Remember that boyfriend you used to have? No, not the one with the tattoos and ponytail. The other one. His name was Robert or Charles. He called your mother ma’am, held the door for you, and wore a navy blue blazer. He was good looking and reliable, and if he wasn’t especially sexy, at least you knew you could always trust him—something not to be underestimated. If Charles were a restaurant, he would be the dining room at the Inn at 202 Dover. There are few surprises here (well, there is one; we’ll get to that later), but if you like Continental cuisine offered in a meticulously appointed Colonial revival-esque atmosphere, you won’t be disappointed.

Ron and Shelby Mitchell opened the Inn at 202 Dover in July 2006 after a year of intensive renovations to the property, but the idea for a restaurant came later, after a series of conversations with Jorge Alvarez, a Cordon Bleu-trained chef who displayed his expertise as executive chef at Virginia’s historic Williamsburg Inn and formerly owned the Oxford restaurant Matilda’s. Alvarez had helped the couple cater private parties at the inn when it first opened and remarked that it would be a perfect place for a restaurant. The Mitchells concurred, and the dining room opened on Valentine’s Day 2007 with Alvarez as the chef.

Shelby says she wants to make people feel like they are guests in her home, and she succeeds, from the warm greeting she gives upon arrival to checking in on tables later. She also encourages guests to enjoy their cocktails before dinner on the plump settees in the inn’s library or parlor. Like these public areas, the larger of the restaurant’s twenty-seat dining rooms is dark-walled and formal without being precious, and the twelve-seat conservatory dining area is a cool, airy space. I prefer the smaller, more contemporary twenty-two-seat dining room, formerly the inn’s exterior sun porch, with its beautiful original wood ceiling (that was painstakingly taken apart and replaced when the sprinklers were added during the refurbishment), cream walls, salmon carpet, and timeless details such as framed Audubon prints and a doll’s house tucked away in a corner.

We began our meal with a glass of prosecco (the inn has a small but likeable wine list) and one of the seasonal specials—fresh figs stuffed with goat cheese. Tangy goat cheese is a classic foil to the sweet figs, and the texture was made even more appealing by heating the figs. We were puzzled, however, by the addition of a red pepper sauce, which seemed almost sour compared with the sweet and savory combination of cheese and fruit. The jumbo lump crab soufflé was more a crab cake perched on a small round of white bread than a souffle, but it was all-lump crab meat, and the surrounding mustard dill was a richly satisfying indulgence. Our final starter, the Caesar salad, arrived slightly overdressed. (Shelby later explained that when the restaurant is less busy than the night we were there, the dressing is made tableside.) It was a flavorful amalgam of eggs, parmesan, and garlic. We even found a few fat anchovies nestled in the romaine leaves, something that too many restaurant skimp on.

The compact menu of entrées, modeled broadly on the steakhouse tradition, offers five cuts of organic aged beef and diners who order one of the steaks can choose from among four different sauces to accompany their entrée. We paired the au poivre sauce with a savory rib eye. Shelby says she gets her beef from a purveyor in Baltimore; I hope she continues to do so, because the beef was well-marbled and full of flavor. The special of the day, seared tuna, was served with the same au poivre sauce, and a fillet of Dover sole was cut into strips and served with browned butter, capers, and lemon. Both were perfectly satisfactory.

Shelby explained to me that the restaurant serves side dishes separately because some of the items, the creamed spinach, for instance, don’t “plate” well (the cream from the spinach runs on the plate, she said) and that serving sides separately allows for more sharing. Those seem like good enough reasons for separate plates for side dishes, but I balk at paying extra (all sides, from sautéed wild mushrooms to honey-glazed carrots, are $5), even though I know this kind of ordering and pricing is part of the steakhouse tradition. Still, I would much rather you charge me an extra dollar or two and include a potato on my plate rather than charge me $5 for a baked potato. And if you’re going to charge extra, everything better be perfect. It wasn’t.

The pasty texture of the mashed potatoes suggested they had been mixed in a food processor instead of being mashed, and though one of us loved the salt-crusted baked potato, another of us thought the salt baking robbed the potato of the crispy skin and flaky inside that makes a baked potato such a humble treat. The creamed spinach was fantastic though, fresh and tasty and not drowning in cream, which brought forward the earthy flavor of the spinach.

Dessert choices were the predictable big three—cheesecake, chocolate soufflé, and crème brûlée, (the restaurant also offers a cheese plate)—but extremely well executed. The soufflé oozed quality dark chocolate, the crème brûlée was on the shyer side of sweet, making the crackly burnt topping even more of a contrast in texture and flavor.

Midway through our meal, the Mitchells and Chef Alvarez graciously wended their way through the diners to see how all were faring. Then Alvarez stepped into the main dining room and with little preamble, began to sing. His choice was Gershwin’s “Summertime,” much to the delight of the diners at the next table. The restaurant listened in silence to his operatic tenor. It was a classic performance, just like our dinner.

Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.