On what turned out to be the crueler of two TriBeCa corners, a spot where the city's and their own love of Italian food were supposed to converge, Jimmy Bradley and Danny Abrams encountered something unexpected: failure. Their restaurant Pace, which opened in August 2004 on Hudson Street, at North Moore, closed in October after little more than a year.
But Mr. Bradley and Mr. Abrams can take heart in what is happening just a few blocks away, at another corner, the intersection of Harrison and Greenwich Streets. Their restaurant the Harrison, which opened while the neighborhood was still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center, is going strong after four years.
Quite strong, in fact, and that's a judgment I base less on the number of diners I spotted during recent visits than on the quality of the food and the smoothness and charm of the whole experience. The scene at the Harrison was less reliably teeming than the one at the Red Cat in Chelsea, essentially Mr. Bradley's and Mr. Abrams's flagship. It opened in 1999.
But the Harrison duplicates or echoes many of the Red Cat's virtues. It has a comfy setting decorated in a style that might be classified as upscale American tavern and isn't incongruous with either a spiffy outfit or a slightly scruffy one.
It has servers so devoid of attitude that they seem as perilously ill suited to their urban habitat as penguins would be to the Sahara. In too many Manhattan restaurants, diners are greeted in a way that says, "Lucky you." At the Harrison, diners are greeted in a fashion that says, "Lucky us."
Here's a genuinely lucky thing: When the Harrison's first chef, Joey Campanaro, left in 2004 to open Pace, Brian Bistrong replaced him. Mr. Bistrong had spent many years working with David Bouley and was ready to take a less French, more American approach. His sense of direction dovetailed beautifully with the Harrison's.
An example of Mr. Bistrong's orientation could be found during my visits in an appetizer called biscuits and gravy. That name was at once apt and misleading. The gravy on the scallion biscuits was made with clams, tasted like a thicker version of chowder and announced a briny, doughy romance between New England and the South.
There was chorizo in that dish, a signal of Mr. Bistrong's membership in the seemingly ever-expanding ranks of swine-and-surf chefs who pair pork with seafood. A terrific salad built around delicately breaded and sautéed tendrils of baby calamari included Serrano ham.
Some of the best entrees reflected considerable ingenuity and effort. The beautiful pool of green below and around skate comprised a garlic purée, a fennel purée, dill, diced cucumbers, capers and, surprisingly, diced pineapple, a sweet presence that nicely balanced the other effects.
Slices of duck breast were plenty flavorful on their own: before being cooked, they had lingered in a bath of duck stock, cinnamon, clove, allspice and star anise. Even so, they were served with a rectangle of foie gras and a croquette made with a confit of leg meat.
Some of this may sound elaborate, but it doesn't play that way. The Harrison's food can be relished without much thought. It can also reward closer scrutiny. That's a neat trick, something diners don't find on any old street corner, something that should keep them coming back to this one.
Mrs. Carrie Watts lives in captivity, but a sky that stretches to heaven is in her eyes. In the Signature Theater Company's beautifully mounted revival of Horton Foote's "Trip to Bountiful," which opened last night at the Peter Norton Space, the country-born, city-shackled Mrs. Watts is played by that fine actress for all seasons, Lois Smith. And though I have seen Ms. Smith onstage and screen many times, I had never before realized how blue and bottomless her gaze is.
Ms. Smith's cerulean stare is the key to a heart-wrenching performance that finds the fanatical hope in an old woman's determination to escape from a life she has come to see as little better than prison. Theatergoers familiar with the 1985 film version of Mr. Foote's play may feel that the definitive word on Carrie Watts was delivered by Geraldine Page, who won an Oscar for portraying her.
But Ms. Smith - whose Broadway credits include the original production of Tennessee Williams's "Orpheus Descending" in 1957 and the fiery revival of Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" in 1996 - brings pure, revivifying oxygen to the role. In like manner, this production, directed by Harris Yulin and featuring a supporting cast that never strikes a false note, finds the emotional authenticity in a 1953 drama often remembered as a tear-jerking chestnut. This is not to say that you should attend the show without an ample supply of handkerchiefs.
Like most of Mr. Foote's work, whose improbably fertile career covers more than half a century, "The Trip to Bountiful" is about the myth of an idea called home. Mr. Foote creates characters, nearly all of whom come from the same stretch of provincial Texas, who long to believe in the reality of real estate, that a house is a fortress and an anchor in a world of threatening flux. But this bleakly sentimental playwright is as merciless as he is compassionate. Home is only an illusion for his people, and everyone is ultimately an orphan, even when surrounded by family.
The first image of Ms. Smith's Carrie is a classic emblem of such loneliness and displacement. She sits in a rocking chair, soaked in moonlight and wrapped in her own arms, by the window of a two-room apartment in Houston. Her son, Ludie (Devon Abner), and his wife, Jessie Mae (Hallie Foote), are in bed in the all-too-near next room. But Carrie might as well be in solitary confinement.
She would indeed be a desolate figure, except for those eyes, which brim with the expectation of a child on the morning of her birthday. Carrie has a plan - to run away to Bountiful, the town where she grew up, buried two babies and raised Ludie - and it gives her a ferocious strength that belongs to a far younger body. The suspense of this intermissionless, 110-minute drama lies in whether Carrie will be able to elude her watchful, high-strung daughter-in-law and get to Bountiful before she dies.
What this production provides that makes "The Trip to Bountiful" seem newborn is its artful counterpoint of the smothering, claustrophobic details of daily life and Carrie's barrier-melting faith in her destiny. The sense of people living in irritatingly close quarters is exquisitely conveyed both by the manic and officious Jessie Mae of Ms. Foote (a daughter of the playwright and a brilliant interpreter of his work) and Mr. Abner's stoically unhappy Ludie.
They all - including the hymn-singing, bustling Carrie - exude the defensive, grudgingly apologetic air of people eternally chafing against one another. And E. David Cosier's rendering of the apartment is as impeccably cluttered a domestic prison as you could wish for. But the lighting (by John McKernon), music (Loren Toolajian) and sound design (Brett R. Jarvis) convey an affecting sense of a life beyond these papered walls that matches the glow in Ms. Smith's gaze.
What follows the opening scenes has an almost mystical seamlessness, as Mr. Cosier's sets float on and off the stage. On one level, it is as if they are conjured by Carrie's imagination, yet they are also flatteningly naturalistic. Ms. Smith moves through the shifting landscape - from bus station to bus to another bus station - with the wondering anticipation of a woman following a road to heaven.
Though Ms. Smith is the solar center of the play, as she should be, this production admirably makes clear that there is more to "Bountiful" than Carrie. A broader thematic web emerges from Ludie's exchanges with Jessie Mae and from Carrie's conversations with Ludie, with a young bride who becomes her traveling companion (Meghan Andrews) and with the ticket seller (Frank Girardeau) and town sheriff (Jim Demarse) she meets toward the end of her journey.
A sense of rootlessness, of erosion and of the pain and deceptive pleasure of memory suffuses all the dialogue, achieved through the careful accumulation of small observations and descriptions. Everyone, even the jittery and bossy Jessie Mae, is just trying to impose some form and meaning on the swirling shadows that are their lives.
In their midst, Ms. Smith's Carrie radiates a religious luminousness like that of the saints in early Renaissance paintings. There comes a point when that light is gone. Ms. Smith pulls the switch with a mastery that turns one woman's return to earth into something like universal tragedy.