For a drink, a bite, a dream

A tidy, brown-paper-covered booklet sold in the office of the intimate Morris House Hotel, a "boutique hotel" ("We say boutique so we can charge more," says co-owner Gene Lefevre), offers an eloquent summary of its venerable, if mildly defiant, history.

When it was built in 1787, you learn, it was beyond a meadow at the edge of the potter's field that would later become Washington Square, putting it at unfashionable remove from the grander homes going up on Second Street.

Though its sturdy brickwork - which remains admirable today - alternated red stretcher and black header bricks, the architecture was resolutely out of step, as well, with the tenor of the times: In this postwar moment when Frenchification was in vogue, the Morris House reached backward, employing retro-Colonial styling, so plain and staid, so frumpishly, well, yesterday.

All of which, if you happened to be strolling down Eighth Street south of Walnut last week, adds to its current appeal - and to the appeal of the airy dining garden tucked behind its wrought-iron gate.

After sundown, you could see torches fluttering, the genteel magnolias and towering holly softened to shadow above the open-air patio tables.

Passersby didn't quite know what to make of it: Two summers ago, a promising eatery called M Restaurant that had risen in the ivied precincts had gone suddenly kerplunk.

And ever since, save for the occasional weekend wedding or private soiree, the walled garden had been fallow - generally closed and off-limits to the public.

But yes, the young lady at the gate assured, M Restaurant was back in business, as of days ago, albeit as a wholly different enterprise. (New chef, new concept: "A good place to have a martini and bite to eat after work," volunteered that chef, Pascual Cancelliere, his Argentine-Italian heritage traced in his name.)

The hostess offered a look at the menu - simple bruschetta of sweet gorgonzola with fig marmalade; a refreshing salad of arugula with beets and red onions, almonds and ricotta salata; small, rustic pastas; and empanadas, yes, empanadas, hand-stuffed each morning by the chef's mother, Dora, who makes them the very same way she did at home in Buenos Aires.

If the Morris House had started life as an independent-minded address, the restaurant re-flowering in its bosom was certainly not now going to be a slave to culinary convention.