Thomas Keller has been called the best chef in the country, if not the world. So some excitement was justified when he opened a new down-market dining establishment just downstairs from his lauded Per Se. But Bouchon Bakery, which opened in March, is hardly the transporting Keller experience one might hope for.

When a pair of European food enthusiasts – friends of mine who had heard great things about Mr. Keller – visited New York last month, their dining checklist included Bouchon Bakery. It was the trip’s sole letdown. The new restaurant, which combines a takeout counter with an airy floor of tables, is a fine, affordable addition to the Time Warner Center food court, but comparing it to Per Se, or hoping for a taste of one in the other, is pointless.

Mr. Keller has not brought his trademark flights of fancy with him downstairs. Bouchon Bakery’s food is generally excellent, but its concepts are very simple indeed. Lunch is the focus for now: The restaurant closes before sundown, and sandwiches comprise the core of the menu. The best of them might be a humble tuna salad ($13.25 at the tables or $9.25 at the counter), layered with slices of egg and radish and punched up by a vigorous olive aioli. It’s unquestionably a tuna salad sandwich, and its frills are few, but it has an ineffable fineness that characterizes a lot of the food here. The same quality shows up in the roast pork tonnato sandwich ($12.25/$8.75), in which tender, thin-sliced pork loin is dressed up by a sharp tuna-tinged aioli, sweet pickled onion ribbons, and capers.

The chicken soup ($11.25/$8.25) is another eye-opener if you tuck into it expecting the usual vague salty savor. It’s a lesson in broth: limpid and pure-tasting, yet managing to capture the dark meatiness of chicken in a way that the common yellow version never does. A soup du jour often manages the same profundity – a mushroom soup is thick with pure pureed mushrooms, an asparagus soup likewise with its respective vegetable.

Salads, like the sandwiches, break no new ground; instead they are terrific implementations of familiar ideas. Beet-and-goat-cheese salads are absurdly common – probably half New York’s beet consumption is in this form – but Bouchon’s ($14.25/$10.75) stands out. It uses the standard components, but the goat cheese is a blend of fresh and aged specimens from Coach Farm, the hazelnuts are toasted to a rich tan, the mache lettuce is crisply fresh, and the beets – red, gold, and roasted – are sweetly superior.

However, the results of the kitchen’s simple approach aren’t always as good as that. A roast beef sandwich topped with ostensibly melted fontina cheese ($13.25/$9.25) showed up lukewarm and only half melted, on three different days, its garlic dressing a little too harsh and its ingredients unexceptional. Ham and cheese ($10.75/$7.75) likewise: Though its ham is pedigreed French Madrange, the baguette – all the breads are made in-house and very good – is the only part of the dish that merits attention.

When the menu rises above salads and sandwiches, it does so with a “Selections” rubric that runs from a daily quiche to a foie gras terrine to a salmon rillette. The quiche ($10.75), unusually custardy and full-flavored, is the only Selection that’s easily managed by one eater (a fact at which neither menu nor server hints). The rest are shareably hefty helpings of fatty spreads: The rillette ($18.75) incorporates flaky fresh and smoked salmon pieces welded together with scads of cold butter; the foie ($30), too, makes a painfully rich lunch.

The smattering of wine selections tops out at $30 a bottle, a nice price for wines like Chateau Puy-Blanquet’s assertive St.-Emilion Grand Cru ($11/$30) and Tablas Creek’s white “Cotes de Tablas” ($10/$28), a clean, lingering Rhone-inspired viognier blend.

The restaurant offers a wide array of pastries, from classical financieres and eclairs to peanut butter cookies. I have no doubt that they use the finest high-fat butters and hand-milled flours, but I couldn’t find a dessert that was better than decent: The coffee cake ($5.50/$4.25) was dry and nuanceless, the various cookies buttery but undistinguished. There are better options for lunchtime sweets in the neighborhood.

The Samsung advertisements, large and small, that decorate the restaurant’s corridor surroundings make a terrible first impression, but between the servers’ punctilio and the room’s lovely view of Columbus Circle and 59th Street, it’s not hard to forget the ungraceful setting once you’re seated. And if you aren’t looking for Per Se, the restaurant performs its humble task very well. But as long as people like my European friends come looking for bargain access to the great chef’s talents, they will enter misled and leave disappointed. In associating his name with a mall’s food court, Mr. Keller takes a risk: He has established Bouchon Bakery’s credibility, but may have lowered his own.

Bouchon Bakery, Time Warner Center, 10 Columbus Circle, third floor, 212-823-9366.