This sea monster remains a little unwieldy

The lusca is the mythical gigantic octopus of the Caribbean — the one that surfaces from the deep, its saucer eyes menacing and tentacles akimbo, and envelops whole galleons, pulling them down to the realm of the unfathomable.

As such, Lusca becomes the perfect cephalopod-themed name for the sophomore effort from Nhan Le and Angus Brown, the team behind the late-night East Atlanta sensation, Octopus Bar. That restaurant, which cranks up at 10 p.m. on the patio of Le’s noodle shop, So Ba, has for years been a magnet for restaurant industry folk as well as visiting food royalty, such as Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern. Brown has shown himself a canny interpreter of the food zeitgeist, a chef who can use ingredients as diverse as sea urchin and rabbit to make dishes that evince culinary edge but still taste heartily delicious.

Lusca, located in the Brookwood Hills space that used to be a mediocre sushi bar (and several mediocre restaurants before that), aims not so much higher than Octopus than broader. Here, we have a full-service restaurant that opens its doors at 5:30 p.m. to a sparely pretty dining room with spit-shine wooden floors. Two gigantic octopuses loom from wall murals — one over the raw bar and one over the drinks bar — but the demeanor inside feels more tame, that of an expensive destination for gastronomes. The diverse crowd here dresses well, and they click their heels with purpose as they march across the floor to their tables, turning heads. Older couples on double dates come early, and then the room grows younger and drinkier throughout the night.

I applaud Lusca for the fresh voice and much needed excitement its eclectic menu brings to Atlanta at a fallow time for new restaurants, a time when all of the online dining “hot” lists compiled by the likes of Zagat and Eater read more like “hot or not.” But I have also found it to be a place of uneven charms. My first meal was mostly appealing despite spotty service and timing issues. On the second visit, the dishes we ordered came off more like cool ideas than tasty creations. Each new flavor added more intellectual intrigue than gut satisfaction.

Le and Brown are joined here by a third partner, Jonathan Sellitto, who butchers and dry-ages all the meats in house. He prepares such diverse charcuterie as ferociously pungent rabbit liver pate with mustard seeds and textbook coppa, each sliver of this cured pork ideally glossy and garlicky. I have yet to try Sellitto’s signature dry-aged bone-in New York strip for two, but those two looming sea monsters put me in the mood for fish.

Here’s my early advice: Order a slice of pain au levain bread smeared liberally with chunky avocado and lavished with rock crab and snips of scallion. Then don’t miss the great dish Brown imported from Octopus Bar, his tangle of hand-cut pappardelle pasta tossed with lobes of sea urchin, melty bits of pancetta and lemon. This bowl of noodles is a place where sea funk and pork fat express something akin to concupiscence.

Le and his crew oversee the L-shaped raw bar, lined with boutique oysters along one side and fish for sushi along the other. Thumbs up for the exotic selection, which includes such Tokyo market treasures as sayori (half beak), kinmedai (golden eye snapper) and isaki (threeline grunt).

Thumbs down for the weird lack of true sushi bar presence. One night I sat at the bar to wait for a friend because no tables were still open to walk-in customers. The nice but insistent fellow behind it kept trying to push me on oysters or sushi, when all I wanted was a drink. But my friend was late and I was hungry, so I relented. He delivered lickety-split a couple of clunky, oversized pieces of sushi and then disappeared. I had to chase him down first for chopsticks, then soy sauce, then a dish to put the soy sauce in. And where was my beer? I had to do the “man holding invisible semaphore” maneuver to attract the waiter’s attention.

I find that the various pieces of this trim menu don’t coalesce into an easy-to-navigate meal. Two silver dollar toasts heaped with orange trout roe and set on a smear of crème fraîche seem like party canapés, and you may wince at the $14 price tag. Ditto the three bouncy pasta bundles stuffed with rabbit and mortadella, though they come in a bowl of the most remarkable consomme, edged with woodsy shiitake mushroom and plumbed with a depth of flavor that only the lusca could imagine.

A crepinette of coarse ground veal in a reduction sauce looked and tasted very much like an upscale version of Salisbury steak. (It’s a nice touch with crepinette when you can see the outline of the lacy caul fat that holds the insides together.) But I enjoyed the way this dish matched with my glass of Merieau gamay, a medium-bodied red wine from the terrific list of food-friendly wines. In fact, every drop of booze I’ve had at Lusca has been a meal highlight, from the draught Birrificio del Ducato Baciami, a sour beer from Italy, to the cocktail called La Peligrosa, a tequila concoction with white port, lemon and ginger.

The menu changes weekly at Lusca, which contributes to that not-quite-jelled quality of the kitchen’s efforts. But I still have high hopes for Brown and company, smart guys all with welcome ideas about dining. I think a few more surefire hits and clearer focus would go a long way toward showing Atlantans why we need this forward-thinking restaurant now.