Hungry City: Fitzcarraldo in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Music rains down from a gramophone horn hung from a ceiling that curves like a ship’s hull. Spiky ferns half-spill out of hanging baskets; peacock-blue flowered tile runs underfoot. The front wall is all window, 12 feet tall with a grid of steel, looking out on almost unrelieved darkness.

A kind of magical loneliness possesses Fitzcarraldo, which opened a little over a year ago in a part of Brooklyn often thought of as Bushwick but technically zoned as the East Williamsburg In-Place Industrial Park. The hovering plants and gestures at beautiful decay come, like the restaurant’s name, from Werner Herzog’s 1982 film, “Fitzcarraldo,” in which a madman dreams of building an opera house in the Amazon. (It’s a favorite of one of the owners, Henry Moynahan Rich, who designed the space.)

Vinicius Campos, the 27-year-old chef, is a native of Brazil. But the food is Italian, mostly Ligurian, drawing from both the coast and the Alps of northern Italy, with occasional forays down to Rome and Naples.

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To begin: a Ligurian specialty, farinata, half pancake, half pizza, made from chickpea flour, immersed in olive oil and baked until it sets but doesn’t crisp; the insides barely make it past gooey. This is terrific served hot in a cast-iron pan, topped with still-whole collapsing tomatoes and a swath of pesto (also a Ligurian invention).

For a mammoth pork chop, Mr. Campos adapts a sauce from traditional Ligurian salt-cod stew, marrying the brine of anchovies and Taggiasca olives to the earthy sweetness of pine nuts and tomatoes. The $18 hanger steak is grander than its price, seething smartly, with a huddle of potatoes and tiny stings of Calabrian chile. Both entrees play well with a bottle of Poggio dei Gorleri Ormeasco, big and vital, from a grape native to Liguria.

Seafood is approached more delicately. A $45 five-course tasting menu opened one night with fluke crudo in a blushing amaranth broth. The scallops that followed were small monsters, almost hilariously big, and still seared perfectly. Their roe had been reserved, rolled in salt and left to dry, then dusted like bottarga over bronzino bathed in a subtle version of Neapolitan acqua pazza (“crazy water”). Too subtle: I wished it were crazier.

There is only one pasta on the menu, cacio e pepe, a minimalist arrangement of liquefying Pecorino and ellipses of black pepper like a derailed stream of consciousness. Elsewhere the dish is famously ushered to the table in a giant gouged-out wheel of Pecorino. Here the approach is more bashful: The bowl is white, its contents pale, like an anemic macaroni and cheese. Then you taste it, and the meal rearranges itself, pork chop and steak shunted to the side, everyone’s forks at attention.

At times, I wanted tastes rather than entire dishes, as with the frankly rich fonduta, an Italian cousin of French fondue, made with a tangy base of goat’s milk blue cheese from Lombardy, sweetened with leeks and winterized with barley and cranberry beans. Other pleasures were more ancillary, like bitter greens seeded with farro and chewy figs poached in balsamic vinegar, best appreciated as part of an ensemble.

Dessert is what happens when there is no pastry chef in the house: on one night, panna cotta spooned over orange slices, with a goat’s milk cake crumble on top; on another, caramelized white chocolate pudding with salted walnuts and mascarpone. Both were agreeable if unemphatic, like trailed-off thoughts.

The particulars of Fitzcarraldo’s address aren’t novel in Brooklyn. The restaurant occupies a corner of a 30,000-square-foot former warehouse now home to Livestream, an online broadcast platform provider. It counts as neighbors a salvaged-lumber mill and a Frito-Lay distribution facility. Entrance is via a narrow alleyway flanked with residual graffiti.

But Fitzcarraldo doesn’t make a fetish of grit. Once you are inside, that world ebbs, as if it were only an illusion. As Mr. Herzog said, “We must ask of reality: How important is it, really?”