The Barrel Room 

I always wonder how much thought goes into being trendy. Nobody wants to be seen as mimicking what's popular — although people do just that, all the time — but there's a world of difference between cramming a joint full of Instagrammable miscellanea in hopes of luring in the cool kids and letting the kitchen speak for itself.

Depending on your perspective, opening a restaurant in the Financial District either frees you up from trying to be cool without looking like you desperately want to be cool, or else it dooms you outright. So when the Barrel Room closed its first location in the Tenderloin to reopen in a 60-seat space on Sansome Street with adjacent bottle shop, it could have felt like it was catering to the revival of expense accounts. Instead, the restaurant came into its own.

It has some of the trappings of a dare-I-say-hip restaurant — sconces, vertical fungi gardens, a map of southern Italy — probably not found elsewhere on Sansome Street. But this Barrel Room buttresses its big risks with some smaller ones, and the result is a self-assured kitchen flexing its muscles to put out good food and drink. It's a tad expensive, but there are worthwhile surprises even before approaching the wine list, which is as comprehensive as you'd expect given that the principals (Sarah Trubnick and Carolyn Johnson) are sommeliers.

Clever touches begin at the bar. The D.F. ($11), made with ancho chili liqueur, is what a Manhattan would be it were born in a colonia of Mexico City instead of a borough of New York. It's also lit on fire, leaving a bit of schmutz floating in it (and sweetened up immeasurably when I came back to it after eating). And the opaque, cilantro-filled Paco Ramirez ($11) was wonderful, a variant of a margarita that was like an extract of every green ingredient in a burrito, minus guac.

Small plates were indeed small, but mostly worked. The stuffed dates ($9) were lovely, hot and gooey without smothering the smoked almonds. But there were only three! It's not as if dates aren't $4/pound at the farmers market, even at the upper limit of their price range.

The ostiones al pil-pil ($18) were grilled well, although the tiny dab of serrano-infused sauce atop the scallops was hot enough to catch me off guard completely. Don't tack it on as an afterthought, because this dish is made of fire. It's a little silly to complain about salt cod croquetas ($11) being too salty, but between their crab-cake-like texture and the bland slaw that came with them, it's probably fairer to say nothing on the plate balanced their saltiness.

Like a high-end comfort food, the roasted manchego ($13) in a wee cast-iron skillet was very good — "saffron oregano béchamel" is a fun-sounding word trio — although tricky to spread and cut. The gingered chimichurri could have been brighter but I'd be remiss not to take note of those generous crostini.

But the chimichurri on the tri-tip ($28), a true Argentine steak, was excellent. Flavorful and nearly crisp on the outside, it was markedly different from the fattier rib-eye ($38). If you're inclined to order two cuts of beef in one dinner, it would be hard to find two on the same menu that are further apart and equally worth ordering. Although the rib-eye's accompanying vegetables were overcooked, its taste and texture were nearly perfect enough to justify the price, such that the bone marrow jam on the side was almost pointless; all it did was gild the bovine lily. It takes a little imagination to see where this one fits into Latin America, but who cares?

(A note on the Barrel Room's steak knives: holy crap! They're like the dagger a character in a Greek tragedy might conceal in her bosom.)

While the food was great, the beverages took us out of familiar territory. After ordering a "Mexican flight" ($17), we were served three small pours of red wine, including something from Casa Madero, the oldest continuously operated winery in the Americas. I'd meant to order the Mexican spirit flight and hadn't thought to specify, but while I was sorry to wave goodbye to the wine and any possible serendipitous discovery, we probably made the right choice.

The Ocho Cientos mezcal was quiet and polite, but La Venenosa's raicilla (a spirit related to tequila and mezcal) was incredible. Sour and medicinal, it carried that characteristic smoothness yet was somehow unlike anything I've ever had distilled from an agave plant. So effusive were we that it was no trouble sweet-talking our server into another pour, of a second, off-menu Venenosa. Distilled in a clay pot, it smelled slightly like floor polish (plus whatever spill it was meant to clean up), but the taste was enjoyably acrid.

Whether or not these options stick around when the Barrel Room switches its Latin America-focused menu to Italy in the months to come, there's a kind of effortless cool to that method, table of contents notwithstanding. You might have to dig deep into the Barrel Room's drink menu to have an adventure, but that's preferable to being distracted by, say, cutesy glassware or a painfully curated Spotify playlist. Loudly aping everybody else will never be as good as quietly whispering, "Hey, look what I can do."