Alison Eighteen in Manhattan - NYTimes.com Drew Anthony Smith for The New York Times The owner, Alison Price Becker, standing, mingles with patrons. DID somebody forget to tell Alison Price Becker that in the decade since she last operated a Manhattan restaurant, all of New York below 42nd Street has been taken over by kids, and that their idea of going out to eat resembles some kind of blood sport? They have no sense of mortality, these young people. It's nothing to them if restaurants make them wait all night for a table. They'll stand up knocking back $16 cocktails for hours as if there won't be a price to pay in the morning. Their bodies are still limber and lean, curse them, so when these kids are finally shown to a seat, and it turns out to be bigger than a laptop but smaller than an actual human lap, they can wedge into it without hearing anything inside creak or snap. The seat (O.K., it's more like a stool or a bench or a tree stump or maybe an anvil) will offer no lumbar support, but still they won't wake up the next morning feeling as if they'd been lifting file cabinets all night. The damage to their eardrums hasn't started to manifest yet, so they can bob their heads to an early "80s hair-metal anthem while recounting the latest episode of "The Walking Dead." And the way they eat! They're like houseflies, always buzzing around one another's plates, sharing a dozen dishes ordered off menus divided into indecipherable headings like "By the Foot" and "Neither Fish nor Fowl." Apparently none of this news has reached Ms. Price Becker's ears. Or perhaps she heard it and then chose to go her own way. Either way, what she opened in January a few blocks off Union Square is a perfectly normal restaurant. Alison Eighteen is not a replica of her first place, Alison on Dominick, which she ran from 1989 until 2002. But it works the way restaurants worked in those days. You show up for your reservation, are led to a recognizable chair at a table that's all yours, eat an appetizer and a main course in that order, make conversation with your inside voice and then go on your merry way. And if there are a few bumps as the night proceeds, at least they will be familiar bumps. You can almost hear the sighs of relief as patrons make their way past the bar and through the eggplant-colored velvet curtain into the orderly, un-raucous, cleanly illuminated dining room. There is no dress code at Alison Eighteen, yet nearly all the men who eat there show up in blazers. It must be a sign of gratitude. Not to say that Ms. Price Becker wasn't keeping tabs on the city's mood while she was in exile in the Hamptons. Alison on Dominick summed up its era's suave metropolitan ideal of a date-night restaurant. But these days, date night could mean walking up Second Avenue eating deep-fried hot dogs followed by crack pie and soft serve, so Ms. Price Becker has eased up on the romance. Instead of lining the walls with the black-and-white Parisian scenes shot by her brother, the photographer Jonathan Becker, she has installed Payton Cosell Turner's whimsical wallpaper with line drawings of produce stands, park benches and awnings for a variety of establishments, all named Alison. This is not a room where young men will offer tiny Tiffany's boxes to their pretending-to-be-surprised girlfriends, as they regularly did on Dominick Street. But it may be where couples who got engaged there will repair to decide whether it's finally time to sell their country house. While they talk, of course, there will be food. Most of the time, it will be in an Americanized bistro mode, and most of the time, it will behave itself. There is no funny business at the rotisserie, for instance. It will spit-roast a chicken that looks and tastes the way a rotisserie chicken should, and will do wonderful things with a hunk of lamb shoulder seasoned with preserved lemons. There is a no-nonsense grill, too, applied to uncomplicated cuts like a juicy pink pork chop and a sirloin. If I couldn't taste the evidence of all 35 days the steak had supposedly been aged, it didn't matter much. The lip-smacking Bordelaise and the hot, crisp potato sticks supplied more than enough flavor.