You won't find many chicken dinners that cost $26, even at the finest restaurants. Around town, that's the price for lamb and filet mignon. Chicken for dinner is $16 or $18, maybe $22. But $26?

Besides, true fine-dining enthusiasts almost never order chicken. So if you select it from Mulvaney's menu, it's only because you trust that it might be chicken as you've never tasted it. You will know the farm from which it hails is as good as it gets, doing right by the animals and the land. Old-fashioned values out in the country, it turns out, translate to superb flavor on the plate.

In a larger sense, by paying for this kind of meal, you are declaring yourself part of something special – a belief, a movement, a way of living you hope takes hold throughout the nation.

At Mulvaney's, if you order foie gras, a dicey choice in the epicurean world because of force- feeding necessary to expand the liver, you can trust that your chef visited the farm where the ducks were raised and noted how clean everything was, how humanely the birds were treated, feeding tubes and all.

Likewise, when you scan the menu at Mulvaney's and notice something featuring "Bledsoe pork," you might look up from your table, as I did during a recent lunch, and see a beloved farmer named John Bledsoe sauntering out after a delivery.

Mulvaney's at the B&L is perhaps the most interesting restaurant in our city, run by the most intriguing of chefs: the son of a lawyer dad and an English professor mom, a man armed with degrees in English and chemistry who hates to write but loves to craft a narrative with his food. He was fired five times at his first restaurant cooking job by the same kind of tempestuous chef he would become himself.

He's an artist, a dreamer, a storyteller, a scientist, a bon vivant, a sentimentalist, a role model and, yes, a kitchen taskmaster who seeks to foster creativity and skill while loudly, profanely discouraging mediocrity.

He believes in the wonderment of food and flavors and combinations. He believes in surprise, in whimsy, in risk. He sees ingredients and reacts, that Rolodex of flavors in his cranium spinning, seeking just the right answer.

You push yourself and test what works. You stand by core values about food and farmers and a way of life, and you start to believe your restaurant on 19th Street in midtown Sacramento can be part of change in the world.

This is who Patrick Mulvaney the person and Mulvaney's the place are all about. His restaurant has been open only since March 2006, but it is a local mainstay. Mulvaney himself is seemingly everywhere. His community and charity work is admirable. He and many employees shaved their heads for a childhood cancer fundraiser. He's done benefits on behalf of the homeless, battered women and abused children. He rides his bike around town with his wife. Their rescued dog, Lilly, gets to hang around the office.

Through it all, he runs a dining establishment that has gotten better and busier and more essential even as the economy has tanked.

As I came to grips with what to conclude about his restaurant, I zeroed in on a couple of questions:

• What would our city be like if Mulvaney's did not exist?

• What would that 1893 red brick firehouse be now if Krispy Kreme had moved forward with plans to open a location there?

Yet drawing overall conclusions about Mulvaney's is a challenge. I have had a range of meals from fair to good to first-rate. I have had double-cut pork chops ($28) that were out of this world – as thick as a phone book, charred, juicy and tender.

I have eaten plenty of food at Mulvaney's that we don't see on many menus around town – a wonderful array of pasta dishes, that superb and very expensive chicken dinner, perfectly prepared lamb, a delicious chicken-liver mousse ($10) with fresh cherries, an earthy pea shoot soup, of all things, and a delicious hamburger on decadent toasted brioche. Foie gras with strawberries. Superb sweetbreads served any number of ways.

I have enjoyed a firm, meaty piece of swordfish in the dining room, bustling on a winter's night, with Sinatra's beautiful baritone piped through the speakers. Looking around that evening at the energy and joy at every table, and toward the kitchen with its staff focused on the craft of cooking, I thought this might be as good as it gets in a total package – the food, the surprises, the sincerity and a clientele eager to be entertained by a story told through food and by the whims of a chef they admire.

On the flip side, I have found myself wondering about missed opportunities and quality control, mostly involving desserts but sometimes main courses.

I have had desserts that were, to be charitable, rough around the edges, including one with two admittedly delicious peanut butter cookies sandwiched between banana ice cream. It was big and clumsy and out of sync.

Then there was the Ding Dong cake that didn't distinguish itself from those in the grocery store designed to stay fresh for 18 years, and a Swedish cookie-and-ice cream concoction that would have been easier to eat if our waiter had brought excavation tools instead of a spoon.

The service, likewise, has spanned the spectrum from distant, formulaic and overtrained to engaging, knowledgeable and accommodating.

This is part of the Mulvaney's experience: its occasional, sometimes endearing imperfections offset by an ambition to be bold and different and daring.

On our last of several visits, however, we finally enjoyed an experience that showed off all the greatness and potential of this very special place. The food was exceptional from beginning to end, served on a patio that is among the most endearing in town.

Our server, Taryn, was outstanding. She knew the menu in staggering detail and spoke about it in entertaining ways. She knew how the chicken was raised and fed, and what that meant to the flavor. She knew our pork chop had been brined and smoked, then grilled. She told us about the entertaining, delicious "Vega egg jewel box" with grilled asparagus ($15) and, when asked, suggested two approaches to eating it. When we wondered about wines to go with chicken, sea bass and pork, she provided several excellent suggestions.

With Taryn's help and her thorough description of the $26 chicken, we could not resist. Her performance was so good, in fact, that it would have been an excellent experience simply to sit there and listen – and never even get to the food.

She was right, of course, that the chicken – a breast and de-boned thigh – was as good as chicken gets, served with mildly bitter mustard greens and a creamy polenta with prosciutto that added some smokiness and balance to the other flavors.

We also had an equally good pasta dish called "Pasta Dave's minted pea and ricotta agnoletti" served with pea shoots and green garlic. The housemade pasta was fresh and tender, and the flavors on the plate were brimming and well realized.

That asparagus small plate featuring the egg "jewel box" and ham showed off the kitchen's inventiveness and sense of wonder. The bright hue of the egg yolk alone, combined with the flavor of the asparagus spears, brought to life the term "farm to table" in straightforward fashion.

What exactly is the quintessential Mulvaney's experience? It cannot be told by a snapshot frozen in time.

It is a way of eating and living best appreciated by those who go often and embrace an ethos that has quickly made this restaurant an irreplaceable part of our culinary landscape.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee's Blair Anthony Robertson, (916) 321-1099.

• Read more articles by Blair Anthony Robertson