Tues-Sun 5-10:30 pm.

One night at Lark, my husband, my friend, and I were watching a tableau arrange itself in the center of the room, a couple of families around a long table, bracketed by limpid hanging cloths. The sons, all of them in bowl cuts and button-down shirts, were standing around at one end of the table with their parents, talking, restlessly shifting from foot to foot. At the other end was a group of teenage girls--all full lips, gawky limbs, and self-conscious, slightly paranoid glances, heads bent toward each other, intent and distracted. My friend, going to the heart of the matter, said it looked exactly like a Justine Kurland photograph.

That one of Kurland's tribes of self-sufficient but tender girls could materialize at Lark is wholly part of its charm. Here is a restaurant--finally, finally--that is both easy and elegant, an answer back to the ongoing problem of how domineering an idea is Seattle Casual. This balance between relaxed and lovely feels effortless at the clean, warm Lark, unlike at other restaurants where, however good the food, the struggle to reconcile the two just creates something awkward (like Rippe's "blue jeans steakhouse").

The stress of eating at an expensive restaurant is missing from Lark, partly because everything I've tasted there is delicious, and also because you order two or three small dishes and taste lots of other things and therefore you don't have much opportunity to worry about what you're missing. The dishes are not tapas, really--I'm not sure what anxiety it is that we're assuaging when we name anything that comes in a small portion "tapas"--but tasting dishes, and although I've heard that people leave Lark still hungry, that was not the case for me. I was, however, dining with two of the people I'm most comfortable with in the world, so invasive forks and bread dipped in a dish across the table were not occasions for embarrassment, but glee. When we were finished with dinner, our tablecloth looked like some other kind of art--a painting soaked right into canvas, with drips of fat and sauce and sprinkled with crumbs and trails of soup. And, with three dishes each, we were all quite stuffed.

Lark's food is also not particularly fancy. I looked around the table at one point and realized that everything we were eating was a better version of something I make at home, and with better ingredients. There were roasted beets in a salad with frisée, unbelievably pungent blue cheese, and walnut oil ($8); there were hedgehog and black trumpet mushrooms sautéed until crazily tender ($12); there were steamed clams with chistorra sausage ($9) and some broth that was heavenly with bread dunked into it.

The menu radiates both intelligence about excellent classic combinations--I love, for example, radishes and butter, and had a thrilling plate of them with Bayonne ham ($9), although the salt I asked for (to my mind, the necessary third element of the combination) never materialized--and innovation. A plate of fluke carpaccio ($10) was sprinkled with spices that you wouldn't think to put on raw fish--cardamom, I think, was among them--and accompanied by a little parsley salad with preserved lemon, an unexpected meeting of sashimi and Morocco, highly interesting and delicious. In some dishes, it's the range of flavors that excites, such as a fish called rouget, lightly fried and served with tapenade, fennel, and white-bean purée ($13); or a pan-roasted piece of elk with chestnuts, potatoes, and huckleberries ($15), a spectrum of flavors that makes perfect sense in an ascending order from rich to sweet.

What else? What not else? A tagine of tender lamb with yogurt and couscous ($14); a gloriously fatty piece of pork belly ($11), with gloriously fatty sauce we kept dipping dark cherry-studded bread into; creamy cauliflower soup drizzled with argan oil ($6) that tastes like almonds and gave unbelievable depth to a vegetable I've never thought much about; a homey pile of halibut cheeks (on a previous visit) served with grits and bacon. And for dessert, a pineapple tarte Tatin ($6), encased in a kind of thin toffee crust, with caramel sauce, was exactly Lark: not quite what you expect, and perfect.