Is Kansas Town the Macaluso’s successor that’s finally built to last?

When artist Mike Bechtel told me, back in October, that he was planning to call his new restaurant Kansas Town, I cringed. Was he opening near the National Agricultural Hall of Fame and costuming the servers in floor-length gingham gowns?

Bechtel patiently withstood my skepticism and explained the vision informing his new bistro on 39th Street, in the former Macaluso’s location. It would be a sophisticated showcase for visual art (with several of his own paintings on the walls), with a menu designed to put “a new spin on comfort food.”

Uh oh.

Comfort food has, by now, been spun around by so many chefs and with such intensity that it should have rotated off its axis and pulsated off toward some other galaxy. There’s only so much you can do with fried chicken — which, yes, is on the Kansas Town menu, replete with biscuit. But I have to tell you, it’s an attractive creation. And better yet, perhaps, I don’t find it all that comforting. The coaster-size chicken breast I sampled came perched on a biscuit whose density was closer to that of a scone, complemented by a mere smattering of artfully sliced root vegetables. Also: red-eye au jus.

If that sounds a little dainty, it should. None of the creations exiting chef Garrett Kasper’s tiny kitchen are very large. Dinner has what’s billed as a small-plates menu, but not everything is easy to share. In fact, some of Kasper’s innovations are best enjoyed selfishly, without making eye contact with anyone who happens to be at your table. And if you find something that compels you to wolf it down fast, order two; the menu changes frequently — “sometimes weekly, sometimes daily,” Bechtel says.

On my first two visits to Kansas Town, I noted subtle differences in dishes I tasted more than once. Gauging these differences requires asking the servers many questions because the single-page menu is mostly a list of ingredients. The servers do a good job of explaining how these featured ingredients will be assembled. But even the best-trained staffer would have trouble deconstructing this menu description: “Foie gras: chocolate, cherry, pineapple, beignet.” That sounded unfathomable to me, but what showed up on my plate was beautiful: a silky square of duck-liver panna cotta.

“Chef Kasper prepared it with white chocolate,” the server said, at last unlocking the mystery. Accessorized with a scrim of pineapple purée and served with chewy, cold fried dumplings passing themselves off as beignets, the dish would have made an unexpected dessert. As a starter, it was, let’s say, flamboyant.

A small tart, made with slices of purple beets, was both savory and sweet, and a delicious counterpoint to the more complicated spices on a flatbread that had a crispy crust on my first visit but turned pushily puffy on my second. This dish was prepared banh mi–style, with exceptionally delicious braised pork, chopped vegetables and chicken-liver pâté — an honest pâté this time.

It takes a lot of brass to charge 12 bucks for a bowl of soup, but Kasper’s creamy celery-root potage at least includes a little theater. It’s poured from a porcelain bottle at the table into a bowl with a single fried Brussels sprout and a dab of orange marmalade at the bottom. It’s a gorgeous winter dish, preposterously rich but something I’ll miss even when the weather finally warms. A bowl of this soup and Kasper’s rotating variations on risotto (delectably smooth and dappled with “mushroom textures” — chopped fungi, if we stop the poetical spinning for a second — when I first tried it) add up to a satisfying, albeit fattening, meal at a reasonable price.

There’s no question that Kasper, who was hired by Joe Shirley (who consulted with Bechtel at the restaurant’s inception and created its first menu), is an artist. His sense of design in combining flavors, colors and textures is in highly impressive evidence all over his menu, and he already has a masterpiece: a chicken roulade that rolls circles of moist chicken around a filling of house-made dark-meat chicken sausage. The dish appears poised for flight on a bed of tapioca-size pasta pearls, enrobed in a thick white sauce of Cojita, white cheddar and parmesan. (Yes, yes, that’s another comfort-food spin, this one on mac and cheese.)

The dessert list here isn’t obviously alluring — as I said, the menu is essentially a list of primary ingredients, and that approach doesn’t do sweets any favors. But Kasper’s cheesecake is a delightful discovery, completely unlike any I’ve ever sampled. (I’m not sure it is cheesecake, come to think of it.) I ordered it blind and was rewarded with two satiny cubes of melting fromage, not quite the consistency of ice cream, so deftly seasoned with maple and cayenne that the heat was unnoticeable for the first two bites (and addictive after that). A wee wedge of chocolate sponge cake, on the other hand, was too dry, its pistachio-basil paste more an art piece than a soothing finale.

Kansas Town could use a couple of extra staffers (two servers can’t really handle the dining room on a busy weekend night) and, maybe, a regular bartender. Bechtel was mixing cocktails himself one night, and he didn’t immediately catch on when my companion asked for a twist in his martini. But of all the restaurateurs who have followed the legendary Tommy Macaluso into this venue — and there have been at least six — Bechtel, I think, has the strongest chance of success. Kansas Town is a bit self-conscious in its sensibilities, but it also conveys a palpable joie de vivre.

I still hate the name, though.