Table 8 at the Cooper Square Hotel

Espresso mousse with candied kumquats

Photograph: Roxana Marroquin

Californian Govind Armstrong, a Spago veteran well known for his matinee-idol looks—he made People’s 50 Most Beautiful list in 2004—slipped into town recently with a surprising dearth of media hype. The second outpost of his Table 8 brand—the others are in Miami Beach and Los Angeles—commits so many sins against good taste, the West Coast star may have been hoping critics would somehow overlook his arrival.

His New York venture is certainly attractive enough—the midcentury-modern earth-toned dining room bleeds into an idyllic garden tucked into the frosted-glass tower of the Cooper Square Hotel. But beneath the cosmopolitan surface, this place is about as au courant as sun-dried tomatoes and white truffle oil.

Our waitress one night gushed over Table 8’s “very unique” Salt Bar, serving small, shareable prestarter nibbles of crudo and charcuterie—as if cured meat and raw fish were cutting-edge innovations. A cook armed with a shiny Berkel slicer mans the station, serving Iberian ham and rabbit sausage, along with a few more unusual snacks. The foie gras terrine—a tiny portion at a tiny price ($5)—comes topped with cocoa nibs, with a grapefruit wedge and limp rye bread on the side. The misfit combination—the silky foie clashed disastrously with its accompaniments—made me question not Armstrong’s worldliness but his sanity.

The restaurant embraces one irksome trend, offering so many extra menu categories—between the Salt Bar, “flatbreads” and “small accent” sides—you can’t help but order far too much food. Those flatbreads—intended as snacks for the table—are delivered in room-temperature slices (three to an order, $4). The mushroom version, with dabs of goat cheese on limp, mealy dough, was about as appealing as bad day-old pizza. And that sprawling menu is way out of sync with summer. Even as bikini weather blazed in, Table 8’s food remained heavy and rich. Moderately succulent, semiboneless quail with chanterelle mushrooms—the only starter I tried at all worth recommending—was doused in an intense and thick Italian-style sweet-and-sour sauce. Underseasoned sweetbreads, in another weighty dish, sat atop gluey hand-torn pasta and a leaden morel-and-chopped-veggie ragù. Burrata with white asparagus and truffled aioli was simply a head-scratcher—though the cheese was suitably unctuous, pairing creamy cheese with a creamy sauce is simply not a good idea. This oddball combination—one of many I tried—would surely get the chef booted were he competing on Top Chef.

Entrées, meanwhile, were often so busy, they seemed like two or three dishes melded onto a single plate. One, described by the waitress as an Armstrong classic, featured grill-marked chicken atop short-rib hash with sad, wilted arugula—a messy heap of cumbersome food that simply had no business being together. Another, featuring an oversauced, undercrisped snapper fillet with potatoes, frisée and a few scraps of lobster, was not much more enticing.

Desserts were a welcome departure from the muddled food they followed. Pastry chef Theodore Kanellopoulos, formerly of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, seems to be cooking at an entirely different restaurant. His sweets—a fine, crumbly apricot-almond tart with salted caramel ice cream, warm pillowy beignets topped with earthy Greek honey, a creamy pillar of semifrozen espresso mousse with candied kumquat nuggets—were simple, homey and delicious. Though his name isn’t recognizable (yet), Kanellopoulos turns out to be the real star chef of this show.

Cheat sheet

Drink this: The reasonable wine list (with several bottles under $50) covers a great deal of territory. While many of the selections are fairly run-of-the-mill, spending a little extra will get you a more offbeat bottle, like the 2006 Petit Ruche Crozes-Hermitage ($58), a nice food-friendly white from the Rhône.

Eat this: Quail with chanterelles, apricot-almond tart, espresso parfait

Sit here: The dining room’s acoustics are miserable and the clientele often boisterous. For a less deafening meal, the best seats are in the verdant garden through the glass doors.

Conversation piece: Govind Armstrong, who has been a Top Chef judge and an Iron Chef contestant, grew up around celebrity chefs. He landed his first kitchen gig at 13 as an apprentice to Wolfgang Puck at Spago, where he peeled carrots and potatoes.

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