The lofty arches of 311 W. 57th St. have seen a lot. Built as the Manhattan Baptist Church in 1930, the building housed the Mediasound recording studio through the 1970s and ’80s, then became gothic nightspot Le Bar Bat, and in April gave way to Providence, a Mediterranean restaurant with a festive bent. But the baroque, multistory space is a hard pair of shoes to fill, and at times the new restaurant seems to show the strain.

Heavy wooden beams gird the ceiling of the main room, which is dominated by a giant crystal chandelier hung over a central lounge area flanked by dining tables. Gaudy spotlights, a holdover from the previous dance-club incarnation, occasionally suffuse the chandelier with color, and a powerful, bassy sound system shakes the room with urban pop. Up a winding flight of stairs is a deep balcony that wraps around the room, offering more tables and a close-up view of the original architecture, including a dramatic stone organ loft converted into a DJ booth. A private lounge upstairs and another one in the basement are stylishly accoutred with curtained booths, custom polished wood furnishings, and other attractive, sumptuous details. The restaurant’s spaciousness is an asset. Dining tables are comfortably large, and even when they’re all occupied (which is rare), the room still feels ample. But a number of silly details spoil the stately impression. The menu, with miscalculated ostentation, bills the chef as “Celebrity Chef Margherita Aloi,” and a heavy cork-bound wine book opens dramatically to reveal a paltry couple of pages. One would expect a restaurant on Providence’s scale to project a cool confidence in the majesty of its space and excellence of its cooking, but threadbare attempts at pageantry undercut that.

Ms. Aloi, a tremendously talented Italian-raised chef who won acclaim at Le Madri and Arezzo, guides the kitchen effectively, but, disappointingly, the mundane roster of lobster, steak, and pasta dishes scarcely lets her show her creative talent. The spring menu is divided into three courses: “To Start,” “To Experience” (pastas), and “Dinner.” (Dessert, of course, is “Temptation,” and only Providence knows why they stopped short of labeling the wine list “Libation” and the coat check booth “To Disrobe.”) The cooking itself is good enough to need no such affectations, with excellent renditions of fairly familiar dishes such as clams caciucco ($10.50), in which succulent little Manila clams are cooked in a richly garlicky broth, their shells gaping to accommodate chunks of spicy chorizo and white beans. Another starter, the “Blond Mary” ($15), is a martini glass of rich yellow tomato sauce and terrific shrimp; it doesn’t transcend the shrimp-cocktail genre, or even try to, but it tastes great.

Pasta courses, too, cover well-trodden ground in a skillful way. Scialatielli ($16), a chewy handmade ribbon pasta indigenous to the Amalfi Coast, where it’s commonly tossed with seafood, here twines through a sauce of stewed red and orange grape tomatoes, whose light, sweet flavor is accented by salty ricotta salata cheese. Much softer pasta ribbons ($23) are served with an abundant scattering of lobster meat as well as grape tomatoes, and dramatically topped with a hollow half-lobster shell – one of the food’s few attempts to engage with the theatricality of the space. The dish’s excellent flavor is compromised just a bit by a mushy uniformity of texture. Caramelle ($22) are firm pasta pillows shaped like wrapped candies, with a twist at each end, filled with a ricotta-mushroom mixture and served in a brilliant green buttery asparagus puree.

Among the main courses, a tender cube of filet mignon ($32) gets plenty of flavor from a rich, concentrated red-wine sauce, but the supple steak is almost upstaged by its luscious bed of pureed potatoes, which incorporate a potent dose of Roquefort cheese. A fish of the day (a particularly enormous striped bass, in my case) is simply roasted whole and filleted; herb butter and roasted new potatoes complement the flawlessly cooked fish. Servers plead ignorance as to why the Norwegian salmon ($25) is called “Norvejan,” but the lovely piece of fish makes one forgive the restaurant its quirks. It’s roasted a trifle past medium-rare and served with a fine pile of mashed potatoes that’s somewhat less voluptuous than the steak’s.

Dessert, a course that could usefully pick up on the ornateness of the space, instead sticks to the plain-and-simple paradigm of the rest of the meal, and fails to impress, with yet another dryish, coffee redolent tiramisu and other familiar sweets. The best of the choices is a dense, buttery bread pudding ($8) drizzled with sweet cinnamon syrup. The wine book’s selection is Italian and Californian and markedly weighted toward the inexpensive end, including a concentrated, unoaky zinfandel from Kempton Clark for $30, and some featured food-friendly choices from Castello Banfi, including a sangiovese blend for $16.

It could be said that anybody who goes out to eat in a historic nightclub gets what they deserve. Ms. Aloi’s cooking is effortlessly good, but its nuance gets lost in the impersonality of the restaurant. The menu lacks the character that such a distinctive space seems to call for. This selection could be served anywhere, and might be easier to appreciate in a cozier spot. Ultimately, Providence’s eccentricities don’t add up to much. A vision that managed to capitalize on the old church’s strengths – its roominess and grace – would be a destination worth revisiting.

Providence, 311 W. 57th St., 212-307-0062.