Maccheroncelli at Sorellina

^{Photo: JOEL VEAK}

Trying to define the allure of a restaurant is tricky business, about as slippery as examining someone's sex appeal. Looks are a good start, but we've all been around the hottie whose self-absorbed vanity, empty head, or whinnying laugh deflated our desire. And in China, an old adage says a fancy dining room is trying to hide the lack of a great chef. But unless your paramour is a dedicated food nerd, terrific food served in a shabby setting can cool the temperature of an evening too. The golden mean is a balance between shiny exterior surface and substantial inner beauty.

This is the high-wire act that Sorellina (1 Huntington Avenue, Boston, 617.412.4600) has been negotiating for some years now. At first glance, it seems too pretty, with its gleaming white-on-black interior design and attractive front-of-house staff. The patrons are pretty too, ranging from the youthful and gorgeous, to the less-young but well-traveled and expensively dressed, to the not-at-all-young who've been surgically tweaked to hood-ornament smoothness. (Okay, that last group can be scary.) You couldn't be blamed if your Newbury Street sense started tingling, anticipating an overpriced, underwhelming meal. But then a well-made old-school cocktail like The Last Word ($14), made of gin, Green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lemon juice, might arrive to soothe your nerves. If a pristine salad came next - say, the verdure ($16), a carefully composed, judiciously dressed plate of perfect French beans, carmine-tinged baby carrots, Ligurian olives, and a wafer of exotic-looking watermelon radish - you could think, "Maybe there's some substance behind the style here."

Confirmation might arrive with the primo of maccheroncelli ($14 half portion, $28 full). Long, thick tubes of gently chewy house-made pasta coil underneath smallish, very tender, very lean meatballs of American Kobe beef. What makes the plate arresting, though, is the sauce: a silky, eminently rich Barolo reduction made luscious with copious butter. Papery shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano complete a picture that is as far from spaghetti and meatballs as pâté de foie gras is from canned hash. A glass of 2007 Vietti Perbacco ($15), a 100-percent-Nebbiolo wine from Piedmont - a lighter, sprightlier nephew of Barolo - offers a crisp echo of that incredible sauce. You could close with a featherweight semifreddo ($10) capped by an even-airier sphere of mocha meringue, or perhaps a syrupy, bittersweet glass of Averna ($12). By this point, Sorellina will likely have you convinced that a restaurant can indeed have culinary substance and still be as sexy as all get-out.