Eli Kulp

At A.Bar, the reborn seafood menu is worth every dime.

GETTING TOASTY: Cherrystones and surf clams on vegetable ash levain.
Neal Santos

Don’t let the dish-towel napkins at A.Bar fool you. Rolled and bundled on the tables, the scratchy cloths signal a casual, country approach reinforced by the wooden condiment caddies they rest against. Inside the compartments, you’ll find communal oyster forks, upright blades in integrated knife blocks and plainspoken bottles of vinegary house-made hot sauce and plum-colored mignonette — all the necessary provisions for dinner at this rejiggered raw bar on the northeast corner of Rittenhouse Square.

But first unspool one of those napkins, and consider tucking it into your collar before going to town on the $24 chilled half lobster. With all the claw-crackin’, clam-slurpin’ action available here, you can count on running up their linen bill — while running up your tab. A.Bar ain’t cheap, but at least the cooking is much more distinctive under the new regime of Ellen Yin, Eli Kulp and Jon Nodler.

When it originally opened in July of 2013, A.Bar was just that: a bar, a very nice one, mostly serving as an attractive waiting room for overflow from the adjacent A.Kitchen. Decent happy hour crowd, intelligent cocktails by Mike Haggerty (who’s still on staff and killing it with drinks, especially the lime-green rum-and-celery Parkside), a wild wine list by Tim Kweeder (now the et al of Petruce et al) and fantastic people-watching through the banks of windows lining the 18th Street side. But it was nowhere you’d want to eat. A lot of the seafood wore strange, candy-sweet glazes, as if a fishing boat had crashed into a sugarcane tanker. All of it was so expensive I kept waiting for the hidden cameras to emerge.

“The space was built to be a raw bar,” says Kulp, whose team, led by Nodler, took over in July. “But it was a pretty boring raw bar.”

Not anymore. Instead of looking at it through a New England lens, “We looked at what a raw bar means globally. Every coastal city in the world has some form of this tradition,” Kulp says. He and Nodler have collected these ideas like shells on a beach, run them through their lacto-fermenting, grain-obsessed, Japanese charcoal-dusted filter and come up with a tightly edited menu that includes lobster rolls gilded in smoked uni mayo and fried shrimp inspired by Sichuan beef.

Whether your language is crudo, sashimi, tiradito, ceviche or poke, the raw (and citrus-cured) stuff is well represented. Albacore poke in the style of a spicy tuna roll, for example, with puffed rice, pickled shallots, fresh celery leaves and vinaigrette made from grill-toasted nori; it drags the ridiculed roll out of the suburban food court. Another set up featured firm cubes of striped bass in a saucer of cool coconut milk, tamarind and lime. At first pass, it seems like something you’ve had before, but Kulp and Nodler know how to construct a dish in a more thoughtful, cerebral way. So there’s a subtle layer of earthy sweetness present: corn spiced with star anise, cumin, coriander and fennel, roasted and ground into a paste with the tamarind, countering the latter’s Warhead tang. And sprinkled over top, with shaved green onion, more corn: crunchy puffed hominy tossed in a dehydrated dust of sea salt and Sriracha, gochugaru and lip-puckering citric acid.

Conscientious sourcing is another hallmark of Kulp & Co.’s ethos, and much of the seafood at A.Bar was swimming in the waters off New Jersey not long ago. When specimens are flown in from farther afield — like soft-shell shrimp from Japan — it’s with good reason. Lightly dredged in rice flour and fried, these young crustaceans arrive in a pail with similarly fried shishito peppers and a cup of heady toasted-chile “Devil Oil”.

Also on the crustacean front, tender Canadian lobster. Get it iced with a sidecar of clever Newburg aioli, all tangy with sherry and caramelized onions, or fashioned into that lobster roll. The flavor of the uni mayo doesn’t really come through, but the sheer slices of bread-and-butter pickles are perfect foils to the sweet meat, and the soft burnished potato bun, by bread wizard Alex Bois.

Bois’ loaves appear elsewhere at A.Bar: rye croutons for the Caesar salad, for example, and slices of marbled vegetable ash levain for the clam toast, a snack that sounds unappetizing, but is actually the can’t-miss sleeper hit. Kulp and Nodler steam cherrystone and surf clams and mount their natural liquor butter, fresh and roasted garlic, chile and herbs. That mix gets layered over the bread, which absorbs all the intense, flavorful juice. You get the zap of red pepper flake, the woodsy hit of oregano, heady garlic in the back of your throat; it’s the same primal experience of dipping a heel of bread into the clam broth at a red-gravy restaurant, recast in a fresh way.

The branzino shares a similar profile, stuffed with lemon, fresh bay leaves, dill and herbs and roasted on a grill pan so the skin turns as crispy as autumn leaves.

Add a side dish of raw squash salad — the steak-y slices of zucchini and patty pans are compressed in tarragon-and-Champagne vinegar and marinate overnight — and a Sam Kincaid dessert (sour cherry-anise hyssop water ice, a sundae that takes the salted-caramel trend to the next level by introducing pretzels), and you’ve got a full, satisfying meal that keeps pace with the best restaurants in town. Not just A.bar anymore.

A.BAR | 135 S. 18th St., 215-825-7035, akitchenandbar.com.

Mon.-Sat., noon-11 p.m. Appetizers, $2-$24; entrees, $16-$26; desserts, $6-$8.