Waban Kitchen, across from the Green Line’s Waban Station in Newton, and in the intimate space that used to house Mediterranean favorite Kouzina, gets an awful lot right. In addition to knowing the menu, servers don’t ask diners whether they’ve been to the restaurant before. (Really, who cares?) And they haven’t been instructed by focus group-addled corporate managers to introduce themselves to diners, a practice that always seems to embarrass the waiters as much as it does me.

Instead, the staff talks about the food, and their respect and enthusiasm for it are catching. One night, we hear about a special that’s just plain inspired: An appetizer of roasted cipollini onions “Rockefeller,” piping hot, the “Rockefeller” topping a fluffy mix of breadcrumbs, mussels, and bacon the chefs cure. The plate is scattered with small pickled shiitake mushrooms and scallion strips, both of which gave the dish bite, a nice contrast with the sweet onions. It takes a lot for me to give one to my husband, but the tiny cubes of thick bacon—not too crispy, not too soft—put me in a good mood.

Then he shares his scallops, one of the menu’s “sharing plates,” and we are even. Seared, small, and sweet, they came with dollops of a simple lemon-olive oil sauce and shaved dry-pan-fried Brussels sprouts, a preparation that leaves them papery (in a good way; they almost melt) and intensely flavored. I only wish that the dollops were puddles, as the lemon is so nice with both the fish and the green.  We share Wagyu steak tartare, too. Its most striking feature is not the buttery bits of soft beef, but the sharply and meticulously diced red onion in the raw beef. The dice are so small that they burst into perfect shots of flavor and texture after you begin to really taste the meat and its mustard-caper dressing. Though this may now be a cliche of TV cooking shows, the onions in the tartare are a testament to the kitchen staff’s attention to even the most basic tasks. After all, that’s what holds up and makes possible the showy stuff.

With those dishes, we try a glass of Four Graces pinot noir from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, a terroir that’s become fashionable over the last 10 or so years because its weather, cooler than California’s, means the wine isn’t too tannic. It often tastes of light fruits, sometimes with herbs and minerals, too. But for my $16, this particular wine tastes a little too much like gasoline smells. We do better with the $13 Roche de Bellene from Burgundy and, on another night, spring for a dry, floral sparkling rose from California, $17 a glass.

The rose is the recommended wine with lobster pot pie, which is indeed a good idea. Also classified as a “sharing” plate, the dish is really very small, better for one person. Creamy and richly sauced, tiny black-eyed peas are an earthy surprise tucked in with the sweet lobster meat. Unfortunately (and this was one of very few problems at this place, but a persistent one), the dish’s crust on top of the pie is chewy instead of crisp, hard to cut, and not pleasing.

An appetizer that gets it all right, including the size for sharing, is mussels with housemade chorizo. The sweet heat of the sausage tastes better with every bite, and keeps you coming back to the heap of mussels and fresh tomato-garlic sauce. One dining companion finds a limp leaf in her “Perfect Green Salad” one night, but my strongest impression of the dish is that beets, which are used to flavor the dressing, really do work in vinaigrette, giving some heft to its other main flavor, red wine vinegar, and making the dish very pretty.