Restaurant Review: Hearth in the East Village

Ilo. Tappo. Beppe. Gonzo. Pazo. Pico. Salt. Fresh. Supper. Canteen. Commune. District. Town.

These establishments, more than half of Ms. Hesser’s roll call, didn’t last.

Hearth did.

It thrived not because it cruised along in the tail winds of a nomenclature fad, but because it diligently looked the other way as fads came and went. The same potato gnocchi wallowing in a wading pool of melted butter that Ms. Hesser praised will be on every second table tonight. Everybody else will get the same rich but not filthy-rich polenta, although the ground corn is now typically grown in upstate New York, not South Carolina. Returning again this fall are the same improbably long bands of handmade pappardelle that drink the braising juices of a fine duck ragù. If you woke up shivering because you went to sleep with a window open and the temperature dropped 30 degrees overnight, this is the bowl of noodles you want.

From the start, Marco Canora, Hearth’s chef and, with Paul Grieco, its owner, set out to adapt the transparency of Tuscan cooking to his own region and time of year. He gets few points for the originality of his vision. But for his fidelity to it, Mr. Canora’s score is off the charts. By all accounts he is in the kitchen on East 12th Street almost every night, even as he and Mr. Grieco have replicated their wine bar next door, Terroir, in four other neighborhoods.

As Hearth approaches its 10th anniversary next month, you can tell the kitchen is paying attention most of the time. Not always: one night the gnocchi would have had no flavor if not for the melted butter and grated cheese on top. Dry, stringy salt cod mantecato needed more richness, and it was stuffed in a bitter roasted yellow Hungarian pepper that needed more sweetness. Siobhan DeCarlo’s desserts were variable, too. I had a nearly perfect cardamom panna cotta with a coffee-caramel sauce one night, and a dry, drab pear spice cake with almost no hint of spices on another. I noticed the lapses because they were so out of character, like John Boehner vaping on an e-cigarette.

In the dining room, though, inattention was closer to normal. The servers seem friendly enough, smiling in their plaid shirts and bluejeans with napkins peeking out of the back pocket. But all my meals could easily have been finished 45 minutes sooner, without rushing. While I waited for somebody to take an order, or bring the main course, or clear dirty dishes, there were pauses long enough for several species of Amazonian frogs to go extinct.

Ordering wine wasn’t always simple, either. Once when I asked a server about a wine, she admitted she didn’t know much about it but promised to find out. Instead she came back 10 minutes later with the bottle; we were halfway through our main courses by then, so we didn’t stop her from opening it. Any restaurant can get into the weeds, but the weeds at Hearth seem especially fast-growing and luxuriant.

If I had been alone, I would have passed the time reading Mr. Grieco’s wine list. This passionate, garrulous, name-checking manifesto exhorts us to drink mead (“a true symbiosis between insect, nature and man”), urges us to drink riesling (“To say that Riesling is great is as obvious as saying Vladimir Putin is the Michael Corleone of Russia”), pleads with us to drink sherry (“the most underrated beverage on the planet earth”) and revises the lyrics to a Justin Timberlake song (“It’s my wine in a box, my wine in a box babe”), twice.

The tension between Mr. Grieco’s confrontational wine list and Mr. Canora’s soothing menu is one of the springs that keeps Hearth in motion.

Another is Mr. Canora’s understanding of the seasons. Once a vanguard notion in the United States, cooking with seasonal ingredients is so mainstream that chefs of all stripes practice it, from the modernist gear heads to the New Nordic foragers who can tell you exactly when to pick toothwort roots.

But chefs who plug this week’s ingredients into a style of cooking that stays the same all year long, who incorporate pumpkin and pheasant into their gels and streusels and cantilevered fronds asymmetrically disposed on just one side of the plate, seem to forget that it isn’t just the farmers’ market that changes with the seasons. Our appetites change, too.