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Proprietor Tim Love, from Fort Worth, Texas, made a considerable reputation back home serving exotic ingredients (buffalo corn dogs, kangaroo carpaccio) with an enthusiastic, down-home flourish. In the big city, however, Mr. Love’s openhearted Texas exuberance seems goofy and a little off-key. Let’s begin with the cheerless, threadbare room, which is long and windowless and painted brown, like a basement bar in some two-bit college town. A pair of skinny, scraggly cacti frame the doorway, and a tattered-looking steer skin has been spread, perversely, on the sidewalk, to usher people in off the street. The only noticeable decorations inside are antic paintings of monster-size hats and cowboy boots, and the lighting is so dim you have to hold up candles to see your food, like miners in a cave. Mr. Love is also a steak aficionado, and the beef he serves (good New York strip, a mammoth bone-in double-rib cut called the “Tomahawk Chop”) is expertly chosen and well aged. Most of the other cooking is a mess. The Boursin-stuffed kangaroo carpaccio comes to the table in bedraggled slivers, on stale blue-corn tortilla chips. My rabbit empanada was fine, though I couldn’t tell you whether the meat inside was rabbit or chicken or some errant lizard flattened by a truck outside Waco. The flan (doused with an orange liqueur called Tuaca) would be this critic’s hesitant choice among the meager selection of desserts, although the chocolate cake isn’t bad, provided you like your chocolate cake spiked with Texas-size amounts of ancho chile. — Adam Platt

Tim Love has his own line of fine wines, which may be why the list is well chosen and interesting for such a modest-size joint.

Rabbit empanadas, New York strip steak or "Tomahawk Chop,” Tuaca flan.

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