Sometimes it’s puzzling how the word about a new restaurant spreads. Smith’s, on MacDougal Street just around the corner from Bleecker Street’s seedy tourist shops, hasn’t been open long, but even in the middle of the week it’s packed. And with a particularly desirable sort of clientele, which is dropped off out front by Jaguars and Bentleys, and which one overhears in the dining room talking about the golf courses they’re buying.

To be sure, Danny Abrams, who owns the restaurant with his partner, Cindy Smith, has a reputation for successful restaurants: the Mermaid Inn, the Harrison, the Red Cat. Smith’s is recognizably his work: a small, tidy restaurant that doles out a user-friendly variety of American comfort cuisine. The middle room looks like an antique dining car and, despite its quaintly pleasing décor, is at least as loud as one. From the antiqued mirror-surfaced tables up front to the clubby bar in back, the stylish black-and-white design gives a pleasant, roomy feel, although when you try to actually move around the restaurant, you realize all that spaciousness is a clever illusion.

After a couple of Bouley veteran Pablo Romero’s dishes, the dining room can start to feel a bit tight. He fills a bowl to the brim with tender tagliolini ($11), douses the noodles in buttery artichoke-studded sauce, tops them with a big sheet of bacony crisp-fried prosciutto and shavings of cheese, and calls it an appetizer. It’s luxurious, almost too much so, and the menu offers little respite for lighter eaters. Baby squids ($9), clusters of their tentacles crisply charred and set among familiar rubbery calamari rings, are excellently perked up with a lemon confit that brings to bear the full spectrum of the lemon’s flavor, tart and sweet. But a creamy base makes the dish heavier than it needs to be. Similarly, when the menu promises “seasonal starters,” one expects simple dishes that show off the beauty of their ingredients; but a pretty plate of roasted miniature beet pieces topped with micro-greens ($6) falls victim to a too-rich cream of horseradish that overwhelms the vegetable.

There’s definite inspiration among the richness, though. Buried in a bowl of delicate, pudding-like butter-soaked grits ($8) lies a concealed, runny-yolked steamed egg, a delicious (though too-salty and too-rich) remembrance of country breakfasts. Proof that foam is concluding its trajectory from avant-garde touchstone through chic ingredient to everyday technique is in this pudding, or rather on top of it, in the form of a subtle blue-cheese-flavored froth that gives the humble, down-home dish a little exotic flair. A side dish of corzetti, simple floppy discs of pasta ($11), is pretty indisputably the tastiest thing in the restaurant. The dollar-coin-sized pasta shapes wrap themselves sensuously around chewy wild mushrooms in a nutty, creamy brown sauce that’s too rich for its own good but impossible to stop eating until the last dabs of it have been mopped up with bread. It’s not just a butter bath, of course; the interplay between richness and earthiness is what makes the dish special.

Main courses lack the creativity of the rest, and attempts to make up for that in volume are unsuccessful. A lean, thick-cut pork chop ($24) has a deliciously seared surface, but such a voluminous piece of meat has to be cooked more carefully, and more slowly, than this one; its interior remains unwholesomely red and juicy while its edges are tough and dried out. Next to it on the plate, a morsel of cheek meat is treated much better, slow-braised and deep-flavored and all too meager. A filet of striped bass (or, as the prolix menu insists, “line caught wild striped bass”) ($23) likewise has a gorgeous crisp golden crust where it met the pan, but the meat is overdone, dry and stiff and low in flavor. It comes on a bed of dressed-up pork and beans, stewy soft flageolet beans given bacony appeal with cured guanciale. Cod is a more forgiving fish to cook, and indeed Smith’s cod ($22) is just as moist and tender as could be wished. If its flavor is a little dull, a tart green sauce compensates, along with a sprinkle of citrus zest and garlic, and a cunning little nest, hidden under the filet, of pasta ribbons tossed with piquant fresh-cracked pepper.

Forty bottles of wine — plus several half-bottles — are nicely varied, including low-priced deals as well as worthwhile hundred-dollar bottles. The West Coast is particularly, though not exclusively, well represented: I was pleased to see an excellent Rhône-style white blend from the small, interesting California producer Garretson ($39) keeping company with A to Z’s fine Oregon pinot ($56) and a tasty $27 bargain, Gustavo Thrace’s “3rd Bottle.”

Regardless of its popularity, Smith’s is a classic mixed bag. Some dishes are excessive by design, others poorly executed in the heat of the dinner rush, and a few, like the pasta, remarkably good and worthy of a return visit — perhaps after the first wave of crowds has moved on.

Smith’s (79 MacDougal St., between Bleecker and Houston streets, 212-260-0100).