Philadelphia Weekly

Once in a while a restaurant comes along that I don't want to write about. I'll check it out and think about erasing it from my schedule, eating the cost of the meal and telling my editors, "Oops! Restaurant X spontaneously combusted last Tuesday. My bad."

Pennsport's wee BYOB Nicholas is one. Discover it for yourselves, suckas, I wanted to say. But then I feared that because the food is so inexpensive relative to its quality, they'd go bankrupt without more attention and business.

My first dinner unfolds in a disconcertingly empty restaurant to the disembodied sounds of Jamiroquai. On a Friday a few weeks later, only a handful of customers peppered the handsome raised pub tables set with votives and flowers the size and color of orange Tic-Tacs. One potential customer poked his head in, looked around and ducked out. His loss.

Namesakes Nicholas Matteo and Nicholas Sweeney are of Stein/Starr stock. The buddies, who met in the mid-'90s on the Striped Bass line and most recently worked together at Morimoto, have been planning their own place for years. So when the gelateria across the street from Matteo's home closed, they jumped.

The menu changes weekly, flavored by growers the Nicks hooked up with back when they were doing cooking demos at the Burlington County farmer's market. Their dishes almost play out reverse from traditional produce and protein pairings. Here, the protein supports the produce and succeeds with quietly exceptional results.

Sugary grilled Jersey peaches marinated in rum and molasses and flecked with DiBruno's gorgonzola make me forget the delicious grilled hickory-smoked Cannuli's pork chop on the plate. Lemony chicken piccata scattered with capers pales in the limelight of roasted summer squash and Yukon wedges with crunchy edges.

"Beef & Reef" brings a succulent grilled prawn and petite flatiron steak that looks like it was butchered with child-safe scissors, but the slender, clover honey-glazed carrots and waxy yellow and deep violet fingerlings quickly shift the focus. Blackened tilapia accentuates charred corn-and-tomatillo salsa, not the other way around.

If these dishes are ensemble performances, the vegetarian ones are orchestrated solos. Tomatoes from Spinella Farm in Winslow Township star in an herb-flecked heirloom tartare ringed with a halo of yellow grape puree. With Claudio's mozzarella and fresh basil, oven-roasted rubies create a breezy Caprese salad to top Talutto's Asiago-stuffed tortellini. Golden tomatoes folded into whipped butter gives the house-baked bread a cool, earthy flavor.

Anointed with spearmint oil and fresh chopped spearmint, the Sugar Baby watermelon soup is Bam! Watermelon! Eating watermelon in a watermelon patch in watermelon-print overalls. The smooth soup is the perfect warm-weather dessert. Too bad it's billed as an appetizer. Captain Obvious report: Crisped bits of salty pork bits and a dollop of tangy cultured dairy would make for a sharper, more nuanced dish.

Matteo and Sweeney's handiwork occasionally comes across a bit too simple, but that's what they're going for. For innovative, cerebral food, go elsewhere. For a delicious, down-to-earth dinner and prices that match, go to Nicholas.

Also go for the outstanding desserts. They're all made in-house. The lighthearted cheesecake comes from Matteo's girlfriend's grandmother, while the not-better-than-sex-but-still-pretty-great "Better Than Sex" chocolate cake is his own granny's recipe. Of neither the triple-layer nor the molten-lava school, this generous slice is float-away fluffy, the biracial baby of devil and angel food.

The sweet dough is the Cinnamon Dippers of my childhood, sugar-and-spice-sprinkled fritters I haven't had since I was 12. Vividly peachy peach puree comes for dipping. One week it's splashed with champagne. Another, straight fruit. After the sweet dough is gone and when no one's looking, I'm spooning away like a Gerber baby.

With peach season cresting, the Nicks have turned to autumn for inspiration for the zeppole's sauce. As I'm writing, the dip du jour is vanilla hazelnut. By the time you read this, it'll probably be an early harvest applesauce, or maybe something with pears and brandy (hint, hint).

Winter brings an austere bounty, in both crops and restaurant diners. I worry if Nicholas doesn't kill it now, they'll get killed come Christmas. So I grudgingly pass along the tip rather than keep Nicholas to myself. Check it out. Just don't go taking up all the seats--or the sweet dough.