Quattro Gatti has the answer to Italian food downtown. The answer is no.

Quattro Gatti (Four Cats) opened in February, the offspring of a New York family restaurant with the same name, from which it seems to have inherited high prices and possibly its urban ... charm. It's a nice space, formal in a modest way, with wooden floors, antiqued yellow walls, white tablecloths and a big tile mosaic at the entry. But don't ask them about the food or the wine.

My colleagues on one night, they're food geeks. Chatty guys who've talked the whole dinner to death. So when dessert shows up, a pudding with mixed berries, they want to know what makes it kick. 'Is there like a liquor reduction in here?' one of them asks. Then the eye roll from the waitress. 'Oooagh. I'll go ask,' she says. She comes back. Yes, it's madeira or something. My buddies, and I'm not condoning this, they high-five each other. Her verbal response is unkind, punctuated by a shake of the head.

If you're curious about your food, best to keep it to yourself here.

Even the owner, working the room in a denim shirt and work boots, cut us short when we asked about the cream sauce with a dish called Pollo 4 Gatti, an anemic $21 plate of chicken rolled with asparagus, prosciutto and cheese. 'It's a cream sauce,' he said.

Back to our waitress. Things didn't start out so hot with her. We sit down, and right away she asks if we want wine, and we say yes, as soon as we figure out the food, and as soon as we get a wine list. Figuring out the food here means parsing through six pizzas, seven antipasti options, 14 meat dishes and 16 pastas. She'll come back. She does, three minutes later. 'Just me, still waiting,' she says. This happens again, not five minutes later. We are one of five tables in the half-full place.

The same waitress took away our pizza with a slice remaining, but left our dirty plates in place, then tried to bus my half-full wine glass. Our welcome, a welcome that had never really begun, had clearly expired.

In the meantime and with the guidance of an older Italian gent, we ordered gnocchi and ravioli, some veal Marsala, a roasted whole bass and some lamb chops. And finally, we ordered a bottle of red wine, a $34 Tuscan sangiovese from a wine list that doesn't list years. On another visit, we asked about wines by the glass. They're not listed, but the waitress seemed reluctant to tell us the labels and prices. We gave up.

And the hits kept on coming. The pizza station juts into the dining area, a showpiece of sorts with a wood-burning oven. We looked up to see the pizza maker punching out the dough for our pie, and he's wearing a tank top like it's a walk-up pizza place in New York. Except the pizza's not as good, and it's $17 for four slices. The crust was more like pita bread, crisp only at the edges, and the pizza with arugula, shaved Parmesan and prosciutto tasted like salted spring grass. 'Quattro Stagioni' pizza ($16) was only slightly better, but the undercooked crust couldn't support the payload of mushrooms, ham, olives and artichokes.

So pizza was a nonstarter. Pasta, maybe? It's not made in-house, we were told, but that's not a fatal flaw unless it's ravioli, which at $17 for a modest plate in whimpering tomato cream should taste better than the Costco bag in my freezer. We ordered the same ravioli on a second visit a few weeks later. Same result. I couldn't order the gnocchi again, though. Gummy potato dumplings in an acrid tomato ... I don't know, emulsion? Sauce would be an elevated term for it.

No better luck with $31 lollipop lamb chops in a tired rosemary cream sauce or the $28 veal Marsala in a sauce so sweet my teeth felt the phantom grit of undissolved sugar. My guest, who in another life conducted tours in Rome, said the veal reminded him of the third-tier restaurants near the Colosseum that catered to tourists.

In three tours of Quattro Gatti, I found two dishes I liked, one a well-roasted whole fish dressed lightly with olive and tomato ($28), the other a bowl of tender mussels ($12) that I ate without reservation, scooping the broth with the shells like lemony garlic soup, mopping it with dense house bread.

A weekday lunch on a sidewalk table took away some of the scratchy sting. The waiter stayed out of our hair, and we kept our questions to ourselves, because there's nothing complicated about a toasted panini sandwich - simple slices of sausage dressed with orange strips of roasted pepper, bright red tomatoes and leafy green lettuce on flattened bread with a little salad on the side for $9.