In a city of exuberant excess, the campus surrounding the Menil Collection has always been an anomalous island of serene good taste. Dreamy live oaks. Manicured lawns. Sleek modern public structures interspersed by huge contemporary sculptures and vintage bungalows painted a uniform sober earth-gray.

I've always thought of these Montrose blocks as Menil World, a land apart. Here the pared modern vision of the late John and Dominique de Menil flourishes ever so quietly around the Renzo Piano-designed museum they endowed, now an international tourist attraction. Recommended Video

Houstonians and visitors populated this landscape and used it. They lazed and Frisbee'd on the lawns, held book festivals on the museum terraces, browsed in the Menil bookstore across from the museum. But until last fall, when Bistro Menil opened a hop from the bookstore, there was nowhere to eat and drink and watch this rarefied world go by.

Now, in a sleek contemporary structure by Houston architects Stern & Bucek, there is. By day, Bistro Menil beckons with a lovely dining deck and a gravel forecourt brushed as carefully as a Zen garden, beckoning the visitor past the looming red steel of Jim Love's playful Jack sculpture. By night, the interior glows in shades of green and ivory behind a glass and steel grid, the bar counter and its patrons silhouetted in a modern version of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

Inside, it's a scene: as raucous and jumpy as the look is tranquil, which creates an odd sort of fizzy tension in the room. This is where you'll see that prominent architect whose name is on the tip of your tongue; or that grizzled artist whose career has faltered, scowling to himself at a table for one. At noon, this is Tony's for museum ladies who lunch. Midafternoon may bring a tall, fashionable sylph who looks like a latter-day Queen of Sheba.

And speaking of royalty, isn't that Lynn Wyatt over there, dining with one of her sons?

They are all eating pretty well, for the most part, and drinking appealing wines out of pristine stemless glassware and having a good time checking each other out. It's fun here, even when the decibel level soars past the ability of the felted soft sculptures on the walls - surely the most tasteful sound baffles ever devised - to contain it.

Like faceted clouds, these billows were a last-minute addition, commissioned when the elegant hard planes of the room were found to be bouncing sound around way too efficiently. It's still loud when the dining rooms fill up, which is why I like sitting out on the deck in view of the giant red Jack, or coming in midafternoon, when the main dining room is filled with light and peace and one of those leafy green views too rare in Houston.

The continuous hours are just part of what makes it such a marvelous amenity for the city. As a restaurant, it could be better and more consistent. As a hangout with lots going for it, it follows a welcome trend of restaurants that don't close between lunch and dinner: Amalfi, Tout Suite and Weights & Measures among them.

Midafternoon at Bistro Menil is also when the style of eating I like most here applies: It's great for leisurely snacking with a glass of wine or getting a bite to eat. There are plenty of full-fledged entrees on the menus, but on my visits, the highlights were at the margins of the menu, in the tapas-style dishes inspired by Spain and southern France that seem closest to chef Greg Martin's heart.

Case in point: the eggplant fries, crunchy batons with soft centers that are irresistible when dunked into the gentle anchovy aioli that comes with them. Think you don't do anchovies? Try this.

I love the salty swagger of Martin's pizza topped with Spanish ham and Manchego cheese, with a deft base of red-peppery salsa to set it off.

A couple of dishes I admired from the opening menu are gone now, but the puffed foccacia oblong topped with white anchovies and parsley was the sort of thing I dream of savoring with a glass of white wine. So was the interesting cannellini bean and fennel dip, a subtle paste to scoop up with flatbread and olives.

Why are they gone? My guess is that Bistro Menil is tilting to the side of caution, which surprises me. There's a sophisticated audience, if not a particularly young one. I'd think they could roll with the likes of fennel and white beans and anchovies. Conservatism is the order of the day on much of the menu, especially among entrees.

There's soy-glazed seared tuna and crab cakes, green peppercorn steak and roast salmon with horseradish dill sauce. Snapper Costa Brava comes with roasted artichokes, tomato and the ur-Houston topping of lump crab. It's perfectly agreeable without being memorable.

An ambitious-sounding chicken ballotine rolled up with wild mushroom duxelles came off on the disjointed, dryish side one evening, but the flavors were there, and with on-point execution, it would have been a good dish. It, too, has left the menu.

Still in place are beautifully seared sea scallops with a lilting beurre blanc, shiny little pearls of caviar adding sparks of briny uplift. And a crisp duck confit plate with clever, edgy pink peppercorn butter might have been magnificent, if only the duck had not been so salty.

Sometimes the kitchen seems out of sync with the chef, who cut his teeth at Cafe Annie and went on to run Cafe Express for the Del Grande combine. A promising salad of cold zucchini with Parmesan, lemon and olive oil might arrive with so much crumbled pancetta on top that the gentle squash flavor is utterly trounced. Beautifully accessorized duck rillettes might turn out to have had the minced texture of potted meat rather than the kind of shreds you can sink your teeth into.

Or a fetching-sounding foccacia spangled with mascarpone cheese, caramelized onion, pancetta and crème fraîche might come to the table, as mine did recently, so tough it was difficult to eat, and showered with more pancetta than was wise. Again, a dish I might love to eat in these surroundings in slightly better circumstances - perhaps with one of the food-friendly Trimbach Alsatian whites on the list or one of three delightful rosés Martin has picked out for spring, each with its own distinct tint and character.

Where the pancetta works is at brunch on weekends, in the form of a pancetta and frizzly fried egg sandwich on brioche, glossed with a tart-edged buerre blanc that puts the dish over the top. If there is a better, more luxurious brunch dish in town, I'd like to see it.

Soft-scrambled Eggs Julia with crème fraîche and caviar are a gentle pleasure at brunch, too. They're named after Julia Child, who dictated the ingredients to Martin once upon a time while they worked on a charity event and she needed refueling.

Eggs Julia and that pancetta egg sandwich call for bubbles, if for no other reason than to enjoy Bistro Menil's exquisite champagne service. From the angled, silvery bucket to the thin-lipped glass coupes, the service pieces elevate the experience, whether it's a classic $128 bottle of Ruinart or a $47 Crémant from Alsace, always one of my favorite wine regions.

Kudos to Martin and company for their local tap beers and their cask-wine program, as well as their wine service by the quarter, half or full carafe of a select group of featured wines. Rather astonishingly, you can actually take your beverage outside onto the lawns of Menil World, as long as you pay a reasonable small deposit on the glassware. Nice.

Service is earnest and cordial, if occasionally disorganized in timing, One night I was startled to see two entrees bearing down on my tiny table while much of the two first courses remained to be eaten. Awkward, to say the least. But good cheer counts for a lot in my book, and the staff has it.

A couple of knockout desserts always smooths any rough edges, too. My picks here are the bright, puckery-lemon curd tart with its architectural swirl of meringue; and a downy buttermilk cake with blackberries and crème fraîche that I can imagine taking new forms according to whatever fruits are in season. Like the refined bubble that is Menil World, it's a classic.