Tea Tray in the Sky has evolved from teas and pastries in two locations to a full-scale bistro in one. The selection and service of teas is spectacular, but the food of executive chef William Flumerfelt is brilliantly understated and highly flavored. Flumerfelt’s entrées remind me strongly of the early menus by Evan Deluty at Torch, except that Flumerfelt seems to have perfect pitch for seasoning. He underlines this by having neither salt nor pepper on tables.

We begin at some risk, with a basket of focaccia cut into diamonds. This focaccia is oily, like most, but also quite sweet, as though someone is still thinking tea cakes and tea parties. Truly excellent fruity virgin olive oil saves the day. Water is poured from glass tea pots, which is fun.

Our best appetizer was roasted-sweet-potato soup ($7), which was almost hot, despite being served in a fashionably huge bowl only three-eighths of an inch deep. Got to heat up that bowl, boys, if you want to honor both fashion and the soup. The attraction of the big bowl is that it’s a larger canvas for decorations, here crème fraîche and apple butter knifed into patterns like the top of a French cake. I also liked the pizzetta ($9), a blend of salty pancetta bits, shallots, hints of tomato, and a little melted mozzarella. It’s supposed to be smoked mozzarella, but since pancetta is unsmoked bacon, it averages out to a nice crispy pizza with an undertone of bacon. The mixed-green salad ($7, $9 with blue cheese) is a good job, but the fennel salad with white beans ($9) had too little shaved fennel, undercooked white beans, and nothing to tie it together (dressing? herbs? nuts?).

You might even go directly to entrées, since they’re all superb. Honey-tea-brined chicken breast with mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables ($18) has more flavor of brine than tea, but the brine plumps and seasons the boned breast meat wonderfully. There are no seasonal vegetables in February, but sautéed baby greenhouse carrots, beets, and mushrooms made a terrific pretense, and the mashed potatoes were among the best I’ve had in years.

The only thing better than those mashed potatoes is the parmesan polenta under the " Lapsang Souchong tea braised lamb shank " ($20). Again, I couldn’t catch the flavor of tea, even the smoky Lapsang Souchong, in the highly flavored lamb shank, but I didn’t care at all. And if that wasn’t enough taste, there was half a head of roast garlic to apply as necessary, and some sun-dried tomatoes, too.

Another great starch is the celery-root purée under the seared sea scallops ($24). Usually celery-root purée is too flagrant, but this is silky and just hinting at celery flavor. The eight smallish sea scallops are highly flavored and neatly seared. I also loved the " melted leeks, " which were more frizzled, crunchy, and bacon-flavored than melted.

Grilled salmon ($20) was a wonderful piece of fish (though I still prefer it steamed or poached), falling short only in the underlying puy lentils, which do hold their shape, but need more flavor, and should have come to the table hotter. " Heirloom radishes, " which I first encountered on the menu at Spire, are not going to work for me until the chefs find a way to display them. Sliced thinly into a salad or pickle, as they are here and at Spire, they just taste like any other radishes. " Heirloom tomatoes " have wonderful flavor. " Heirloom beets " have interesting colors and even stripes. What do heirloom radishes have? I think the black ones are distinctive when sliced and fanned out with olive oil and sea salt. The rest should probably be un-sliced to show how they look. In France, they are served with a little stem, butter, and salt.

The wine list at Tea Tray is quite good, with multiple choices in the $20s on popular varietals like shiraz and merlot. The 2000 Salena Estate shiraz ($26) has a lot of definition and flavor for the price, while the Lurton merlot ($25) is the Bordeaux version, which is softer and less intense than one I remember from the same maker from Pays d’Oc. But next time, I'll have the excellent Montes merlot from Chile.

The real news, of course, is the tea list, a loose-leaf book with what must be a dozen oolongs alone, three choices of the rare black teas of Yunnan, a garland of Darjeelings, and many other daydreams for us tea lovers. Teas are far more variable than coffees, but even very rare ones are not expensive by the cup. We finally settled on a pot of Tung Ting oolong ($7.75 for about five cups). This is a delicate tea, made to the color of champagne in a glass pot, with so much flowery aroma it’s like jasmine tea without the specific focus of the jasmine.

Desserts are worthy of the tea, with perhaps the outstanding current choice being " Banyuls poached pears with a bittersweet chocolate torte " ($8). Banyuls is a port-like dessert wine that is thought to complement chocolate, but here the dark-purple poached Seckel pear and the concentrated-chocolate layered torte don’t do much for each other. It’s just that each one is great by itself. Chocolate beignets with cardamom ice cream and chocolate sauce ($8) is good in the same way, featuring quite spicy ice cream and four balls of chocolate, each with a thin, fried shell. Caramel-mango tart ($8) is hard to slice but easy to like; the mango is a candied dome on top, the interior is eggy puffed stuff, and the shell is crispy.

Tea Tray in the Sky is a beautiful café, but perhaps too loud and dark for dinners so good you want to linger. On a full-up weekend night there were lapses in service, a shortage of red-wine glasses (where the plentiful white-wine glasses would have been more suitable than the water goblets we used), and a breakdown in the credit-card computer that distracted our waiter from ever coming back with my receipt.

The name of the restaurant comes from Alice in Wonderland, and so does the décor, featuring Magritte-influenced paintings of tea-party-like subjects by Julian Landa. The café has a random pattern of ceiling panels in either red or Magritte-cloudy sky, and unusual lighting (which doesn’t quite illuminate the menus for middle-aged-plus customers). There are displays of old editions of Alice, and many unusual tea pots. Perhaps more could be done with the numbered silver canisters that are the " tea cellars. " Of course, lots of people just go for tea and pastries, and there is coffee, which might be very good, but I’ll never know.

After publication of this review of Tea Tray in the Sky, Robert Nadeau was informed that the restaurant will be closing on March 24 and reopening in late April as Solstice. Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com