Penn Dutch with pizzazz

Merely farm-to-city concepts having achieved the status of what-else-is-new?, perhaps the time is ripe for MidAtlantic, which at 37th and Market (on the ground floor of a sterile ice cube of a Science Center, no less) is taking a slightly different bite of that chestnut.

It's milking the soul foods of the Pennsylvania Dutch for inspiration for a menu that includes, as a side, a cocktail called Rumspringa, named for the freewheeling teenhood of Amish youth before the hammer comes down.

If chef Daniel Stern's latest endeavor were a movie treatment (or if Stern himself didn't have such cred in the kitchen; he was top chef at Le Bec-Fin for a time), MidAtlantic's theme might be the stuff of light comedy: a sort of anti-Witness, test-tube cocktail glasses performing the role of Lancaster County's brooding silos.

But with farm-to-table and regional and seasonal and fresh and local beginning to sound like one long, undifferentiated word, Stern is doing us the favor of a focal point, at first taste a not only homey, but honestly flavorful, and occasionally fanciful one.

Thus we have here not just local (and quite succulent) pork chops from Country Time Farm out in Berks County, but surprisingly tasty crab scrapple (yes, crab scrapple), informed by, but by no means beholden to, the old original. And chicken and dumplings with a French-accented, citified polish (richly roasted hunks of chicken, thyme-inflected gravy, cakey biscuits), not that gloppy country cousin found lounging at the smorgasbords that stretch obesely out Route 30 West.

Stern, who has a more spectatular dining venture ("cocktail cuisine") teed up for Two Liberty Place next month, visited the farm markets and byways of Dutch country to pick up the vibe. He dropped in at Roughwood, the rustic Devon estate of Pennsylvania German food historian William Woys Weaver, who has authored an exhaustive volume on local scrappleways.

The fruits of those field trips have paid off. That crab scrapple (which has a lot texturally in common with panfried, diner-style crab cakes) borrows ingredients from one of Weaver's kosher-chicken scrapples; fillers of cornmeal, kasha, and barley. But Stern adds cracker crumb, Old Bay, and a vinegary mushroom ketchup created from fermenting, well, lots of mushrooms.