This particular Caffe Italia, for example, is actually three restaurants with three distinct audiences. You walk into an espresso bar, where a person with the right language skills can find a substantial discussion of Italian Serie A soccer. As such places used to be in the North End, this room is all male.

Through that room is a piano bar, where you can eat lots of good Italian food or just pizza. On weekend nights you’re serenaded by jazz singers and throbbing tenors.

Over to the right, where we ate, is a small dining room with a view into the kitchen. It’s decorated with oversize bottles of wine and imported pottery, and it has much the feel and quality of the smaller family restaurants of the pre-yuppie North End.

Just as I used to have a preliminary test for Mexican restaurants — I’d note the presence or absence of cilantro in the salsa — I do a quick check on the cheese shaker in Italian places: is there a cheese shaker on the table and, if so, how closely does the cheese resemble actual Parmesan? Caffe Italia has not overlooked this detail. It has advanced to hot rolls without butter, so now we check the cruet of extra-virgin olive oil: pretty good.

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Real food might start with the soup of the day ($3.95/small bowl; $5.95/large bowl). Our day it was sausage and white bean, not overly thick, and a terrific flavor combination with or without added cheese and pepper.

Calamari salad ($8.95) would be a fine introduction to squid eating for a Midwesterner. It had so many capers, red onions, morsels of kalamata olives, and roasted red peppers that the squid was just a texture. It’s a very appetizing salad. Polenta Italia ($8.95) was fried yellow grits, crisp at the crust and creamy inside, but perhaps a little greasy. I certainly enjoyed every bit of the topping of garlicky, bittersweet broccoli rabe, and the sausage was not hot — as the menu indicated — but sweet with fennel seeds.

The entrée fettuccine Italia ($11.95) has much the same sauce, with the addition of sun-dried tomatoes. (This raises a question: what do Italian shoppers do with the fabulous sun-dried sweet peppers one sometimes finds in the North End groceries?) But I ordered it anyway because the menu specified homemade pasta. And it certainly was homemade, with that wonderful slight chewiness that’s so hard to find outside Italy.

Tortellini boscaiola ($13.95) was probably made from purchased pasta, because who has time to make all those tiny stuffed dumplings? The filling was a typical cheese with a hint of nutmeg; the sauce was creamy, with lots of flavor from pancetta and a hint of white pepper, with fresh peas. To me, mushrooms are woodsier (“boscaiola”) than peas, but I’m not suggesting any changes to this dish.

A special on haddock Florentine ($17.95) was a terrific, buttery piece of fish on nicely made baby spinach, and there was quite a lot of it. Again, the dish was really made by the sauce, a thin, lemony cream sauce almost like the Greek avgolemono soup.

The wine list is from all over, and it lacks a good Italian Barbera. We snuck by with a better-than-good Australian shiraz, Penfolds Thomas Hyland Shiraz 2003 ($24). This balances oodles of dark fruit with some vanilla oak, but it doesn’t have the acidic backbone of, say, a Barbera d’Alba. So it may be better with the meal just described than with a lot of red-sauce dishes. As you might expect from an espresso bar, even decaf cappuccino ($2.50) is wonderful, and it doesn’t even have decaf American coffee.

Caffe Italia purchases its desserts, but it does so really well. The cannoli ($3.75), especially, had a rich creamy filling and fresh-fried shells; they’re as good as any I’ve had. Profiteroles ($3.95) as presented here are kind of inside-out candies. The filling is excellent chocolate mousse, wrapped in pastry, but first you have to get through a gray outer shell of marshmallow cream. Since marshmallow cream and even Marshmallow Fluff are technically known as Italian meringues, there is a kind of justice to this, and every bite is worth a bit of a tussle. All three desserts were served on large retro glass plates with polka dots.

Service was excellent in our little room on an early weeknight. Things might slow up on a busy weekend, but Italian food is to be savored. The atmosphere was a good combination of familial and accepting. This part of East Boston doesn’t have as many Italian families as it once did, most having moved north or to the suburbs, while the new residents are mainly Hispanic immigrants from many countries. The view out the window is of an apparently Dominican music store, and there is a Colombian restaurant on the next corner. So Caffe Italia becomes a meeting place for the old residents, the yuppies, the lucky person getting lost returning from the airport, and whomever else loves Italian food in an old-new style, which is sort of everyone.

Caffe Italia, 150 Meridian Street, East Boston | Sun–Thurs, 4–10 pm; Fri, 4–11 pm; Sat, 4 pm–midnight | MC, VI | full bar | no valet parking | sidewalk-level access | 617.569.1800

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Robert Nadeau: RobtNadeau@aol.com