New York is never short on dinner options; you’re constantly surrounded by choices and possibilities, and it seems like any given experience is always at the whim of your Metrocard’s swipe. The city’s menu is regularly astounding, leaving barely any room for the slither of creativity that can provide the punch you need to feel blown away. With so many places to choose from, there’s much already seen and explored within these metropolitan ambits. But Sorella defies that predictable and as-yet-unsatisfying sort of surprise that you’re used to expecting, and stands apart by being so great that you can’t quite describe it; great enough that you’ve never quite felt it, until treading the candlelit trails through its narrow confines.

Freed from being just another wine bar, Sorella distinguishes itself with every detail that defines its glistening interior. The lights loom in sepia, the kitchen half-exposed and inviting, and the delicately laid out dining room gleams open but intimate. Only 13 (two-person) tables make up the whole of the eatery, and each time the chef serves something out from the kitchen you can steal a slight and olfactory-laden partial purview. The dining space is something off of pure oblong, with a quasi-rectangular tinge almost confused by confounding décor. Sorella, opened just last December by two acolyte chefs inspired by the Italian countryside, now glows in heartbeats of rustic tints set to undertones of farm-inspired underground chic. The staff all wear flannel accents and the tunes chime in pseudo-Williamsburg meets Sinatra, a quirky and totally perfected juxtaposition to the candle-lit everything and pervasive hues of intimacy.

Sorella’s virtues illuminate the imperfections that you never quite knew existed.  Scanning through the menu, I kept getting caught on a number of small-plate appetizers, or qualcosinas, that I’d wanted to start with before the main meal. “How are you doing tonight? Anything I can help you with to start?” our flannelly waitress popped over and so I asked her my queries, wondering how the qualcosinas worked with the entrées, the portions and so on. Her answer was brilliant: Sorella has a methodology, it turns out. Each night brings a different and novel palette of entrees—a pasta, a meat and a fish, so you can’t go wrong. Each entrée option then comes with your choice of one qualcosina as the accompanying side dish, and all for the price of the already listed entrée ($22-$26).  I was ecstatic. I loved it. I’ve always wanted to do that, to take the most inviting starter and somehow transplant it by the side of my entrée-to-be.

The gnocchi (my choice qualcosina) came in tiny-diced form, embroidered with brown butter pears, laced with chives and interwoven by Castelrosso cream sauce soaked entirely through. Though officially a “side” for the main dish, the gnocchi came first, as a starter and sort of a prelude. The main course was even more delicious: a fluffy white fluke traipsed by watercress, semi-sweet raisins, and paper-thin parmesan that couldn’t have fit much better if it tried. The flavors were poignant, distinguished and sensational. Each bite added to the bouquet of bright palette-pleasers that unfurled with each of my fork’s sculpting strokes. The chef’s notes on the end-of-night check winked with the latent spark that scribbles her playful mastery: “Sometimes when I’m cooking, I pretend I’m in Hawaii,” her black pointed Sharpie engraved on our bluish-green bill.

Maybe it was the way that the candlelight flickered against neo-gothic small mirrors. Or maybe the flannel, or the random tidbits of hip-hop that splashed through the playlist towards the lean side of 10 p.m. I’m still not sure what it is that breathes life to Sorella, but it may be in the perplexing genus of those wicks and ambers—unassuming, perfected, in a way so very humbling and yet vivid throughout. Sorella plays to the tune of discretely inviting; so make reservations and head over for some checkered epiphanies, before all the soft mysticism ages to familiarity and loses its coveted zest.