Riding around Lake Washington on a cartoonish tropical island, SuttonBeresCuller proved that they can pull stunts and puncture the high seriousness of classic performance art with the best of them, but I like it better when they're not smirking. Of all their trompe l'oeil installations, their newest, Three Dragon Restaurant, is the most atmospheric and multidimensional. And it communicates the generousness and humility that distinguishes John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler, a trait that mutated into something glib in some of their staged photographs, too many of which show the guys mugging for the camera in costumes.

Three Dragon Restaurant happened in stages whose significance I still don't fully understand. Inside the big, beautiful main room of the new gallery Lawrimore Project—SuttonBeresCuller also served as Scott Lawrimore's construction crew—the trio built yet another structure: an enormous plywood box containing the raw materials for a surprise installation the artists would make during gallery hours for three weeks. (They reversed the trick by leaving another spacious room virtually empty.) Then, for a packed crowd on July 15, they ritualistically lowered the four walls of the box to rest on the outer walls of the gallery and unveiled Three Dragon Restaurant. The leftover box walls stood like opened wrapping for several days, and then were removed because the artists needed them for a Bumbershoot project. All this seems to me a mix of the meaningful and the merely logistical.

But what stands in the gallery now is intentional, and it demonstrates what the threesome excel at: As in their 2003 retrospective at Consolidated Works, which included a basketball spot-lit under a hoop, they invite us into recognizable situations where the rules have shifted. This one just happens to be extremely elaborate—it's a detailed replica of a Chinese restaurant where ducks are strung up in the window, a plein-air homage to the International District, the neighborhood where the men have spent so much time these seven months.

A functioning walk/don't walk sign is the first clue that this is not a fixed moment in time, as were the socially critical tableaux of Edward Kienholz; this is unfolding. We stealthily circumscribe the restaurant, not quite a place and not quite a sculpture, to examine the smoke-emitting pipe on one side that is staining the terra cotta wall with soot, or to linger in the back alley with the cigarette butts and feel the breeze of the air conditioner. Going through its front door, we don't clamor to be served, though the tables are set and the menu extensive. We know from the air of abandonment here that "Please Wait to Be Seated" is a Godot-like proposition.

Then again, the artists don't necessarily intend the nourishment of the piece to be limited to its majestic materialism. Sutton suggested that I have lunch there, and I asked him whether I could, but he didn't know for sure. I might be able to, or I might not.

jgraves@thestranger.com