A room with good service -- and food

Patrons enjoy a drink in the cocktail lounge at 606 Congress. (JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

An early taste of what's new on the restaurant scene

Here's the problem with eating dinner in a hotel restaurant. You're eating it in a hotel. The suffocating professionalism. The relentless tastefulness. The tourists. All that strange, unidentifiable fabric. Oh, and those prices.

606 Congress is the culinary attraction at the seaport's Renaissance Hotel in that stretch of neighborhood that's not really a neighborhood yet. 606 feels like a hotel restaurant, except someone had the ingenious idea to stretch the ceiling up to the ionosphere. Now you're not choking on the hotelness of it all. Everything about the dining space is long - the window, the tables, a lot of the guests. The room is as vast as the walls are tall. It makes you think it should be used for a purpose higher than eating, but that sort of naive piety doesn't last.

Commandeering the kitchen is the superchef Michael Schlow, who's responsible for Via Matta and Radius and who certainly could have come up with a better name. (We're talking "Our name is our address" stuff.) In any case, the idea here is smaller plates. It's the unstoppable trend that feels like a gimmick when, really, it should be the norm. At 606, the menu is sectioned into six, uh, arrondissements. Only two appear to have any actual meaning as a category. The "fifth" comprises a bunch of meats. The sixth is all cheeses. You might order something from, say, the second and the third then possibly the fourth and the fifth.

Schlow and 606's in-house chef, Tony Hill, have structured the menu around risky combinations. The influences are all over the world map - South America, Europe, here. Andrea's High-falutin' Mac 'n' Cheese is Alabama by way of the French countryside. Few dishes this unnecessarily fussy taste this good. The food, meanwhile, is served by section - or at least it seems to be.

Wave one was mostly seafood. So was wave two. Ahi tuna has a spicy kick and vinegary punch. The shrimp kicked, too. One satisfied customer described the fried calamari as seafood potato chips. And admired from a distance, it resembles a bowl of fried cereal. A plate of littleneck clams, cannellini beans, and quarter-size chorizo are upstaged by a citrusy tang and scallions that never succumb to the charming texture of the rest of the dish.

A duck confit salad revolved around the soft-boiled egg at its center. The sherry vinegar bullied the other flavors. A bowl of leeks and minced pancetta became a delicious soup with the addition of a creamy squash base. But a polite slab of sirloin was the evening's buttery high point. It arrived before a bland mushroom bruschetta, a duck breast whose succulence had been slow-roasted away, and an unusually arid pork chop that came with soulless grits. So the steak's excellence, thus, went pretty much unimpeached. (Although you may not be able to order it: At press time, the stove at 606 had gone kerflooey. Meaning it's salads and cold soups until the stove is fixed, maybe as soon as the end of the weekend.)

At some point during all the grabbing and gnawing and head-scratching, it became apparent that most of the wait staff was outfitted in belts with big buckles. A server explained that the buckles were part of a dress code. According to him, so were the fishnet stockings the women wore. He answered his interrogators with a smile and had nothing critical to say about his employers' sartorial demands, leaving that to the table of bewildered men and women looking at his waist. 606 Congress doesn't seem like the sort of place to impose that kind of tackiness. But one server's silver cow buckle was no joke even if it makes some people laugh. Eventually you realize the ceilings are so high to leave room for all that concept - even if no one could explain what the concept was.

606 Congress. 606 Congress St. 617-476-5606. Entrees $9-17 (the restaurant serves smaller plates); wines by the glass: $10-14.