Despite these bright spots, I found the overall experience at Il Totano oddly off-kilter. The space, a few steps below street level, is narrow and nearly windowless; its low ceilings, cramped conditions and garish colors evoke less the lemon-scented hills of Sicily than the feeling of being stuck below deck on a new-money schooner. In fact, very little at Il Totano evoked the Tyrrhenian delights promised by the brand and decor. Not that it’s sad; it’s just not very Italian. The pasta, oddly, is nothing special, except for the amazing duck meatballs—a throwback to a Thai-inspired dish Dieterle cooked on a long-ago episode of Top Chef that became a signature of his first restaurant, Perilla. It’s served with a scant handful of mint-flecked cavatelli, which I assume is what earned it a place on this menu. In fact, most of the dishes I found exciting seemed to derive their luster from anywhere but Italy: the tropical-tinged kampachi crudo; a zesty and somewhat Teutonic seared pork chop under a tangle of bitter greens; a top-notch arugula salad with fried calamari and chunks of soppressata that sounds more Jersey Shore than Amalfi Coast. The cocktails are from another planet entirely: for some reason, they’re mostly named after children’s shows from the last century—Snorks, Wuzzles, Rainbow Brite. It’s the kind of forced, old-fashioned cheekiness you’d expect at an airport bistro, not a snazzy new West Village dive with hotspot aspirations.

Italian seafood, a quirky Village brownstone, the triumphant return of a legendary “Top Chef” winner: This combination should be magical, or at least magnetic. That it isn’t seems out of step with what I remember of Dieterle’s approach to cooking from his previous forays—though it is more or less in line with what it feels like to eat at the other restaurants his new business partners have launched. Dinner at Hoexters, the Shapiros’ new Upper East Side brasserie, has the feel of a suburban date night as it did five years ago; Flex Mussels (whose Uptown branch is still open) is a midrange bistro that derives most of its potential from a food pun. This is, I suppose, a matter of taste rather than aroma. Despite their embarrassing names, the cocktails at Il Totano are solid, especially the Inspector Gadget, a sherry-spiked martini that’s blithely garnished with a caper berry. The plump shrimp in peperoncini butter are tender and sweet (though it hurts to have to pay extra for the focaccia that demands the savory sauce). The linguine with clams is textbook—tender pasta, salty little clams, garlic, briny pink chunks of guanciale—and that’s good enough as far as linguine with clams goes. But everything about the restaurant, its successes as well as its missteps, suggests it could have been more. ♦