Dining at Lento can be a church-like experience. The dining room has a hushed, almost reverent feel to it - uncluttered, a study in subdued browns, the only splashes of color the lush photographs of food on the walls. The photos provide focus for your visit: food, fresh from the farm, carefully selected, and lovingly prepared by Chef Art Rogers and his crew.

A native of Rochester, Chef Rogers is a true believer in the tenets of the "slow food" movement: local, seasonal, fresh, and organic ingredients carefully selected, expertly prepared, and served with almost theatrical flourish. His menu is full of local ingredients, many of them drawn from the Rochester Public Market or from Rogers' own garden, with a heavy emphasis on free-range organic meats and sustainably caught and harvested fish and seafood. The chef insists that everything - including the bread, pasta, stocks, sauces, pastry, and ice creams - be made on premises. This drive to place only the best and freshest on Lento's plates, regardless of effort and expense, translates into a menu whose prices can cause sticker shock.

Shortly after we were seated, our waiter arrived with the menus, a fragrant slab of focaccia, and dish full of fruity, vibrantly green olive oil. With a sprinkle of kosher salt and a couple grinds of black pepper, the oil made a wonderful dip for the dense and chewy bread. The menu itself enumerated and pedigreed the ingredients in every dish -- Raindance Harvest Farm buttercrunch lettuce, Lively Run goat cheese, Ganz farm half chicken, Wolfneck Farms grilled organic ribeye, Berkshire pork chop.

My party settled on two salads, one soup, a single appetizer, both of the pasta offerings, and two of the entrees, and then turned to Lento's eclectic and very affordable wine list. Rogers says that the list reflects his desire to offer wines that are "sensational without being crazy expensive." The list is heavy on bottles in the $20-to-$25 range, and all of the glass offerings range from $5 to $7. There are solid syrahs, cabernets, zinfandels, and rieslings, but there are also malbecs, a tempranillo, several Italian whites, and a gewurztraminer. In addition, there is a surperb cabernet-merlot-malbec-pinot noir varietal blend.

Our first course arrived in the hands of four waiters who swept over the table so quickly that the food seemed to magically appear. The house salad ($7) was simple, fresh, and well-dressed. The BLT salad ($10) - crisp romaine lettuce tossed with lardons, served with fried green tomatoes and a real ranch dressing (buttermilk and chive rather than that dreadful stuff from the grocery store) - offered a nice set of cold-warm, savory-sweet, crunchy-chewy contrasts. Likewise, the white corn soup ($8) countered the essence of corn with the bite of chive oil and the sweet-hot savor of a corn and chile salsa. Of the appetizers the best was the frito misto ($9), literally "mixed fry" of calamari, hot red piquillo peppers, and chickpeas with garlic aioli. The calamari was crispy outside, velvety smooth inside, and the aioli gave some punch to the flavor without making it soggy. The peppers added a nice, subtle heat that undercut the potential heaviness of the aioli.

Four more waiters arrived with our entrees. The first pasta dish we tried was the chef's interpretation of chicken cacciatore ($25). Here, the chicken was replaced with two adorable little quail, the sauce composed of roasted tomatoes and zucchini, the olives intensely flavored green piccolines, and the pasta a house-made pappardelle. The quail was expertly boned and fork tender, but the tiny legs and thighs begged to be picked up and discreetly gnawed after a quick dunk in the thick and flavorful tomato sauce. The pasta, however, was underdone and required a knife and fork to cut. The other pasta dish, goat cheese and pine nut stuffed mezzluna (half moon-shaped ravioli) in a tomato butter sauce ($24) was much more satisfying. The huge flavor of very ripe tomatoes was countered by a generous quantity of butter and the sinful creaminess of the goat cheese to create a flavor that lingered agreeably on the tongue.

Chef Rogers' pork chop, served with a corn and beet relish and accompanied by collard greens and buttermilk chive mashed potatoes ($30) was simply wonderful. A huge double pork chop arrived seared outside and medium rare inside, the crust giving an agreeable char to the succulent meat. Accompanied by the earthy beet relish, which brought out even more of the sweetness in the pork, this was an impressive (if impossible to finish) effort. The pan-seared cod ($28), a large fillet of  pure white cod perched on top of a bouillabaisse of mussels, couscous, red pepper, beans, and kale in a seafood broth permeated with the savor of sweet corn, was equally huge.  The cod was good, as were the mussels, but the broth, subtly flavored with saffron, stood out. We were inclined to push the empty shells to another plate and make sure not a drop of it escaped notice.

Dinner at Lento is not only good, but also good for you. In that sense, the desserts, which taste too healthy to be called dessert, are a fitting end to your meal. An oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookie ($2) tasted very much like a PowerBar, and the peach-blueberry crostade (basically a free form pie, $8) would have made a good breakfast but not a great after-dinner sweet. You would do better to order another glass of wine, perhaps another appetizer, and save dessert for another day.

Lento

274 N. Goodman St. (inside Village Gate)

271-3470

Tuesday-Saturday, 5:30 p.m.-11 p.m.