$28.95 for that?

It was one of those nights when the world whispers a secret that you already should have known. I was in the North End. You can imagine the place -- checked tablecloths, pasta served in bowls the size of bathtubs, a chef named Antonio smoking a cigarette in the open kitchen as his mother in a floral housedress works the front door.

Of course, these days, you'd be imagining wrong, which is something of the point. The restaurant was called Bricco, foreign, I believe, for expensive. The menu was written in a language called Gourmet. Our sexy waitress came by to purr about the nightly special: a tri-colored spaghettini mixed with shaved white truffles and a rare mushroom from Bulgaria. When I asked her to repeat the special a few minutes hence, the mushrooms suddenly hailed from France. But let's not be cynical here. Maybe they'd been aboard a connecting flight through Paris.

Regardless, I ordered it, if just to answer the question of how spaghettini varies from spaghetti. When the dish was placed in front of me, not so much filled with pasta as decorated by it, it survived for maybe 10 bites over the course of four or five minutes.

And with that last delicious bite of a marvelous but minuscule entree on a summer's eve in a startlingly fashionable stop on Hanover Street, I came to grasp the full extent of something that perhaps I hadn't wanted to know. Boston, almost despite itself, has become a foodie town, not yet at the level of New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, as some of the haughtiest masters of this city's restaurant universe will point out, but miles ahead of where it used to be a slim decade ago.

This is a good thing. Mostly. The food being served in Boston has never been better. I say that without reservation, though to get into most of these restaurants, you'll need one. I love the crab ravioli appetizer at Mistral, inarguably the best dish in town.

I love the lobster pizza at Excelsior. I love the roast chicken at Hamersley's Bistro, the butternut squash tortelli at Olives, the miniature lobster rolls at Great Bay. I love Barbara Lynch of No. 9 Park, and not in any hyperbolic way. I mean, I really love her. How can you not love a woman who makes a $19 plate of pappardelle Bolognese so utterly honest and unpretentious that it can consume your thoughts and dreams for an entire night?

Beyond their kitchens, the city's much celebrated restaurateurs have been the foot soldiers in the new Boston's war against its dowdy old ways. They turned Park Square from a dingy waiting room of a decrepit Greyhound bus station into a veritable bazaar of fine dining. They helped transform what were once the seediest parts of the South End into a vibrant neighborhood populated by some of the most stylish people in town. They remade Charlestown into something of a destination. They have lent vitality, panache, and shine to a city in woeful need of it.

And yet something gives me pause in what should be the glory days of Boston gastronomy, if not the glory days of the city itself. I pause when the waiter at No. 9 Park carefully places my dessert on the table, as he did one recent lunch, and announces, "I will go through the cheesecake bit by bit for you." How about I just eat it instead?

I pause when I need an unabridged dictionary, a Biology 101 textbook, and a pile of Fun With Phonics just to figure out the meaning of gianduja ice cream, hazelnut financiers, yellow watermelon, and bulgur crackers just some of the inscrutable listings from the dessert menu at Rialto. Whatever happened to pie or warm cobbler?

I pause when I can't pronounce the names of the restaurants -- Jer-ne, Pigalle -- let alone the dishes on their menus. I pause when I'm sitting at a table in the sun-splashed cocktail lounge of a restaurant called blu -- pronounced, I think, "blue" -- listening to the enchanting owner Michela Larson tell me that good food should "challenge" the diner.

I pause most of all when I'm presented with a meal, almost any meal of late, and inevitably wonder who the hell ate the other half. And by the way, is there some new city ordinance that the scoop of ice cream with the $11 dessert can't exceed the size of an egg?

This actually might be the biggest comeuppance of all: The food is better than it's ever been, but diners are given far less of it, creating a trend toward what Lydia Shire, the grande dame of Boston's culinary corps, described as "precious food, tiny little bites." The exception, of course, is that bite that chefs are taking out of your wallets.

All of this prompts a few questions: Amid a city's renaissance, and amid all their greatness, have Boston chefs gone too far? Who, exactly, are they trying to impress, the diners or their fellow chefs?

I posed these inquiries to none other than Bob Kinkead, owner of Kinkead's in Washington, D.C., for my money one of the top half-dozen restaurants in the United States, and the part-owner of the soon-to-be-opened Sibling Rivalry in the South End. (Kinkead has worked in Massachusetts before, at the Harvest and Chillingsworth.) "The whole object of the game is to put as many things that no one ever heard of on the menu," he says. "They're put there not because they taste great or have great flavor, but because they're tough to get. That's not what it's supposed to be all about. Any knucklehead can cook well with pounds of truffle and caviar and little eels and 27 different flavors of salt."

In other words, somewhere along the winding road from the scrod with popovers at Anthony's Pier 4 to the crunchy sauteed French turbot with fragrant citrus ginger broth at Clio, the finest restaurants of Boston have begun to lose their way.

Is there one culinary culprit, as I suspect, responsible for this? I promise to leave no chanterelle unturned in my pursuit. Meantime, let's take a closer look at the issues, as my server at No. 9 Park might say, "bit by bit."

THE MENU AT BLU, THE INDUSTRIAL-CHIC EATERY in the new Ritz-Carlton, Boston Common complex with the soaring windows and the astounding views of downtown's gritty streetscape, invites curiosity. For instance, the seared branzino entree is footnoted with a warning that consumption of undercooked meat, poultry, or egg can be hazardous, but which of these is a branzino?

In what grand body of water did the pan-roasted sablefish once swim? Did the grilled Berkshire pork chop ever get to Tanglewood? Should we be trying to fix the "broken" -- tiny tomatoes or just eat them as they are?

I came to pose all of these questions and more to Michela Larson, an owner of blu, and one of the frontiersmen in Boston's food exploration. As such, she stood high on my list of suspects. Two decades ago, she opened Michela's with an ad that said "No red sauce" and forever changed the way a city looks at Italian food.

In the mid-1990s, she created the sumptuously sophisticated Rialto in Harvard Square, which then, as now, with talented chef Jody Adams at the helm, remains one of the top dining destinations in the area -- the overwrought dessert menu aside. Her various restaurants have launched the careers of Todd English, the city's most celebrated chef, as well as Esti Parsons, the general manager of Radius, whose beauty is exceeded only by her utter amiability.

Larson's credentials, in other words, are impeccable, her contributions immense, but this place blu, in name and menu, seems to support my theory that a good woman has gone stark raving mad. Her chef is named Dante, which kind of reminds me of the new chef named Pino at the minimalist Restaurant L, which makes me wonder why you never meet anyone in these upscale kitchens named Billy or Kevin. But that's for another day.

As she sits across from me in blu's lounge one afternoon, she immediately fuels my worst suspicions, talking, as she does, about food not in terms of consumption, but inspiration.

"Jody's food is incredibly thoughtful," she says of Adams. "Jody has allowed her food to meet the sky." Then she adds, "What this city is learning is that it's about nuance, layers, intensity. All the senses have to be satisfied."

But what about the sense of value? To that, she cups her hands in front of her and says that in India it is believed a meal should only involve two palmfuls of food. Of course, curry isn't running $30 a plate in Bombay.

I am ready to pin on her so much blame until I find myself at Rialto one night with Jody Adams's soft-shell crab appetizer before me. It is a dish of substance, and when I follow it with the Tuscan steak topped with shaved Parmigiano-reggiano cheese, I have to admit an intrinsic satisfaction. What the hell: I'm inspired.

Later, Larson calls me not to amend her remarks, but to elaborate. She concedes that Dante de Magistris's food at blu, sablefish and all, is more "painterly" -- her word -- than Rialto's. "Part of our job is to keep pushing the limits, not pushing them in your face, but continuing to explore," she says. "In a funny way, we are also teachers." Then she adds: "We always have to ask, 'Have we gone too far here?'"

She is absolutely right on all counts, evincing a self-awareness that contrasts with the typical restaurateur's self-reverence. My search for the culprit moves on.

COME ABOUT SEVEN YEARS AGO, A GQ food critic named Alan Richman waltzed into Boston with an attitude and left with a James Beard Foundation award, the Pulitzer Prize for the fine dining set. He did it the old-fashioned way: by making endless fun of an insular city that invites it. He ridiculed the massive portions of mishmashed food that many Boston chefs then bestowed, calling the regional style "not haute cuisine, but a heap of cuisine." He fingered Todd English, the iconic owner of Olives, as the ultimate perpetrator, the man of the moment to be mimicked, which is what chefs essentially do: copy one another. English, for his part, accepted the blame with a smile and a shrug.

These many years later, most chefs are still angry -- and still reacting or, as is surely the case, overreacting. That Richman was probably right doesn't necessarily mean that Boston's chefs were wrong, but they don't seem to know it. Even Olives -- yes, Olives -- has pared its menu as well as its plates.

But pity not the poor, put-upon chefs of Boston. When I first began my search for the main instigator of small, inscrutable food, I rang up English. His assistant handled my call as if it was the most onerous thing she would do this entire year. I had a better chance of calling the White House switchboard and getting to President Bush.

Sure enough, a PR person from a high-priced firm called back later that day with the news that "Todd is scooting off to Japan." Of course he is.

At Barbara Lynch's No. 9 Park, a young woman informed me, "Barbara's in France until next week -- in the Alps." A hostess at Ken Oringer's Clio said simply, "He's out of the country." And a rather clipped young woman at Excelsior said of my request to chat with Lydia Shire, "She will need more information than that."

It used to be that when you'd call, the chef would dust the baking powder from his or her hands and pick up the extension in the kitchen, the one on the wall over the stove. I mean, what else did they have to do besides cook?

These days, everything. When they're in town, chefs swagger through their own dining rooms like cowboys through a corral. They splash around one another's restaurants every night, seeing and being seen, this city's typically stunted version of celebrity. Customers swoon at the sight of them. They appear regularly in gossip columns, are featured in People magazine, throw out the first pitch at Major League Baseball games, get mentioned as possible main attractions on reality television shows. In this celebrity-starved town, our chefs are our red-carpet stars.

"It's rock-star status now," concedes Lynch, after she returns from the French Alps.

And when they're not doing any of the above, they're tending to their growing conglomerates, as English has to do, flitting from Boston to New York to Seattle to Florida and even overseeing his own restaurant on the Queen Mary 2. Or they're writing cookbooks, or promoting them, or hoping against hope for a little bit of fame courtesy of the Food Network. Everyone wants to be the next Emeril Lagasse, and you don't get that way standing over a hot stove.

Says Christopher Myers, one of the city's truly trend-setting restaurateurs: "Chefs in busy restaurants haven't been cooking for 50 years. They teach, they taste, they expedite. Is Bush writing his own speeches?"

I've never actually thought of comparing the president of the United States to the guy who's cooking my herb-basted Giannone chicken before, but if that's what it's come to, then OK.

IT'S BEEN A SLOW ROAD TO GET HERE. For years, Boston was little more than a dowdy outpost whose most famed eateries were Durgin-Park, the Locke-Ober Cafe, and Parker's Restaurant. Then came Cafe Budapest, followed in the 1960s by Anthony's Pier 4 and Jimmy's Harborside and then Maison Robert. The long-gone Dodin-Bouffant on Boylston Street is still regarded by many to be the first truly gourmet victualer in town.

What really fed the dining scene was the 1982 opening of Seasons in the Bostonian Hotel, the city's first real "new American" restaurant, mostly because the owner couldn't afford to stock expensive French wines. A few years before, architect Ben Thompson had created Harvest in Cambridge. In 1986, Michela Larson opened Michela's in Cambridge. And thus began the first generation of Boston's truly innovative chefs.

From these kitchens came Jasper White, still regarded by many to be the most talented chef to ever cook in this city, Lydia Shire, Bob Kinkead, Todd English, Jimmy Burke, Chris Schlesinger, Gordon Hamersley, Jody Adams, and Susan Regis, among others. These chefs, in turn opened their own places, though the movement toward chef-owned restaurants was slow. In the early 1990s, you could count the trendsetting eateries of Boston on precisely one hand: Jasper's, the most refined; Hamersley's Bistro, the steadiest; Biba, the most adventurous; Olives, the heartiest; and L'Espalier, the most romantic. The latter, by the way, is where I had my first truly gourmet meal, the cost of which was $267 for two, with wine, the price of the VCR I didn't yet own. It concluded with a dessert called la bete noire -- a flourless chocolate cake drizzled with warm chocolate sauce and resting in a deep pool of creme anglaise -- an experience that I've been trying to relive ever since.

And from those kitchens came many more young, talented chefs, people like Barbara Lynch, Tony Ambrose, Marc Orfaly, and Paul O'Connell. The dining explosion continues to produce even more young chefs with greater ambitions.

These days, you can't throw a jar of truffles without smashing the window of a top-notch restaurant, the three most influential of which are Radius, No. 9 Park, and Clio.

Just below them are the old warhorses of Hamersley's, Olives, and L'Espalier, joined by Rialto, Mistral, Via Matta, Pigalle, Aujourd'hui, Restaurant L, Spire, Excelsior, blu, Meritage, the revived Davio's, Great Bay, UpStairs on the Square, and Azure. A half notch below these is an even larger roster of slightly less ambitious -- but not always less successful -- restaurants, including B&G Oysters, Troquet, Salts, Chez Henri, Terramia, Prezza, Sage, Bricco, Tremont 647, the Franklin Cafe, Toscano, the East Coast Grill, Teatro, Sel de la Terre, Sonsie, 29 Newbury, Bomboa, 33, Icarus, and Aquitaine. There are many others; these are just the ones I like.

All the while, steakhouses cropped up as the anti-gourmet response, nine of them crammed into a little more than a square mile in the Back Bay, including the Capital Grille, Abe & Louie's, Blackfin, Morton's, the Palm, the Oak Room, Grill 23, Bonfire, and Fleming's. And coming soon: Smith & Wollensky and Ruth's Chris. The best-run of them all isn't in the city at all: the Capital Grille in Chestnut Hill.

Many good people have begged out. Jasper White has left the world of fine dining for his casual chain of Summer Shacks. Moncef Meddeb, founder of L'Espalier, cooks in the distant suburbs. Jean-Georges Vongerichten fled Boston amid diners' indifference for New York, where he has become among the most prominent chefs in the world. Tony Ambrose, who brought vertical food to Boston at Ambrosia, is now merely cooking steak.

It's not easy in this crowded field to find the perpetrator of too much that's gone wrong, but the search goes on, only because it must.

NEXT STOP, SPIRE, THE NEW-FASHIONED restaurant in the ultra-chic Nine Zero boutique hotel on the edge of Boston Common, and the dining room that other restaurateurs most often say is the place to watch. Think Locke-Ober or the Oak Room, with their soaring, frescoed ceilings and tangible sense of history. Then think of the exact opposite. I know I should say I like Spire, because it would probably say something good about me. But I can't, so I don't.

Other chefs describe the food and feel here as bold and adventurous. As I look around at the shiny black floors, the Tilt-a-Whirl-style banquette that dominates the main dining room, the aquamarine lighting, and the circles cut into the ceiling, I'm thinking more off-putting and plastic. The entire room feels as though it would blow away in an April breeze.

I take a seat in the small lounge, where I'm one of about a dozen customers, meaning, of course, that the server is taxed completely beyond his means. He requires many long minutes before taking my order. After he does, he immediately forgets it. When I remind him, he pours a pinot noir by the glass as if he were giving his own blood. He brings no bread, offers no water, and forgets that people require silverware. The food, I'm thinking, had better be damned good.

And it is, what there is of it. The three-basil salad with almonds, almond oil, and chardonnay vinegar is delicious, despite the fact that the almonds total about three, and they're crushed, spread on the edges of the plate. I eat it all in about two minutes, and that includes the considerable time it takes to balance nut fragments on the tines of my fork.

The prime rib-eye steak comes thick and boneless, appearing much like a petit filet mignon, resting on a pool of mashed potatoes ringed by some sort of bordelaise sauce, and accompanied by a miniature skillet of chanterelle mushrooms. The skillet is so small that for a passing moment I think they're parodying themselves, but one look around tells me they lack that kind of self-awareness. It was delicious, the steak, all 14 bites, but I don't think even Calista Flockhart would have found it satisfying.

For dessert, I order the milk-chocolate banana souffle, mostly because it is the only item on the list that I am pretty sure I understand. About 15 minutes after he takes my order, the bartender casually informs me they are sold out. I order the fromage blanc cheesecake with braised Bing cherries and an almond cookie instead. Fromage blanc, I'm pretty sure when I'm done, is the gourmet term for "bland."

I leave quite confident that this restaurant is a symptom of too much that is going wrong in Boston dining, not a cause. Accusing Spire of high crimes would be like saying Deborah Norville is responsible for the downfall of television news. I do know one thing, though: If this is truly the direction of Boston dining, I propose we all stop right where we are.

I TAKE REFUGE FROM THE SUMMER HEAT in Via Matta, the second of three impossibly chic restaurants in the growing Christopher Myers/Michael Schlow empire. This restaurant is big, open, chic, loud, and accessible. It draws a mix of young women looking to meet wealthy men, poor politicians wanting to gawk at young women, and pseudo-celebrities of both sexes simply wanting to be with one another. Mogul-about-town Jack Welch is a regular, but then again, that's like saying George Washington slept here.

I have high hopes that this marks the end of my journey, that I will finally be able to lay blame where it best resides. When Myers, the town's most famous celebrity host (Schlow is the celebrity chef in the enterprise) pulls up a chair, he is ever cheerful. He carries with him his trademark look of practiced dishevelment. His hair is long, his face large, his shirt untucked, and his mind fast and sweeping.

I inform him that because of shrinking portion sizes, Boston restaurants, including his, are heading off a cliff -- a fact of which I'm not sure he is aware. He informs me that I'm a troglodyte and a philistine, though not in those exact terms. He gets an exasperated look that I will soon know all too well and says with forced patience, "There's a strong Boston ethos -- you really want to feel full. But the reality is, feeling full is a really awful feeling."

He explains that when he opened Radius in the Financial District five years ago, the goal was to exceed the style and quality of some of America's truly spectacular restaurants, from Citronelle in Washington to Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia to Daniel in New York. Maybe he did, but what he got from Bostonians were complaints, even as out-of-towners filled him with compliments.

"We would hear, 'We had to get a spuckie on the way home,'" he said, caustic now. "So we increased portions and took prices down."

He says this as if he were spitting sour milk from his lips, as if the very idea was utter heresy -- more food, less money? I change the subject to something not as pleasant and ask about the incomprehensible offerings commonplace on his and other menus.

The veneer of patience falls to the floor. I think I actually hear it clunk. "This city spent 14 billion and still doesn't want to change," he says, gesticulating out the window in the general direction of the Big Dig.

Louder now: "You have to allow for some originality here!"

Nearly yelling: "That's what's screwed up in this town!"

I would think I have him nailed, but the problem is, well, the food. It's far too good to be a problem. And so is the service. Via Matta, truth be known, is one of my two favorite restaurants in town, the other being B&G Oysters. It's the best combination of price and quality in Boston. And the following night, I find myself at Radius, tucking into a slow roasted rib-eye in a pool of creamy whipped potatoes that is nothing short of amazing, though, admittedly, with a $43 price tag, I was wondering if my server doubled as a mortgage broker.

The reality is, Myers and Schlow are too smart to push the city too hard in a direction that it doesn't want to go. They're learning about our limits, as we're learning about their goals. So I take my investigation elsewhere, with just one stop left. And I'm pretty sure I have the culprit cornered.

FIRST, THERE ARE A COUPLE of other suspects to disregard. Barbara Lynch consistently puts out the best food in town at No. 9 Park. Marc Orfaly, the last true adherent of Todd English, offers some of the heartiest food at his Theater District restaurant called Pigalle (silent e). Mistral is the restaurant that other restaurateurs love to hate; they accuse it of lacking adventure, as if dining is supposed to be a safari. The reality is that Mistral offers straightforward luxury food, no dictionary required, in the best-run dining room in Boston. "People just want to go in and have a great meal and not play with too many things," shrugs chef-owner Jamie Mammano.

Which brings me up to Massachusetts Avenue, to the front door of Clio, considered by many to be the most refined eatery in town. I recall how years ago, when I ordered the lobster on my virgin visit, the smiling waitress advised me to "eat a lot of bread." Clio would be a good place to be a regular if you were on a Weight Watchers program.

Still, the chef-owner, Ken Oringer, is the most talked-about culinary artist in Boston. He came not strictly from within, like just about everybody else, but passed a lengthy stint in California. His sheer creativity and, some might add, gastronomic gall, ensure that he's always respected within the business -- and copied.

If Todd English is the numeral 3 on a clock, then Oringer is number 9. English is big and winsome, Oringer is petite and tailored. English seeks to please, Oringer prefers to do things on his terms. English is Boston's trendsetter of the recent past. Oringer is the man of the moment. I am left with not one (tiny) morsel of doubt that he is the chef at the vanguard of Boston's dining transformation, the one who brought us to small.

When I come face to face with Oringer in his famed sashimi lounge, he is as I remember him to be from previous social transactions. He makes for a great acquaintance, always with a friendly wave from across the room, never burdensome with too many words. In fact, everything he does, everything he is, from his perfectly chiseled features to his height to his weight to his quiet demeanor, is suitably compact.

But I don't want to be so benevolently swayed. I am representing a cause, or maybe trying to alter one. I will not allow an entire generation of Boston diners to be placed unwittingly on a mandatory diet by a new cadre of cutting-edge chefs who regard us as a bunch of overfed, understimulated pigs.

So I put the telling question right to him: What did he think of the Alan Richman assassination of Boston chefs?

"I loved it," he says.

Aha! Then he repeats himself in case I didn't hear. "I loved it. That article had a lot of validity. I love those guys' food, but someone had to change the perception of Boston dining."

So you take pride in your portions? I ask this as a prosecutor might, knowing that a hostile witness is about to fall apart on the stand.

"I was one of the first," he says, confidently, proudly. "It's the way people should eat. Too much of a good thing gets monotonous after a while."

Then he says, "If you go to the Capital Grille and get a 3-pound porterhouse, your mouth gets tired from it. These portions are normal everywhere else in the world. I have traveled in New York, Asia, Europe, and these are the portions. It's not like I'm trying to rip people off. Our business is better than it's ever been."

I think this is what's known in the legal world as a confession, and yet why don't I feel better about what's just been said?

Before I collect myself, Oringer sums up his thoughts this way: "Look, when you go out on a date or out with your spouse, you don't want to eat so much that you can't have sex when you get home. That's my job to make sure you don't."

Silence. I have no more questions for this witness, your honor. Truth is, I'm stumped. The guy, after all, has a point. I didn't want to bring this up, but I had sat in his dining room a week before and feasted again on a sweet butter-basted Maine lobster with chanterelles and fava beans that nearly left me in tears. It was a clean dish, remarkably simple, and memorably delicious. If it seemed small, it's only because it was so good.

I take my leave amid a crosscurrent of emotion. Do I miss the days of yore when I'd be driving home from Olives gripping my gut in utter agony but happy in the knowledge that I had just gotten a pretty good deal? Kind of.

But is this better for me, walking out of Clio not exactly hungry but certainly not completely full? Maybe.

Perhaps this whole thing, the new reality of Boston dining, is just going to take a little time to digest.

Brian McGrory's e-mail address is McGrory@globe.com.