One of the best meals I had in 1993 was at a then-new West Village trattoria, cooked by an ambitious, young chef named Mario Batali. When Mr. Batali left that restaurant, Po, in 2000, Lee McGrath took charge of Po’s kitchen and to this day supervises a smart Italian menu that hasn’t changed much over the years. Now, Mr. McGrath is employing the same formula on Carroll Gardens’ restaurant-saturated Smith Street, where this summer he opened Po Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn restaurant, while situated in a space roomier than that of the Manhattan flagship, keeps the signature cramped feeling and occasionally deafening volume of the original.

The six-course tasting menu has always been a draw, even as it gradually crept up to $50 a person, but the one I tried in Brooklyn was a mixed bag. There’s no printed copy of the tasting menu. The chef just sends out a salad, two pastas, a main course, a cheese plate, and a dessert, according to the day’s whim. After a tasty antipasto with olives, roasted red peppers, watercress, and good bresaola came a single raviolo, stuffed with seasonally sweet corn kernels and afloat in a luxurious thin melted butter sauce; but the pasta envelope was stiff and tough, a disharmonious element in a mellow dish. It was the first but not the last inconsistency I noticed in the cooking of the pastas, which should be second nature at a place like this.

Next came fresh house-made gnocchi. They weren’t modishly light and fluffy, not at all; instead they had an almost rubbery firmness that boldly stood up to their bath of meat sauce. The ragu had an earthy, sourish flavor that was hard to place and not particularly likable. Fortunately for the meal, the main course was fantastic, a profoundly crisped boned guinea hen whose dark, juicy meat resonated with flavor. The grilled bird was placed on a bed of fregula, couscous-like pearl-shaped pasta. It was flavored with fresh corn, and swirled around with grassy olive oil and a sweet Italian grape syrup, known as saba, which complement each other and the meat nicely.

The guinea hen appears on the à la carte menu, happily, an $18 main course. The tasting menu’s other courses don’t — the à la carte gnocchi ($16), for instance, come with tomato, mozzarella, and basil, not ragu. Considerably better than the raviolo was the inch-wide, tender ribbons of pappardelle ($15), slippery with butter, puréed fresh corn, and slices of mild chorizo. It’s one of 10 pastas on the menu alongside classics such as spaghetti Amatriciana ($14) and orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe ($15), as well as a delicious tangle of soft black fettuccine ($15) with tomatoes, some jalapeño heat, and just a few shell-less, nicely salted mussels. Mussel lovers would do better, though, with the minty, abundant “Bob’s” clam and mussel appetizer ($12), likewise spiked with chili and herb tomato sauce, and served with garlicky crostini.

Main courses include a justly famous porcini-crusted cod filet ($19), crisp and flavorful outside and moist inside, and grounded by kale and white beans; and a thin lamb cutlet ($19) that’s grilled, drizzled with tangy yogurt, and set on a juicy bed of ripe grape tomatoes. Less traditional is a hash ($18) in which creamy bits of sweetbread are fried together with potato cubes and smoky hunks of pancetta. The effect is savory, subtle — you wouldn’t know they were sweetbread pieces without careful inspection — if relentlessly heavy. It’s a dish that makes more sense when accompanied by a vegetable side, like the piquant sautéed dandelion greens.

Po pours 50 or so wines from all over Italy. By-the-glass choices are somewhat limited, but with so many of the bottles under $40, there’s plenty of range.

The original Po benefits from its proximity to Murray’s Cheese shop, serving a small but excellently curated cheese plate. The Brooklyn restaurant is just a block from Stinky, an irreverent cheese shop that stocks the outer-borough version of the platter, which makes a fine dessert. Among the sweet offerings ($6), the house-made gelati stand out, particularly in the Po sundae: a refreshing mix of mint gelato and fudge sauce, strewn with cinnamony toasted pine nuts that are reminiscent of breakfast cereal. But a plain and tasty panna cotta is unfortunately doused in an eye-wateringly sweet Amarena cherry sauce, turning a would-be subtle dessert almost into candy.

Po Brooklyn (276 Smith St., Brooklyn, between Degraw and Sackett streets, 718-875-1980).