Apiary.(Restaurant review)

In the East Village, a neighborhood known for its all-you-can-eat sushi and alarming preponderance of Irish sports bars, post-collegiate insouciance permeates the dining scene. Even the area's more ambitious restaurants, which are invariably of the David Chang variety, adopt a resolute informality: bar stools, communal tables, open kitchens. Apiary affects no such fratty precociousness. Dimly lit and darkly appointed, it is the sort of place grownups from Gramercy might go if they venture too far down Third Avenue. And if grownups are generally understood to be people who have not filled their entire apartments with IKEA, Apiary is all the more apropos, because it is a restaurant that is really a furniture showcase. A franchise of Ligne Roset, the high-end French design house, created and owns the establishment, and the space is a study in a particularly Gallic strain of self-conscious sophistication. Instead of chandeliers, cylindrical silver ceiling fixtures are adorned with chandelier-shaped cutouts. Sleek, squat chairs are upholstered in deep wine-colored reds and purples. On the back wall, sprawled over a floor-to-ceiling mirror, is a gnarly-limbed "Day of the Triffids"-like lighting installation. (It's called "Paranoid.")

Meanwhile, Apiary's menu covers some of the same ground as a Presidential ...