During one of my visits to Jeeb, a new restaurant on the Lower East Side, a small group was seated at the table next to mine. One customer opened the menu, smiled, and began announcing a litany of numbers: “Four, four, three, five, four, two, four, three, five, four – this is great!”

He was referring to Jeeb’s prices, which are gentle in the extreme, with more than 30 menu items costing $5 or less. As you might expect, these are small dishes – Jeeb markets itself as a “Thai tapas” restaurant. Yes, that’s a contradiction in terms, since tapas, technically speaking, are Spanish, but that battle has already been lost, as every cuisine in town is now proffering small “tapas” portions.

By any name, however, small dishes are welcome this time of year, when the muggy weather makes big, heavy meals unappealing. The surprise at Jeeb is that the low-budget menu doesn’t mean a no-frills experience. You can sit in the small but attractively designed dining room or in the spacious garden deck, which surely qualifies as one of the Lower East Side’s most pleasant places to eat. The food presentation and dishware are a lot better-looking that you’d expect at this price level. Even the bathroom sink is entertaining (more on that later).

If there’s a catch, it’s the food. Most of it is fine, but if you’re expecting an authentic Thai dining experience, you’re in the wrong place. As is often the case with a large, wide-ranging menu, there’s an over-reliance on mix-and-match preparations and sauces (sweet chili sauce and crushed peanuts show up again and again), and several ingredients clearly came from a can (including that chili sauce). Most of the small dishes are tasty enough, however, and the atmosphere is relaxed and conversational. And at the moment there’s still no liquor license, so you can save even more money by bringing your own, making Jeeb one of the best bargains in town.

If you’re going beyond the $5-a-dish barrier, do it with the salads. The best of them is the crispy duck salad ($8), a dynamite mix of vegetables, cashews, pineapple (canned, alas), and duck, tossed with a spicy lime sauce. It’s bracing, refreshing, and satisfying all at once, and is the single best dish I tried here. A grilled shrimp and mango salad ($7) is also good, as are the fruity California salad ($4), the green papaya salad ($4), the grilled vegetable salad ($4), and the seaweed salad ($4), although the latter doesn’t live up to the menu’s “spicy” description.

Since there are two-dozen tapas to choose from, I’ll start by listing the ones not to order. Something called Thai chicken wings ($4) evokes neither Thai cooking nor great chicken wings – a scraggly looking, overfried mess. Similarly, Thai sausage ($4) turns out to be slices of the driest, blandest sausage you’ve ever tasted. And grilled beef ($8) is even drier than the sausage.

After that, though, there are plenty of fun choices, none of them life-changing but most of them perfectly fine for creating a culinary backdrop to an evening out with friends. If you want something everyone can nibble on, fried calamari ($4) is agreeably crisp but not greasy, and popcorn chicken ($5) is an unusually moist and flavorful version of McNuggets. Okay, so neither of those has anything to do with Thailand, but they’re both good, and the accompanying dipping sauces add at least a hint of Asian culture to the proceedings.

There are several fine dumpling options (all $4), including salmon with baby shrimp; shrimp and crabmeat; mixed vegetable; and turnip, which comes wrapped in a sticky rice crepe.

There are also a few unexpected treats. Taro crunch ($2) is deep-fried shredded taro root topped with sweet chili sauce and crushed peanuts, which is wonderfully crunchy – a tactile delight. And when I saw “steamy mussels” on the menu ($5), I ordered it without looking at the description, assuming it would be steamed mussels. But it turned out to be a nice mussel soup, accented with basil and other herbs.

There were several things I didn’t get to, including the chicken curry puff ($3), appealingly described as “chicken, potato, onion, and curry powder with cucumber salad.” Is it good? I can’t say, but at only three bucks, you can afford to find out on your own. That’s one of the nice things about a low-priced tapas menu: There’s little downside to ordering speculatively. If something sounds interesting, try it.

Another nice thing about a tapas meal is that you can treat dessert as just another small dish appearing on the table, instead of as a big event with overloaded expectations. At Jeeb, the best option is pumpkin custard ($4), which, despite its name, is more of a moist cake, and a nicely refreshing one at that. There’s also a competent if unremarkable creme brulee ($4), which is studded with pieces of jackfruit, to surprisingly little effect. Avoid the coconut sticky rice with mango, which is horribly salty (“Oh, it’s supposed to be like that,” said my waitress, but I have my doubts).

Now, about that bathroom sink: It’s a big ceramic pot sitting on the floor, filled with ice cubes. Perched above this vessel is a broad showerhead, which dispenses a light stream of water for washing your hands. It seems completely out of place, which perhaps is why I liked it so much. Chalk it up as another small but telling gesture that makes Jeeb more than just the latest place for cheap eats.

Jeeb, 154 Orchard St., 212-677-4101.