Luxe or casual: Canvas Café’s little blue house with the big porch and intimate wine bar and gallery out back goes for welcoming and casual. Luxe is reserved for the cooking.

The café’s main room is small but comfortable and nicely appointed with work mostly by emerging artists. Tables are unfussily bare, as are the wood floors, which can ramp up the noise level on a busy night, but the hubbub comes across as more convivial than distracting.

Outside, ample seating is offered on the fan-cooled porch or at patio tables under umbrellas. Both are good options in this leafy neighborhood.

Around back, what might once have been a guest house hosts a small wine and coffee bar in a gallery setting. The hip factor is a trifle higher here, but staffers are as friendly and helpful as are their counterparts in the restaurant.

The wine list, served either in the café or the wine bar, is compact but well considered and offers a good selection of wines by the glass, including the value-priced French brut sparkler François Montand Blanc de Blancs.

Sweet or tart: Here’s where the chef, Stephen Phelps, formerly of Mattison’s Steakhouse on Longboat Key, first asserts his talent. It’s evident in his handling of an ingredient that in lesser hands can lead to culinary disaster. That ingredient is fruit.

Anyone can pair fresh seasonal fruits and berries with vanilla yogurt in a dessert parfait (as Canvas does, and nicely), but Chef Phelps ventures beyond such trifles to enter the realm of alchemy. A prime example of his success is a chicken breast elevated nearly to the sublime by the chef’s perfectly nuanced cherry barbecue sauce. There’s a hint of sweetness, as there should be, but the dominant note is a robust tartness that combines with barbecue spices to bring out the best in the chicken rather than smothering it.

His even but inventive hand is seen, too, in the Robert Salad, which combines greens with cherries, green apples, oranges and goat cheese under a Spanish sherry vinaigrette, and even in a lemon “dust” version of potatoes gratin. When it comes to dessert, the parfait is fine, but the best fruit offering is the Meyer lemon and Florida blueberry sour cream cake. Blueberries were made to be set off to perfection by the cool and understated tang of Meyer lemons. The sour cream cake that contains these two is no slouch, either.

Cherries play a small but essential role in another dessert, this one a chocolate Guinness stout cake stuffed with rich caramel dulce de leche and sauced in a cherry pistachio cream. Again, the cherries add the tartness that keeps this extravaganza from being just another monument to sweet excess.

A question chefs are beginning to ponder: Given a growing understanding of the true cost of importing foods, including the cost of petroleum-based fuels to transport them and the carbon footprint of that transportation, which exotic delicacies are most worth the price?

I, for one, would be hard pressed to do without Parmigiano Reggiano or several of the New Zealand sauvignon blancs or the superior green chiles grown near Hatch in New Mexico. Still, a Turtle Creek Florida chevre is a wonderful cheese, and we’re lucky that oranges grow at our back door. But I’m not a chef and have only to satisfy myself.

Chef Phelps rises to the greater challenge. His preference is for local, organically grown ingredients in his “global fusion cuisine,” but he balances that preference with an understanding that no single locale can produce the best of everything.

When it comes to seafood, which he does extremely well, he balances his Kissimmee-farmed barramundi, a river and estuarine fish (native to Australia) with delicate and toothsome pure white flesh, against the uncontested king of lobsters from Maine and firm cold-water halibut from Alaska. The succulent scallops he served in a daily special on one of our recent visits were wild-harvested from the Gulf.

The barramundi is served with a tomato-mustard seed jam and those lemon “dust” potatoes gratin, both perfectly suited to this mild but full-flavored fish. A pan-roasted beef filet, on the other hand, is more assertively garnished. The nicely crusted steak is topped with a heavenly Gorgonzola flan and served on a muscular smoked bacon and chanterelle mushroom concasse, the whole further asserted by a powerfully good reduction the chef calls mushroom syrup.

The cherry barbecue chicken is likewise perfected by just the right accompaniments, in this case a purée of Okeechobee-grown sweet corn and fingerling potatoes in a salad.

Other judicious pairings include a zesty gazpacho softened with a dab of creamy crab and sliced ripe avocado, a tart combining goat cheese with wild mushrooms, and, also from the appetizer list, a chunky lobster cake with roasted fennel in a tarragon-shallot emulsion.

If you believe, as I do, that balance is entirely too hard to come by in our contentious modern world, come soothe your frayed nerves at Canvas Café.

Canvas Café and Wine Bar
239 S. Links Ave. (in Towles Court)
(941) 366-2233
Lunch: 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday
Dinner: 5:30-9:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
Wine bar: 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
VISA, MC, AMEX, DISCOVER
Handicap accessible
Parking on street