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In a business filled with random, elliptically named establishments (Ago, Elettaria, and Olana, to cite just a few), Bar Milano is one restaurant that looks almost exactly like its name sounds. Step inside the sleek two-room space, which opened in an innocuous gray building on lower Third Avenue, and you might actually think you’re in one of the more stylish precincts of Milan. Or if not Milan, exactly, then a well-imagined facsimile of the kind of casually elegant, darkly fashionable place—part upscale coffee bar, part first-class Alitalia dining lounge—found in many world capitals and frequented by Kate Moss groupies and crowds of pencil-thin gentlemen in Brioni suits. The café tables are set with packets of sugar like the ones you find in Italy. The bar serves shots of amaretto and grappa late into the night, and cups of espresso and macchiato in the morning. And if you wish to linger for a while over your coffee, you can even enjoy an egg-white frittata for breakfast.

This slick setup is the work of the young restaurateur Jason Denton and his brother, Joe, who have been operating successful, small-scale Italian joints in the city for several years now. The Dentons, who grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho, dreaming, presumably, of all the delicious foods they couldn’t eat, are responsible for New York’s toasted-panini craze (at ’ino) and were among the first restaurant pioneers to stake a claim on the Lower East Side (at ’inoteca). Bar Milano is their most ambitious, and conspicuously upscale, venture to date. To ensure success, they’ve recruited not one but two co-chefs (Steve Connaughton and Eric Kleinman, from Lupa and ’inoteca, respectively) and scoured Milan and the surrounding region for all sorts of stylistic touches. The wine display case is trimmed with dark wood and stocked with an impressive selection of boutique amarones and Barolos (there are over 400 bottles, all from Northern Italy), and the walls behind the bar and in the dining room are covered in panels of polished marble cut from quarries in Emilia-Romagna.

Is tonno e vitello, a dish of tuna and veal breast, a good substitute for a competent pasta Bolognese? Traditionalists may not think so, but I do. In fact, if you avoid the pastas almost entirely, it’s possible to have a sophisticated, even semi-Italian meal at Bar Milano. My generous portion of “carpaccio”—scallops with a helping of sea urchin—was flavored with a little too much lemon, but my friend the Octopus Snob gave his benediction to the tender polpo alla griglia, served with chopped bulbs of radicchio. This seems to be rabbit season at the trendier new Italian restaurants around town, and the very good rabbit terrine here is cut in thick, jellied slabs and mixed with a rustic combination of carrots, liver, and artichoke hearts. There are very nice fried oysters too (served with tasty little cabbage rolls stuffed with farro) and an excellent nouveau-Italian egg-roll creation called patata imbottita, which is made with a skin of shaved, crisp-fried potatoes filled with egg yolk and served with a creamy, hollandaise-like fonduta and a spoonful of caviar. — Adam Platt

The Northern Italian wines are excellent. And so is that lethal, absinthe-laced cocktail, the Corpse Reviver No. 2.

Patata imbottita, veal chop alla milanese, panettone crostata.

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