It’s hardly newsworthy anymore when an established pastry chef breaks off to open his own restaurant. Iacopo Falai has Falai, Pichet Ong has P*Ong, Sam Mason has Tailor, and each has a keenness of vision that results in a restaurant that’s decidedly out of the ordinary in one way or another. The rigor that’s necessary to make fine desserts seems to translate into exactingly controlled environments, with every element in place.

Chef Jehangir Mehta has made innovative desserts at Jean-Georges and Aix, and has no lack of vision, but at his new solo venture, Graffiti, it is quite literally constrained. The restaurant is one of the smallest I’ve ever been inside. P*Ong and Falai are hardly palaces, but in Graffiti’s art-bedecked dining room, two patrons can barely squeeze by each other; the pocket-size kitchen is even tighter. The room has four tables, which diners may be compelled to share with strangers if the restaurant gets full. Though the cozy scale has its charms, particularly when Mr. Mehta is pressed into service as a waiter, too often it detracts from the experience and distracts from the food.

The specificity of the chef’s plan extends to an unusual menu structure. Instead of dividing the dishes by category, he breaks them into three price tiers: $7, $12, and $15 dishes, all of which are designed to be shared. Every bottle of wine costs $25; every glass is $8. It’s a welcome simplification, encouraging diners to think less about the prices and more about the product.

The highlights of the $7 tier are two salads whose delicious, keen flavors belie their blatant unseasonality. In one, crisp tiles of watermelon are strewn with tart-salty feta crumbles and capped with mint sorbet that has the clean taste of the fresh-picked herb. The other is a rainbow of heirloom tomatoes covered with balsamic ice and crunchy candy nodules. Cubes of firm paneer are served hot, their creamy blandness offset with spice and with the sourness of unripe mango.

It’s not hard to deduce the flavor philosophy of the food — complementary elements from wide-ranging parts of the flavor spectrum — but just in case, each dish arrives with a careful explanation by the server of how the sweetness of this ingredient matches the saltiness of that one and the tartness of a third. Sometimes it’s more fun to discover such things for oneself, as with the unexpectedly successful incongruities atop a puff-pastry tart ($12). The flaky, deep-gold crust is excellent, a reminder of the chef’s pastry training, but so is the inspired Asian-Mediterranean topping: a smear of sour tamarind paste, crisp-chewy wakame seaweed with a hint of bitter astringency, and silvery little anchovies that give a keen richness. Half a dozen spring rolls filled with chewy noodles and luxuriously sweet crab-meat get their extra charge of flavor from a fiery tomato purée and a helping of crunchy pickled onions.

The $15 dishes offer more volume but no additional complexity: The Chinese buns filled with pulled pork could hardly be simpler — or better. The meat, deeply flavored with cinnamon and star anise, is wonderfully rich and moist, so much so that the buns’ ostensible purpose as sandwich wrappers is mooted when they quickly dissolve under the onslaught of pork juices. Accompanying the dish is a sweet apricot marmalade, and for once the servers’ explanations come in handy: The chef, who leaves the pits in the apricots, urges eaters to crack the pits open and eat their almond-like kernels, which add an additional dimension to the dish. A thick, fluffy sesame pancake, split open and filled with sliced beef, is a somewhat upscale — less greasy, more complex — version of the ones sold in Chinatown.

Desserts (all $6) are neither as ambitious nor as successful as one would expect from a practiced dessert chef. A “stoned fruit” crumble of stewed apricots is tasty but plain, its complement of black pepper ice cream surprisingly mild. Crystalline halvah topped with date cream is neither sweet nor particularly satisfying. The dessert I will return for is one I had for the first time when Mr. Mehta cooked it at Sapa, a recap of the steamed pork buns: puffy cakes filled this time with gooey mocha chocolate and paired with luscious peanut ice cream, plain and rich.

The wine cabinet, which takes up a significant fraction of the dining room, contains several bottles from Hi, an international brand whose line includes Spanish garnacha, Italian prosecco, and a few French wines — all in friendly packaging at extremely friendly prices, though none with a great deal of complexity. For hollow-legged indulgers, $35 per person buys an all-you-can-drink ticket, allowing personal pairings of the eight wines sold by the glass, as well as unlimited refills.

The cooking at Graffiti is both clever and neatly executed, impressively so considering the toy-sized kitchen. The pricing and the painfully cozy environs seem destined to draw a less sophisticated crowd than Mr. Mehta’s used to; I hope this smart cooking finds an appreciative audience.

Graffiti (224 E. 10th St., between First and Second avenues, 212-677-0695).