Kefi.(Product/service evaluation)

Kefi, Michael Psilakis's casual Greek outpost, looks imposing from the outside--it's set in the garden level of a stolid limestone town house on the Upper West Side--but once down the steps and through the heavy door you find yourself in an awkward lobby-bar, with shrunken white benches posed in a face-off. The space previously housed Onera, Psilakis's first effort at high-end Greek (Anthos, in midtown, is his second), and was transformed in a single day by the staff themselves, who hung drapes and lanterns and replaced the fancy furniture with narrower, more crammable versions. In the dining room, at the back, the high-decibel, rapid-turnover ambience gives Kefi the hectic feel of an airport food court besieged by people of no discernible relation to one another: professorial types in sandals and socks; habitues of Lincoln Center in jabots, clinking glasses with a "Chin-chin!"; ponytailed twenty-somethings bearing Banana Republic shopping bags. Neighbors swiftly become confidants. On a recent night, one young lady was overheard confessing, "I almost went to the Guggenheim today, but I was afraid I'd have too much time"; another broke into hysterics over her date's ...