To throw another Italian restaurant into the brimming pot of Italian restaurants that is New York is to risk its submerging in the mass. I Sodi, a new little one in the West Village, is the inevitably stylish creation of an Italian-raised fashion executive, Rita Sodi, but it doesn’t always muster the substance to back up its style. The skinny space is laden with attractive features: paneling that looks like polished driftwood, luminous marble shelves, sliding wooden bathroom doors whose locks are small dexterity tests. The young staff has a flirty warmth with a vein of salesmanship that seems to suit the neighborhood clientele. Despite its three-course menu, it has the crowded wine bar atmosphere that discourages lingering visits: The tables that do stay for hours on end do so to the festive accompaniment of numerous bottles of wine, making the room that much louder with every pour.

The menu changes weekly, but within a frustratingly limited range. On one visit, a third of the dozen menu items involved artichokes. It was April, peak artichoke season, but the ones I tried were woody-tasting and not particularly well showcased: hidden in a creamy lasagna ($16); fried into crisp, bland chips ($7), or sliced paper-thin, with paper-thin parmigiano slivers, into a paper-dry salad ($11).

The “insalata dei Sodi” ($11) is pleasantly Mediterranean and sturdy, a satisfying, vinegary protein-fest of chickpeas, cubes of tangy real fontina cheese, hard-cooked egg, and flaked tuna.

A meat lasagna ($16) is built to the same simple specifications as the artichoke one: Soft, thick sheets of pasta are the main event — a treat for those of us who love pasta for its own doughy sake. It’s welded with cream sauce and paved with thin layers of tomatoey meat ragú that firm up in the baking. I tried spaghetti with clams ($18) when the restaurant was busy, and the result was a plate of undercooked noodles, resistant to the tooth and to the thin sauce they resolutely refused to absorb. The tiny clams dotted throughout were good; I picked them out of the over-salty, over-peppery dish and left the rest behind.

In a main course of fried chicken ($19), the meat is hacked into bite-size chunks before it’s lavished with thick batter and fried golden. They’re not boneless chunks, and the effect is not to make the dish easier to eat. What it does, though, is maximize the surface area, and hence the ratio of salty, crisp batter to moist but dull meat. Other weeks, rabbit, which stands a good chance of being more flavorful, is the meat in this dish.

What the menu calls a “stew” of seafood ($23) emerges from the kitchen as a tall, dry pile of cuttlefish chunks that glisten orange-red against their white bowl. The neatly cut cubes, deeply saturated with tomato sauce, are chewy and sweet, but dealing with an entire bowl of them gets monotonous long before the end. A few small shrimps lighten the mood, and a slice of bread underneath it all sops up any liquid that might have made it stewish. The same sweet, coarsely chunky, carrot-studded tomato sauce drenches a breaded beef cutlet ($21).

Behind the bar are a passionate bartender and an impressive collection of Italian liqueurs, brandies, and aperitifs. The latter are exhibited in a variety of negroni cocktails ($14 each): The “punt-e-groni,” made with flowery Hendrick’s gin, Campari, and bitter Punt e Mes vermouth is unique and delicious. About 70 wines are on offer, many in a choice of serving sizes: glass, quarter- or half-liter carafe, or bottle. Several staff members raved about the Friulian “Tre Vignis” white blend ($16 a glass), but to my palate it was overripe and as subtly appealing a companion for the meal as a glass of peach juice.

I Sodi is a labor of love, and feels like it, for better and worse.

I Sodi (105 Christopher St., between Bleecker and Bedford streets, 212-414-5774).