During the many years this building housed Boston’s police headquarters, I managed to avoid dining in the basement, where the holding cells might have been. (As a reporter, I once had a cup of coffee with detectives on one of the higher floors.) Now the Irish-owned Jurys Hotel chain has removed all vestiges of the former cop shop, except for a small exhibit of Victorian-era Boston-police memorabilia and the name of its bar, Cuffs. One walks past these things, and through the loud bar, to the Stanhope Grille, a relatively quiet 65-seat oasis awash in 1950s autumnal colors and low light. Chef Matthew King’s food is also somewhat out of the ’50s, but in one of the best possible ways: plainly presented protein with elaborate potato variations. There is some Irishness to the food, probably more at breakfast, but not a doughnut in the house.

We begin with a basket of rolled-dough rolls and a pour of fruity olive oil, or you could use the chive butter. The mushroom-salad appetizer ($10) is actually a pair of fried pockets of mushroom and cream cheese, like mushroom Rangoons. The salad part is field greens wrapped in a thin strip of cucumber. The "winter chopped salad" ($9) is a seasonally colored mix of romaine, red dressing, cranberries sweet as lingonberries, slices of pear, and walnuts.

Steamed mussels ($8) were plump and orange, not piping hot, but spicy from both the tomato-wine broth and dribbles of hot-pepper mayonnaise (well, the menu calls it "rouillie," which ought to be rouille). A nice toast, like bruschetta, picked up some sauce, and we spooned up the rest with mussel shells. Smoked-corn-and-snow-crab chowder ($8), with its creative ingredients, was our most unconventional appetizer. The taste is a medley of classic chowder flavors: cream touched with shellfish and smoke, with lumps of potato and kernels of corn. Another nice twist is pumpkin-seed-crusted sea scallops ($13), not amazing shellfish, but very good, with contrasting crust and a side salad of shaved fennel and seaweed.

You might order entrées to get the different potatoes, as they often steal the platter. The rack of lamb ($33) brought two double baby-lamb chops impeccably rare to order. And the sautéed baby vegetables, including asparagus tied with chives, were fun, but the bacon-flavored potato does linger in the memory. So do the blue-cheese potato croquettes on the dry-aged New York strip steak ($36), although here the superior beef was also something to savor, and there were lots more baby vegetables, including pattypan and zucchini squash, carrots, and onions, in lots of meat-glaze sauce.

The chef also knows pasta, judging by the braised-veal tagliatelle ($12/half; $24/whole), an Italian (modest) portion of perfect pasta ribbons dressed with wild mushrooms (and black trumpets at that) and some fairly fatty veal-breast cuts. Pan-seared monkfish ($24) is seared in what I am learning is the special Irish sense of the word, meaning sautéed, to make it as light as cod, and served in an oversize bowl of chopped clam chowder, accompanied by some littlenecks in the shell.

The wine list is international and decent. Our bottle of 2001 Mattei barbera ($7/glass; $24/bottle) was exactly what I wanted from the secondary grape of the Italian Piedmont, a table red that begins with light cherry fruit and finishes with some astringency, the better to set off steak and lamb.

Desserts are relatively weak, except for the peach Bellini sorbet in a sugar-frosted martini glass ($8), which reaches the complexity of a strawberry flavor with peach and perhaps some Asti Spumante. The frosted fruit tart ($8) is beautifully made but rests on a heavy cookie crust, and the wild blueberries taste frozen. I don’t mean that they were frozen (although it is December, folks), but the taste was like eating berries out of the freezer. Warm chocolate-fondant cake ($8) is the usual of its kind (which I usually like a great deal), but the ice cream doesn’t taste much of the menu-promised Bailey’s Irish Cream. Similarly, white-chocolate bread pudding ($8) is terrific if you forget about the white-chocolate part and just pour the caramel sauce over it. Decaf ($3), tea ($3), and espresso ($3.50) were all fine, but served after the desserts rather than before, the only service lapse of our evening.

One of the great things about hotel restaurants is that they keep the classic dishes alive; another is that they are responsive, even to local restaurant critics. A number of the details of our meal had been modified for the better from descriptions in published reviews. Chef King is very visible in the dining room, and the open-kitchen format allows him to go over and adjust plates in full view. I’m not sure I really want to know about this, but it’s certainly in the spirit of open kitchens.

Open kitchens are also loud, although this one is open only above the shoulders, so not so loud. Early in our evening the noise mostly reflected a muted hubbub from the bar next door. As the Stanhope Grille fills up, it gets loud enough to drown out its own soundtrack, which might have been torch singers of the 1920s and 1930s. That would go with the hotel’s packages involving the MFA’s Art Deco exhibit. The dining room has some Art Deco touches built in, and the bar has a painting in the style of Art Deco illustrator Tamara de Lempicka, featured in the MFA show.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.