A BOTTLE OF CHOLULA hot sauce. A bottle of Pickapeppa sauce. A bottle of Tiger sauce. A Catholic prayer candle. A bottle of Cajun Power Garlic Sauce. A tulip in a bud vase. Knives, forks, spoons. A whole slew of napkins.

Welcome to your table at the Maple Leaf Grill, from which keen observers might size up the place pretty accurately. Let’s see . . . not just one zowie sauce, but several: must be a place that values heat and nuances of flavor. The prayer candle might signify sacred space—well, yes, for worshippers of the Great God Microbrew—but more likely communicates folksy irreverence. The tulip says aesthetics. The silverware says food. The napkins say your fingers may get involved.

Maple Leaf Grill 8929 Roosevelt Wy NE, 523-8449 Mon-Fri 11:30am-10pm, Sat 4-10pm, Sun 4-9pm MC, V; beer, wine

You’ll want to pick up your barbecued ribs ($10.95) for instance, licking every last droplet of mellow sauce from your grateful paws, maybe dredging them through your side of spicy vegetarian red and black beans and herbed rice. Ditto the Montego chicken ($10.95), which you may remember from earlier menus as Kingston chicken, still marinated in a thick, citrusy sauce and grilled to a moist splendor. You might likewise need to lick some salsa from your fingers after dipping triangles of quesadilla ($5.95, $6.95 with chicken), all smeared inside with a delectable paste of roasted poblano peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted garlic, and smoked cheeses.

And the sandwiches . . . these five-napkin affairs are the Maple Leaf’s calling card, particularly the innovative numbers like the blackened pork loin sandwich ($7.50): Warm slices of moist, charry pork are laid between two slices of focaccia bread, along with a couple of dollops of sweet apple jicama slaw and sassy homemade remoulade. Wonderful.

And the salads . . . if the Maple Leaf’s flavor-rich homemade dressings don’t dribble down your fork and run streaming down your arms, you’ll wish they had. A house salad ($3.25)—a mere pile of torn romaine strewn with fresh asiago—was elevated into the stratosphere with its rich, sweet, maple-mustard vinaigrette. Better yet was the grilled chicken breast salad ($9.95), in which a torrent of greens (and purples, and reds, and whites) came tossed with carrots and peppers and orange slices and jicama and currants and moistly marinated chicken in a feisty honey curry dressing.

Best of all was the spinach salad ($7.25), where the fresh greens were tossed with mushrooms, croutons, strips of prosciutto, and a snowstorm of asiago in a sensational basil-pine nut dressing. This was a flavor masterpiece, which we dispatched down to the ceramic with hunks of crusty bread.

Like I said . . . you may need napkins.

But anyone who’s been anywhere near Seattle in the last decade already knows all this. When owner David Albert and a chef known simply as Rip opened Maple Leaf Grill in its original location down the street—a neighborhoody, Depression-era joint with a bar, some booths, and a kitchen that looked like it couldn’t have held much more than a hot plate—it immediately began wowing foodies and raising property values in Northeast Seattle.

Albert and Rip simply adored flavor, and plenty of it, often infusing dishes with Cajun or Caribbean overtones, lavishing the humblest comfort foods with culinary attention and, frequently, whimsy. This kitchen was not above offering Rice and Beans Du Jour, or the Dog Du Jour, or the undervalued hamburger—but you could bet that the mayonnaise on that burger would be homemade and crafted with raw eggs. The healthily correct would never triumph over the flavor mavens in the Maple Leaf’s kitchen, and happy diners reaped the benefits.

THEN LAST YEAR the Maple Leaf lost the lease on its original digs, and Albert and crew moved down the block into the charming house restaurant that had for years housed the Indonesian restaurant Java. Enter chef Justin Fogal, with big plans of putting the “grrr” back into grill, and, well, suddenly the Maple Leaf Grill was a new enterprise altogether. Loving the original Maple Leaf as I so vocally had, I wondered at first if I could maintain proper critical objectivity for the new version. But then I wasn’t sure whether my bias would tilt me toward inappropriately adoring the new one or hating it for not being the old one. (These are the questions that keep restaurant critics awake nights.) So I figured it would come out sort of even.

Truth be told, the new location disappointed me from the start. Nothing against the place—the three-room house is charming, with a fireplace and U-shaped bar anchoring the main room and about three times more space to handle the legions of the faithful. But, as foretold by the bright new sign out front, it’s all a little too shiny to enshrine the amicably shabby spirit of the original.

Once you sit down, however, you’re back in that old Maple Leaf spirit. Yep, there’s the Tiger Sauce; there’s the Pickapeppa. There’s the two dozen well-chosen bottles and drafts. There’s the same affable, casual service; indeed, sometimes so casual you’ll gray a little around the temples waiting for your entr饬 or your chicken salad will arrive without the chicken, or your ribs will come sans the promised jicama slaw, or your mussels and clams will need a warm-up upon arrival. This kind of mistake happens at the Maple Leaf, as surely as life slows down south of the border.

Experiments will also happen at the Maple Leaf—and sometimes they taste that way. That’s another thing that hasn’t changed from the original. Northwest oyster stew ($10.95), with fat Hamma Hammas, spicy sausage, red onions, sweet peppers, mushrooms, potato chunks, spinach, and a fair bit of corn in a light cream broth, was confused and not oystery enough. (Note must be taken, however, that this dish was sampled before Fogal took the helm.) An appetizer special, tiger prawns in a sun-dried tomato cocktail sauce with corn pur饠($6.95), was ill-conceived: The red sauce was too heavy on the horseradish, the corn pur饠simply weird with the prawns.

But if the occasional mistake is the price one has to pay for culinary verve this exciting, this reasonably priced, this easy to be around—well, that’s just not too high a price for this critic. Visit the new Maple Leaf, stick with your old tried-and-trues, and remember that these shiny new digs are the reason you no longer have to wait a half-hour for your table. Now it’s just 10 minutes.