It’s tough to get a reservation at Centro Vinoteca, the newest member of the growing, trendy West Village Italian scene. Chalk it up to chef Anne Burrell’s incipient celebrity status: She’s cooked at Felidia and Savoy, but, to judge from overheard conversations in the painfully loud dining room, she’s best known for her appearances as Mario Batali’s assistant on “Iron Chef America.” The restaurant’s early success seems to have gone a bit to its head, and the friendliness of its first weeks has been forgone for cool pragmatism.

After you’re first seated, the waiter brings a one-page bar menu of piccolini, little snacks such as deviled eggs and breadsticks, “in case you want to snack while you decide what to order.” But it’s not a convenience, it’s a disingenuous roadblock: You can’t get a dinner menu until you buy something from the piccolini menu, or endure the waiter’s injured sniff when you say you’d like to fast-forward to the appetizer course. The piccolini don’t fill a particular hunger on the customer’s part, as the restaurant’s dinner portions are already grotesquely large. It just feels like a hard-sold boost to Centro’s bottom line.

The snacks themselves are fine: It’s hard to quibble with such fatty treats as unctuous deviled eggs (two for $4), or heavily breaded and fried cauliflower nibbles ($6) with a creamy dipping sauce, and they pair well with the 30-odd wines by the glass. A chicken liver pâte ($4) is pleasant too, refined and smooth-textured — almost runny — and topped with strings of sweet balsamic vinegar-cooked onion. But why not leave the bar menu at the bar?

Ms. Burrell’s cooking is firmly in a Bataliesque modern-Italian vein, without all of Mr. Batali’s maximalism but with modishly recherché ingredients such as farro, guanciale, and fennel pollen. A lumpish cake of tender-braised oxtail meat ($14) has good, rich flavor, but it’s bested by its own side salad, a tangled affair of tasty fresh celery shredded to cool ribbons and dressed simply with olive oil. It’s a must for celery aficionados. Zucchini flowers, stuffed with oozy goat cheese (atypically, the menu misses a trick by forgetting to name-check the source of the cheese) and fried to a breaded crisp ($13) have the appeal of richness, but other restaurants do this dish better and more delicately. Again, the accompanying salad, this time an appealing mixture of good ripe tomatoes and pleasingly vinegar-logged croutons, stands out.

It’s a truism of New York dining that sea-scallop dishes typically contain two or fewer of the prized mollusks, so the appetizer of a half-dozen that Centro grills and serves with cubes of watermelon ($15) is a generous surprise. Unfortunately the hot grill is not kind: The scallops I tried were burnt in parts, tough on the edges, and dried out in the middles. The melon was excellent, and would have been complementary to juicier, sweeter shellfish.

The big, flat ravioli ($13) filled with chard and tart broccoli rabe makes an excellent pasta choice, especially if it’s the middle of three savory courses (not to mention piccolini). The vegetables are keen and fresh, and the buttery, cheese-flecked sauce, while substantial, is a lighter alternative to options like thick pasta twists with sausage ragu or farrotto with lobster. Fried gnocchi ($13) have no crispness, just a mahogany color to their puffy chew; they’re flavored with just a spoonful or two of savory, chunky lamb Bolognese sauce.

Main courses are a little disappointing. A “heritage pork chop” — the server couldn’t answer what precisely that meant, but it sure sounded good — came out juicy but overly salty inside, which the topping of crisped pork skin didn’t help. The menu also promises on the meat a crust of fennel pollen — an expensive, intensely flavorful ingredient — but whether the pollen was there before the chop was blackened to a bitter char is impossible to assess. Roulades of pale rabbit ($26) stuffed with sausage and accompanied with a mixture of Tuscan beans sound good, but none of the components have much flavor at all. Thickly breaded skate ($22) comes out a little tough and fibrous, but with good marine flavor; a charred and sliced rib eye steak ($36) could feed three people, but three sensible people might squabble instead over the small but wonderful sloppy cheese-infused corn cake that comes underneath.

The wine list is affordable and ranges nicely among Italy’s smaller producers. Thirty choices by the quartino are joined by more than 100 bottles, ranked in price order from $23 on up.

Diners who filled up on piccolini are better off for skipping $8 desserts such as the bland, yogurty-tasting coffee panna cotta, a big trough of which comes topped with chocolate-covered coffee beans; or a too-sweet hazelnut cake with Nutella mousse. A goat-cheese cheesecake is light and nicely balanced, though, and flavorful almond gelato makes a plum tart special.

Centro Vinoteca has fine potential, if down the line its chef’s good ideas are treated with the care they deserve. In the present hectic environment, such fine points seem to be overlooked.

Centro Vinoteca (74 Seventh Ave. South at Barrow Street, 212-367-7470).