On a bustling Saturday night at Steel & Rye in Milton, a valet magically appears beside our car as we search in vain for a spot in the full lot, and doesn’t charge us a cent. While we wait for a table in the crowded bar area, juggling cocktails and heavy jackets, a hostess comes over and asks if she can hang up our coats. Why yes, and thank you. Even small touches like complimentary sparkling water and delicious decaf coffee from Jamaica Plain’s Fazenda Coffee Roasters make us feel almost like guests, not just patrons.

The food makes us feel even more special. The buttery, melt-in-your-mouth foie gras, served in a tiny glass jar with sweet pear butter and salty brioche, is luxurious. But the menu is also down-home, with ham salad and broccoli casserole on offer — although this ham salad is more of a pate, served with discs of homemade pumpernickel. And the broccoli casserole is a wonder of complex flavors, with crunchy homemade crackers, thick stalks of broccoli, wild mushrooms, and soft blobs of Comte cheese, rounded out with crème freche, lemon juice, and mustard — not a hint of Campbell’s cream of mushroom in sight.

Chef Chris Parsons obviously knows his way around the kitchen. Parsons previously owned Catch and Parsons Table in Winchester, where he lives, and here-creates several of those restaurants’ dishes: salt-roasted Maine clams, served in the shell with breadcrumbs, bits of chorizo, and an oregano mojo sauce, brought to meaty, briny bliss with a squeeze of seared lemon; and Mt. Desert Island mussels plumped with the flavors of smoked tomato and chorizo (Parsons is clearly a fan) in a decadent lobster broth.

The space in Lower Mills is stunning, a 7,000-square-foot former car dealership turned ambulance garage, with mile-high ceilings, exposed pipes and ducts, and glass garage doors that open onto the patio. Parsons and his co-owners — general manager Dan Kerrigan, the former GM of Chiara Bistro in Westwood, and financial partner Bill Scannell — made an effort to retain the building’s industrial feel, with old tools gracing the windowsills and a rusty I beam framing the bar, and yet somehow the restaurant still manages to feel warm and intimate. Red oriental rugs dot the concrete floor, and the cavernous room is broken up into different dining areas, a step down here, a table tucked into a window alcove there. Around the corner, diners can watch their meals being prepared at a counter ringing the open kitchen.

Parsons likes to get inventive, rounding out an appetizer of lamb meatballs with a squishy poached egg, pine nuts, Greek yogurt, and harissa, a North African chili paste flavored with coriander and caraway; a sprinkling of fresh mint leaves gives the dish a fresh kick. Green olives go into the deep fryer and come out of the kitchen riding a wave of prosciutto-laced cream cheese. Polenta dressed with a hearty beef ragu and creamy farmer’s cheese makes a welcome alternative to pasta.

And yet one of the menu’s simplest offerings — an uncomplicated-sounding $4 snack called Today’s Cheese — turns out to be a table favorite: homemade black pepper bread spread with quince jam and topped with delightfully stinky, creamy Swiss monk’s head cheese shaved into a delicate coral-like spiral. To die for.

Even the baby greens salad, with the earthy crunch of toasted pumpkin seeds and the subtle sweetness of dried sour cherries, cranberries, and apricots, is noteworthy. Sweet potato soup, however, dotted with rounds of sweet potato and homemade marshmallows, just kind of sits there, heavy and ho-hum.

The broccoli casserole is the lone vegetarian entree on the menu, but the pescatarians out there will be happy with deliciously fatty swordfish paired with a red lentil-carrot puree, barely cooked spinach, and roasted sunchokes, or slightly smoky Atlantic salmon, blackened with applewood ash, but still dark pink in the center, served alongside okra, red peas, and crispy discs of rice griddle cakes.