Let me extol the pleasures of a specific dining experience, which is eating alone at the bar. I love it. For starters, I can pretend to be immersed in my phone but eavesdrop shamelessly on the people around me. Because the barkeep is two feet away, I can get immediate service by just looking up. Best of all, I can order the food I want and not share it. Sharing a meal with good people may feed the soul as well as the body, and many dishes are ideal for this purpose, dishes like roast chicken, fried calamari, and Olive Garden’s bottomless salad. But others — small, exquisite creations — are not.

You’ll find a lot of these pleasures for solo diners at the bar at La Serre, the latest West Loop project from DineAmic Hospitality, a local restaurant group that specializes in big, sceney spots (think Siena Tavern, Lyra, Fioretta). This one is up a flight of stairs in a cavernous space designed to evoke the South of France, if Aix-en-Provence were Sound-Bar. The loud room thumps with energy, while acres of fake flora erupt from the walls and ceiling. (There must be 500 pounds of plastic in the central floral arrangement alone.)

I’m happy to be in the relatively quieter bar, where an excellent barkeep is tending to the couple on a bad date next to me. She wants a flirty cocktail; he wants a beer he can drink from the bottle. I look at the menu, and one nonshareable dish in particular calls out to me: It’s the Caviar Nest, a small serving of lemon cream pasta topped with osetra caviar, a signature item that comes in three sizes, each with a by-the-gram measurement of the prize ingredient. They’re serious about this. A server arrives with a child’s portion of pasta, an enormous tin of caviar, and a gold scale onto which he measures a bit more than the 30 grams I had ordered. With two mother-of-pearl spoons, he transfers this beady gold to the pasta, and then it’s mine. Because my martini had grown warm during the roe show, the barkeep remixes it with a splash more gin.

The pasta bears savoring, and I plot out the few bites it will take to finish, much like I do with the remains of a pint of Chunky Monkey eaten from the carton. Over two more visits to La Serre, I see just how well the menu works for any kind of appetite and any kind of party, from a solo diner, to a date, to a business meeting, to a gaggle of friends — all of which are well represented in the dining room.

The menu reads as luxurious but isn’t killer expensive: Two can get out for well under $200. The cooking is French, if by “French” you meant tuna crudo with yuzu or a variation on mu shu duck. Unlike other popular new French restaurants that lean into the bistro canon, the cooking here really belongs to a culinary genre I’d call Westloopian. You’ll see all the trendy offerings: shellfish towers and tartare, hearty pastas and one-bite foie gras profiteroles, and shareable entrées and prime steaks (because every big Chicago restaurant is at heart a steakhouse).

Compare DineAmic menus and it’s clear there’s a template at work, yet it’s a template that works if the food is good. And it is. Very good, in fact. Under chef Nikitas Pyrgis, the kitchen team cooks with consistency at a high volume. Everyone in the kitchen hits their marks, as do the servers. In my experience, big restaurants are rarely as well run as La Serre.

For a proper dinner, you settle into the plastic arboretum of a dining room and sip your thematic Greenhouse, a dirty martini (olive-oil-washed vodka and Roquefort-stuffed olives — delish) as a warm baguette with butter and tapenade arrives. You can go into nosh mode with friends and spread French onion fondue with its cap of bubbling Gruyère over grilled bread, dip fries into a pot of pillowy, properly cooked mussels in a creamy broth enlivened with shallot and fresh bay leaf, and scoop up icy tiles of caviar-topped tuna from their tart yuzu bath.

If you’re looking for more of a date menu, then you could start with a generous, shareable Little Gem salad with green goddess, dill, and lemon — dressed with restraint and seasoned with a keen sense of acid balance. Restaurant salads don’t get much better. Then move on to a Dover sole for two, skillfully deboned tableside and napped with lemon-caper butter. (The velvety texture of this fish is everything.) I have not had a better cooked or fresher Dover sole in this city, nor (at a cost of $75) have I had a more reasonably priced one.

The kitchen is so consistent that its execution flaws stand out, like when asparagus tastes of gas from the grill or otherwise tasty eggplant fritters are greasy to the touch. Also, a $68 prime New York strip shouldn’t be half an inch thick. It’s like flank steak cosplay. Yet the misses are few and the pleasures many.

Here’s the thing, though. You put all these dishes together and La Serre comes off about as Provençal as one of those gold-and-blue polyester sunflower tablecloths. A dinner here is not like walking through fields of lavender or hearing the mistral whispering in your ear. It is more an exercise in watching groups of young women in cocktail dresses taking selfies in front of a mirror etched with the word “Bienvenue,” telling the person sitting cheek by jowl at the next table that you like their very cool handbag, shouting a bit to be heard over the din, having an espresso martini for dessert.

La Serre means “hothouse” in French, and no better word could describe this very good, very Chicago restaurant.