With a new chef de cuisine creating buzz-worthy menus, Berkeley’s classic restaurant is still doing the right things in new ways.

We drift through life vaguely aware that everything can be done rightly or wrongly. When things are done wrongly, we often barely notice, because wrongness is so ubiquitous.

But when things are done rightly—which happens ever so rarely—they jolt us awake, while shouting: See how lovely things can be?!

Rivoli does restauranting radiantly rightly. That’s how this cozy, deceptively low-key-looking spot on Solano Avenue has spent its long life scoring rave reviews, topping best-of lists, and luring legions of loyalists. It was launched 21 years ago by award-winning chef Wendy Brucker and certified sommelier Roscoe Skipper, the same couple who also own Corso.

This year has brought some changes to Berkeley’s Birkenstocks-or-Louboutins grande dame. These changes include upgraded wine storage; new training for servers; a partial redesign incorporating new banquettes, new equipment and extended visibility of and in the kitchen; new menus, and, most notably of all, a new chef de cuisine: Michael Williams, a veteran of Café Rouge, Corso, Picán, and Gregoire.

The result? Rightness, magnified and multiplied. There is a buzz-sparking back-to-the-rustic-roots focus, boldly exemplified by a seasonal tasting menu comprising yellowfin crudo with avocado, radish, peanuts and cilantro; smoked-ricotta raviolo with chilled egg and tomato confit; seared scallop, wild fennel, pickled corn, and chanterelles; rabbit loin and boudin with jamón (not just ham, but jamón), fresh beans, and padron peppers; and, for dessert, brioche pudding with berries and crème fraîche. Just thinking about this meal, much less eating it, is like twirling a globe ecstatically.

The rest of Williams’ menu is equally enticing. Its ostensibly simplest dish is described understatedly as “avocado, tomato, sweet peppers, Castelveltrano, seeded crackers.” Yet this Kandinsky-worthy composition evokes a wind-whipped flag: the hand-sized cracker spread with palest-jade avocado purée piled high with bright-on-bright red-orange-green-white rings, cubes, and crescents. It’s an earthy, crispy, juicy, creamy, cutting-edge yet age-old homage to sunshiny gardens and their plump, sweet, fleeting gems.

That’s how rightness comes about.

The trying-to-be-trendy restaurant race is now a game of chicken/Operation/Truth or Dare in which chefs meld ever stranger, ever more incongruous ingredients into arcane assemblages which we must eat or risk being denounced as rubes. Resisting this chicanery, Williams devises dishes that, while daring and different, aren’t freakshows. They make sense.

A great dish “should elicit something familiar and be, all the while, surprising,” Williams asserts.

For instance: sugar-pie pumpkin purée spiced with the French curry blend called vadouvan, spiked with cilantro and sleeked with crème fraîche. Or chicken confit served with meatballs, spaetzle, mustard greens, chanterelles, and almonds. Or wild-mushroom croquettes: golden and tooth-tenderly crumbly outside, exploding into fungi-chunked satiny creaminess inside, and plated atop an aioli snowdrift studded with capers that burst, singing softly of Sicily, between your teeth. This is a one-dish series of delicious explosions, large and small.

That familiar-yet-surprising ethos and the edible-explosions experience also pervade clever, compelling cocktails such as the Mad Dash: a strong, sunset-colored satisfier comprising Rittenhouse rye, Vergano Chinato, orange juice and Peychaud’s. It lives up to its name: It races across tongue and throat packing almost more tart, borderline-savory flavor per cubic millimeter than mere taste buds can contemplate. Explosive, too, in its alcohol-free elixirality is Navarro Gewürtztraminer grape juice, a vivid celebration of unfermented fruit.

It’s not just the liquids themselves that luxurify the sipping-at-Rivoli experience. Spotless, sparkling wine glasses as thin as butterfly wings engage other senses, as does the dense fenced garden visible from every table through a massive rear window.

Smoky Marcona almonds tossed with Warren pear and leafy chicory atop velvety burrata and goat cheese, sprinkled with crimson Espelette, are another humble masterwork of color-flavor-texture contrasts.

“It’s my way of ringing in the fall: a little bit sweet, a little bit acidic,” Williams says of this starter as the restaurant fills with families and dress-to-impress first dates. Jazz lilting softly through speakers is a quiet rejection of the din that’s such a hipster-magnet standard.

“Rivoli is a beautiful restaurant with an appreciation for tradition,” Williams explains. “It has an elegance and refined presentation that are only belied by warmth of the kitchen.

“Wendy set the bar high in that regard for 21 years, with elegant food that was both traditional and unique, but as much as anything was comforting. I use those sentiments in my cooking, and trust that our loyalists feel it.

“I want to lead a team of like-minded people in making delicious, personal food. I want a narrative to my food that tells people who I am, what I like, and who Rivoli is and has been since opening. This is not easy, and is not an up-in-the face message. But it happens by being thoughtful, and, of course, working closely with Wendy in menu development.”

Those gnocchi are melt-in-the-mouth puffy pillows of potatoey perfection. But save room for dessert. While in many restaurants the sweet course is a kind of let’s-toss-Froot-Loops-onto-whiskey-ice-cream afterthought, Rivoli reveals its masterful mettle by wisely saving some of its best for last and serving these in generous, grandma-loves-you portions: sticky, flaky-crowned, fruit-flanked, dairy-rich Basque cake, more pudding than pastry, and the closest you might ever come to heaven on a spoon. A towering hot-fudge sundae, made with Straus Family Creamery organic ice cream: so stunning and so sumptuous as to make you forget it’s a classic or that you’ve even ever eaten sundaes before. And for that extra adult touch? A glass of tawny Port.

“The root of the word ‘restaurant’ is ‘restore,’ ” says Rivoli’s general manager Nicholas Danielson. “If you’ve had a rough day, you should be able to come here and feel restored” by dinner’s end.

Nobody sits down at Rivoli before Danielson has inspected that table.

“Is a napkin askew? Straighten it. Are the forks and knives all lined up? Most people don’t notice these details consciously, but subconsciously they do.

“Everything goes into reaching that place of restoration. A restaurant isn’t just food. A restaurant is a thousand different things. Many of those things are tiny, but they all matter, every single day.”

Rivloi

1539 Solano Ave., Berkeley,
510-526-2542,
www.RivoliRestaurant.com
Open Mon.-Thur. 5:30pm-9pm,
Fri. 5:30pm-9:30pm, Sat. 5pm-9:30pm,
Sun. 5pm-9pm
Entrées $21-$32.
Beer, Wine, and Cocktails.
Accepts Credit Cards.