vivid cooking, shows potential enough to set Yumcha ahead of the new-Chinese pack.

Yumcha, 29 Bedford St., 212-524-6800.