Most workplaces are full of petty jealousies, and the restaurant Le Club seems to be no different. While the chef, Toshi Miyazaki, performs a small series of wonders with his modern Japanese-cum-Continental fare, his waitresses lazily subvert and undermine his achievements with Bartleby-like, I-would-prefer-not-to service, as if they are willing the newly opened restaurant to fail.

This subversion comes in numerous, scarcely noticed gestures, like the look of cold disdain the waitress flashed when I tried to order a glass of wine. That, of course, was after raising my hand and waving like a drowning man for attention, for the waitresses at Le Club treat customers as they would H5N1 virus vectors, avoiding all contact. When they do come to the table, the best you can hope for is a perfunctory "prosím" and an expression imported from the dry no man's land that lies between stupidity and contempt. Both waitresses on my recent visits seemed better suited to a jídelna than a room where a two-course lunch can cost 500 Kč ($20).

Which is disappointing for the chef, as his food is largely excellent. The menu is limited — a good sign for a good address — with just a few appetizers, several soups and bowls of noodles, a handful of fish plates and a similar number of meat dishes. Among starters, the shabu shabu salad is a top-10 hit: ribbons of tender pork topped with a salty-sweet sesame dressing and accompanied by paper-thin slices of red onions, carrots and what seemed to be white radish. (When vegetables are this thin, the tastes are practically sublimated as well as sublime.)

Also excellent is the fish soup, called "fishi soup" on the menu, though there's nothing fishy about it: a briney, misolike broth with two pieces of squid, two mussels and two shrimps. It smells like the sea though it tastes earthy and salubrious: You feel good after eating it. The rings of squid, often tough and rubbery in deep-fried calamari, are extremely soft and juicy here.

The main courses bridge both the Pacific and the Atlantic, connecting Miyazaki's homeland with the West. The "burger" is a Japanese take on the American classic: a pile of tender, sliced beef with teriyaki sauce, served with a bun made of pressed sticky rice. Since the meat is more like Philly-style sliced steak, it's not really a burger at all, though it is among the most expensive dishes with that name in town. I liked everything about it except the bun: Closer to onigiri, it's thick and sticky enough to make it difficult to cut through, let alone eat.

Far better is the duck breast, served in rosy-red medallions and coated with a sweet and tangy honey-ginger sauce and topped with grilled edamame, or green soybeans, a typical Japanese beer snack. Appearing like green peas, more soybeans lurk in the accompanying pyramid of sticky rice, easier to make it through than the burger bun.

Another great dish sounds boring but transcends the ubiquitousness of its components: salmon teriyaki with celery-root purée. A halved salmon steak coated with teriyaki and pan-fried until very well done, its sweet-and-sour notes play counterpoint to the rich, aromatic mash.

Desserts are not so self-assured. The green tea mousse puts a thick, matcha-scented foam inside green-tea-flavored crepes, then tops them with squeeze-bottle chocolate ribbons which positively reek of afterthought. That's still better than the rice dumplings, a cross between wood glue and spitballs and an improvement on neither. Like thumbnail-size pieces of mochi, they're accompanied by red-bean paste, a shot of espresso and a strange, unidentifiable gelatin, none of which made me want to order it again.

Le Club has a decent wine list with many nice bottles from France and few domestics. The house white, a French chardonnay, is delicious. Also available is some very OK sake, thin and spicy with a long, semisweet finish.