When it appeared on Orchard Street in 2012, Mission Chinese Food was slightly unreal. It didn't seem to follow the rules, or even know that there were rules. The health department and other city agencies knew, though, and after just 18 months , they pulled the plug on Danny Bowien's hallucinatory all-ages chile-pepper party.

At its new address on East Broadway, there is a two-level dining room with half-moon booths of brushed red velvet under bistro mirrors. And a well-appointed kitchen in the basement, not Orchard Street's narrow galley behind plexiglass.

While very few items on the old menu couldn't be knocked together by one person with a wok in less than five minutes, many dishes now speak of ample counter space and many hands, including those of Angela Dimayuga, the executive chef. (Mr . Bowien is the chef and owner.) Of her many contributions to Mission Chinese Food, the one everybody wants to talk about is Josefina's house special chicken. Josefina is Ms. Dimayuga's grandmother, a Filipina, and her chicken is no short-order stir fry. The bird is roasted with a stuffing of fresh chorizo​​, raisins, olives, sweet pickles and butter. It is carried to the table on a silver platter, feet splayed out, head tucked in. When the torso is cut into thick slices, the center of each one has the white-and-yellow ring of a hard-cooked egg. Everything about Josefina's chicken is great.

The recipe is most likely of Spanish descent. This should make it an idiosyncratic fixture in a Chinese restaurant, but idiosyncrasy is to Mission Chinese Food what the Bloomin' Onion is to an Outback Steakhouse.

In the original San Francisco incarnation, as well as in the first New York location, most of the idiosyncrasies looped around Sichuan cuisine. Many of the old dishes, marked as much by Mr. Bowien's freethinking approach as by the burn and tingle of chiles and Sichuan peppercorns, have migrated to the new restaurant: the kung pao pastrami; the galvanizing lamb ribs with sweet, gooey dates; the Chongqing chicken wings so acutely spicy and flavorful they make Buffalo wings seem as dangerous as an animal cracker.

But this kind of scorched-tongue cooking has become a minor motif in M​​r. Bowien and Ms. Dimayuga's menu, which goes on for pages. Fewer than a third of the items are marked by red flames blazing from what looks like a pair of cheeks , and not the ones you kiss your grandmother on. The rest is not just less fire-spewing but more varied than before, drawing from regions beyond Sichuan and countries beyond China.

Some of it is even nuanced. Splashing around in a gentle, aromatic pool of chamomile, almond milk and saffron, the steamed Napa cabbage has more in common with a chai latte than with Mr. Bowien's pork-drenched mapo tofu. There is a startlingly well-calibrated, nori-sprinkled salad of red cabbage in a Caesar-esque vinaigrette of soy, miso, sesame and anchovy. Konnichiwa, Caesar! Another salad waves toward Vietnam, with green papaya threads, roasted peanuts, sliced​​ banana blossoms and shreds of lightly smoked chicken.

The perfume of dill, mint and basil rises up from a bowl of cellophane noodles in deeply aromatic lamb soup. Grassy,​​ astringent matcha is sprinkled over green-tea noodles with scallions and ginger. Fried rice with sweet and tender lumps of lobster is fragrant with coconut oil.

All of these are smart, layered and vibrant enough to win over anybody who shows up thinking that Mission Chinese Food is still in the business of knocking your head against the wall until you smile or pass out or both. It's easier to taste the quieter flavors now. With the extra space and staff, the kitchen pays some attention to the order in which dishes arrive, so it can keep the more antisocial ones in solitary confinement.

There is a wine list now, stocked with semi-obscure natural wines. In the five months the restaurant has been open, servers have memorized a few stock phrases, like “it goes well with our food” (imagine that), but have not learned which part of the corkscrew will remove a metal bottle cap, or when to stop pouring an unfiltered wine to keep sediment from sliding into the glass.

I liked taking a hammer to a clay brick to reveal a whole duck confit stuffed with sticky rice and chestnuts, and liked the rich and oily meat I tore from the legs, but I didn't love the dry breast meat, and I wouldn' t mind taking a hammer to the $100 price tag. I also won't be handing over another $150 for a smoked prime rib topped with a king crab leg, a garnish that just seemed like bait for the hedge-fund crowd. For far less money, the celery with hazelnuts that was so nicely stir-fried one time was nearly raw the next. I might have loved the just-cooked black kale with pickled plums if not for the overpowering brininess.

But these are normal lapses for what has become, against the odds and to almost everybody's benefit, a nearly normal restaurant. The hallucinations may have stopped, but Mission Chinese Food is still a trip.