Eighty One, the new restaurant attached to the Excelsior Hotel, feels like it is run by a bunch of well-funded children doing their best to play Restaurant, with all of the trappings and none of the understanding.

Up front, four or five people consistently crowd around the reservation machine, peering intently at its screen and blocking customers trying to pass. The restaurant’s pageantry and indulgence in upscale cliché verge on the ridiculous. The service staff milling around the bright, velvet-hung dining room seem to outnumber the seated eaters, but still the impression is of a disorganized flurry.

Orders are frequently fouled up; each time, the situation is resolvable only by a heated consultation among many employees. Staples such as bread and water are near impossible to get. Your plate may be licked clean, your heavy utensils laid parallel upon it, but still it won’t be cleared until a staffer grandiosely asks, “Have you completed your appetizer, sir?”

On the overwrought menu, something as simple as an egg is never just an egg; it’s a “hen egg” or a “farm egg.” Along with appetizers and main courses is something called the “Tasting Collection.” As the staff must tire of having to explain, “that’s some of the chef’s favorite dishes, but they can be eaten as appetizers.” What that seems to mean is a second tier of starters, made with high-flown ingredients at twice the price.

That chef is Ed Brown, who put in 14 respectable years at the Sea Grill at Rockefeller Center and seems to spend every working minute here in the dining room, chatting with tables of his friends. Eighty One’s Web site makes reference to “his gentlemanly nature” and “his star status,” both of which are thus on full public display. Memorably, at Sea Grill, his culinary style was to select very good ingredients and let them shine simply; his method is similar here, extensively citing his ingredients’ pedigrees and then leaving them on their own, to varying degrees of success.

The poached egg in one appetizer ($15) is delicately, barely set, posed quivering on a round of super-buttery brioche. Flanking it, likewise poached, are three morsels of offal: veal sweetbreads and pressed calves’ feet, all disappointingly bland. A dainty little selection of vegetables from the “Tasting Collection” includes tiny onions, Brussels sprout leaves, carrots, endives, and peeled green grapes, roasted with butter and dumped on a plate, for $15. They’re perfectly fine, delicate vegetables, each tasting simply of itself.

Another Collection appetizer is a trio of tuna tartares ($21), three similar-looking pink cylinders of chopped fish. The first is almost pure tuna, with some fresh chervil for accent. The second sneaks look-alike slivers of blood orange among the chunks of meat, with a little zest on top. The third is the best, its top paved with crunchy wakame seaweed, sesame seeds, and wasabi crème fraîche.

There are only a couple of main courses for less than $30 — and those two are $29. A tuna main course ($36) sees two rounds of yellowfin set on a dull, milky cassoulet, its plump beans and snippets of bacon and tomato all equally flavorless. Two lumps of foie gras bravely set out to combat the tough stringiness of the over-seared tuna, but don’t quite succeed. Mr. Brown has a reputation as a master of seafood —or did before he opened Eighty One. An enormous hunk of cod ($29) has a magnificent, moist, almost wax-like, dense texture, but it’s drowned in a painfully salty, garlicky sauce, oniony couscous, and handfuls of frizzled shallots reminiscent of the French’s onions that cover green bean casseroles.

Lamb three ways ($39; that’s just $13 per way) is memorable only for the confit lamb shoulder, darkly savory shreds of meat that scintillate underneath, while a loin and chop vie to bore the eater.

For a $42 surcharge, black truffle can be “shaved on any dish.”

In all, Eighty One is a sad disappointment. The restaurant’s aspirations are all too prominent, but the best it seems capable of are unintentional moments of self-parody.

Eighty One (49 W. 81st St., between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, 212-873-8181).