Let’s get the bad news out of the way at the beginning: odds are that you will wait for a table at David Bouley’s miniature bistro, Upstairs. The restaurant does not accept reservations, and its dining room only seats a few dozen diners at a time, which means that more than likely, you’ll spend time wandering around in the Bouley Bakery downstairs with a glass of wine. Of course, there are many worse ways to spend half an hour. The other piece of bad news is that we hear through the grapevine that David Bouley has been spending less time cooking at Upstairs than he did just a few months ago–on our most recent visit last week, he was not in the kitchen, and the staffers in the bakery told us that they hadn’t seen him cooking on site for at least a week. But if getting a bargain peek at Mr. Bouley is your only motivation for dining at Bouley, you’re missing the point; the restaurant is superb, with or without Mr. Bouley manning the saucepans.

The menu might seem a little Sybil-esque, fractured as it is into Japanese and French sections that bear little relationship to one another, but this is more an endearing quirk than a problem–the dishes all somehow manage to work well with one another, even if the mechanism behind this alchemy is unclear. Then again, it is very easy to order from one cuisine stream and just avoid the other, as HungryMan and I did on Wednesday. We chose French mostly because of the chicken liver appetizer–two toasted slices of walnut bread, topped with a few spoonfuls of very earthy and tender liver morsels that tasted strongly of rosemary and the cognac that they were sautéed in just seconds before. Better still, this dish smelled as good as it tasted, prompting the diners at the next (a little too nearby) table to beckon the waiter and change their own dinner order. I don’t blame them a bit.

My own starter, the a la plancha calamari salad, was nearly as good, featuring diced avocado, tomato, mixed greens, and a pesto-like vinaigrette. The calamari was excellent: very lightly golden and still delicate and barely cooked through, precisely the way it ought to be. All of these ingredients were piled together in a bowl of Bibb lettuce, which I really thought ought to have been included as a primary ingredient in the salad, as I suspect that some diners mistake it for a garnish and leave it behind.

For my main, I chose the now-legendary halibut that has become the restaurant’s signature dish. Composed of a thick slab of poached halibut atop a very buttery foundation of tiny shiitake mushrooms, peas, fresh corn, and a lemon-thyme sauce, this dish would have been a success even had the fish itself not been sauced. But it was, it was… . Twice. The green pesto stripe was lovely, but the truffled sauce that freckled the surface of the fish was just magnificent, tasting pungent and nearly sweet at once, with a subtle, inexplicable aroma of allspice. This dish is quite simply the best halibut I have eaten in New York City, bar none.

HungryMan’s lamb chop, served with a generous hunk of lushly soft grilled eggplant, mint and zucchini purée, and sherry vinegar was also very good, if a little too rare. The portion size was more than adequate, barely leaving him enough room for one compulsory dessert– and really, with Bouley Bakery just a flight of stairs away, how could we not have ordered at least one item from the dessert menu?

So we chose the dacquoise, which arrived looking like no other dacquoise we’d seen. This one seemed to be more of a custard tart, rather than a multi-layered meringue affair, which is what we expected. While we both really enjoyed the inventive addition of passion fruit to the dessert, the whole thing left us a little disappointed, and we both wished we’d ordered one of the pastries from the case downstairs. In comparison with the stellar quality of the rest of the meal, the dacquoise couldn’t compare. I even found that the remnants of my glass of verdicchio made a splendid match with the dacquoise dessert–not what I would have expected from a dry white wine. And in the end, this echoes our lingering impression of Bouley Upstairs: it did not conform at all to our predictions, but it was lovely despite, or perhaps because of this– no matter who’s in the kitchen.

Bouley Upstairs, 130 West Broadway, 212-608-5829