Art-glass teardrop lights, polished blond wood floors and a billowing wall of gauzy white drapes tell you immediately that dinner will be chic. But not until you open the menu do you learn it will be easy on the wallet, too. Chef-owners DeAnna Akers and Aaron Hervey designed their new restaurant to be affordable enough to visit often, and made the food interesting enough that you actually want to.

From the quirky, mismatched dishes to the modern art that echoes the menu in exuberance, this hip new restaurant is fun. The same menu is served at lunch and dinner, which means that anything from a sandwich to a full spread of appetizers-entrée-dessert is possible, at a tab that can range from less then $10 to about $40.

The menu encourages grazing with a list of 13 appetizers, such as baked goat cheese in tomato sauce, Indian-spiced fried dill pickle slices with yogurt dip, and tomato and cheese soup - a yin-yang swirl of pale, brothy cheese soup and bright, chunky tomato soup that is the essence of vine-ripe tomatoes. The nine entrees are comfort-food interpretations of cutting-edge contemporary cuisine: smoked Gouda macaroni and cheese with blackened chicken, braised lamb shank over mushroom risotto with olive demi-glace, and vanilla-rum glazed halibut over mashed plantains with mango salsa.

You gotta love a restaurant that has such an interesting list of moderatly priced wines by the bottle and glass, and a separate long list of bouquet beers on tap, along with draft root beer. The root beer shows up on the dinner menu a root beer float. I'll probably never try it, though, because I'm hooked on the low-sugar fried pumpkin and apple empanadas - four finger-sized puff pastry turnovers filled with pureed pumpkin and bits of soft-cooked apple, fanned around a mound of real whipped cream.