A charred slab of foie gras atop a caramelized peach is a familiar dish made voluptuous. Photographs by Stacy Zarin-Goldberg.

If you’re like me, the thought of paying good money to eat in a strip-mall restaurant is about as appealing as the thought of an in-flight dinner.

The strip-mall bias is hard for a lot of us to shake. But eating in a storefront restaurant in the middle of nowhere is no longer the dubious proposition it used to be. With soaring rents in city centers, the explosion of the Maryland and Virginia exurbs, and the growth of the area’s immigrant populations, strip malls often are where you go when you want a tasty, affordable meal.

But it’s one thing to hit the highway in search of good ethnic eats—you might be disappointed, but it’s not going to be an expensive disappointment—and another to take a flyer on fine dining at an unprepossessing place named Cynthia’s in a sprawling shopping plaza in Severna Park.

Its neighbors include a Mattress Discounters; its young, inexperienced staff looks as though it learned service in a semester of home ec; and its menu has the presumption to charge the same prices as downtown DC’s big-ticket restaurants.

You can almost guess the outcome, right? A huge tab and the disappointment that comes from having gone against your better judgment. Wrong and wrong. Cynthia’s is a revelation. An ambitious white-tablecloth place that makes good on almost all its promises, it’s not an excellent strip-mall restaurant; it’s an excellent restaurant, period.

Don’t expect fireworks from the start. To walk into the open dining room—as blandly inoffensive as a conference room—is to cling just a little tighter to all those die-hard strip-mall prejudices.

This isn’t the kind of place that reveals its intentions all at once—a splashy design, a big, bouncy mood.

In time, your eye falls upon the framed vintage American food-crate labels (Red Bill celery, Ak-sar-ben oranges), an unexpected bit of whimsy, and the classic jazz that pours through the sound system—confident sounds of such American masters as Parker, Coltrane, and Monk—creeps into your blood.

The confidence and whimsy extend to the menu, which takes a lot of glee in deflating some of the pretensions of fine dining. The sauce for the pork chop is not a reduction, not a glaze, just “yummy sauce.” Invoking the theme from TV’s The Love Boat, the dish of the day is “ever changing, exciting and new.” The last adornment in a hazelnut-chocolate semifreddo? “Some crunchy stuff.”

All of this would be insufferably cutesy if Brian Bennington, who does the cooking, and his wife, Cindy Bennington, who makes the desserts and breads, weren’t possessed of big-time talent. Both worked at the celebrated Patina in Los Angeles, and Cindy also did a stint as a pastry cook at Gramercy Tavern in New York City.

That the restaurant is named for her tells you that Brian is either a generous man or a wise man. Or both. It also tells you how to plan your meal.

Salt-sprinkled Guggenheim rolls hint at the sophistication and comfort to come.

Her work is exceptional, as you discover when you bite into one of her Guggenheim rolls. Gratis at dinner, 75 cents at lunch, they’re similar to Parker House rolls only more exquisite: delicate, buttery pinwheels dotted with coarse grains of salt.

It gets better. “Breakfast at Cynthia’s” is not nearly as over the top as “Breakfast at Citronelle,” its obvious inspiration, but the dish—two buttery sponge cakes buried under ripe summer fruit and drenched, hollandaise-style, with a prosecco sabayon—is plenty clever. And just as delicious.

Like Citronelle’s Michel Richard, with whom she shares an affinity for clean lines and precise flavors, Cindy Bennington loves her quotation marks. Patrons of Sabatino’s or Vaccaro’s—those bastions of old-fashioned Italian cooking in Baltimore’s Little Italy—would no doubt roll their eyes at her lemon “cannoli,” but I bet you they’d also hoard the wealth once they got a taste. The cannoli is a lacy tuile cookie, rolled while still warm into a cigar shape and filled with lemon cream. The richness and tang of the custard are underscored by the richness and tang of the sour-cream ice cream. A handful of ripe, oversize berries is the single note of unadulterated sweetness on the plate.

When she tries her hand at something more conventional, she’s just as masterful. She’s not above milk and cookies—although milk, in this case, is a delightful Bailey’s Irish Cream milkshake. I love that the cookies are designed to call to mind Chips Ahoy—they’re small and studded with bits of chocolate, not at all the big, flecked-with-salt renditions that most pastry chefs turn out, lest anyone think they can’t improve upon a simple cookie.

I tried every sweet on the menu looking for something to complain about. Sorry—no can do.

I might not have mooned over the chocolate fudge cake as much as I did the nectarine-blueberry crumble or the chocolate soufflé, but that’s only because the crumble and the soufflé are perfect—their lightness and balance a kind of grace.

To split a dessert here—whether out of a sense of modesty or in the interest of preserving a sense of “virtue” after consuming a multicourse meal—is to miss the point of coming. That’s not to say Cindy’s husband is incapable of keeping pace.

I wasn’t all that enamored of two dishes I tried on my first visit at lunch—a plate of wannabe tempura shrimp and a dainty rendition of a quesadilla—but that’s because I hadn’t yet figured out that savory-meets-sweet isn’t just a description of Brian’s (working) relationship with his wife; it’s the prescription for his best dishes.

His seared foie gras, served atop a caramelized half peach, was so good that I ordered it twice, letting a friend have the joy of discovering it for himself on one of my later visits. After the first bite, he turned to me, sighed, then asked his wife: “What are the housing prices around here?”

The foie gras is described as “seared,” but the surface is closer to a light crusting, not unlike what you’d find on a good steak. It’s also about twice as big a portion as you tend to find these days and—unlike most foie-gras preparations—cooked to a perfect pink unctuousness within. That soft, almost melting texture is echoed and amplified by the soft ripeness of the peach. Richness? That’s easy with foie gras. This one goes beyond richness. It’s an essay in voluptuousness.

The duck breast is remarkable for its gaminess, with the result that it comes across at times like a chewier version of the foie gras. Pork lovers often complain that today’s pork is a pale imitation of the pork of old. This duck is a throwback—it makes most other duck I’ve eaten in restaurants in the last few years look wan and overbred.

The halibut is cooked to a pearlescent moistness and served atop a corn sauce that approximates the sweet lushness of the fish. It’s garnished with tiny coins of fried potato and a gorgeous summer succotash, which play up the sweetness of the dish and provide a subtle textural change. It’s one of the few halibut dishes I’ve eaten in recent memory that I’d return to.

The salmon misses that lofty mark, but not by much. A lot of chefs are guilty of trying to make fish play the part of meat, drenching a mild-tasting filet with butter and dousing it with heavy cream and then siding it with a heap of mashed potatoes. Brian Bennington seems to wink at this tendency, painting his filet of salmon with deep, dark streaks of Cabernet sauce so it comes to the table looking like a spare rib. Then, intensifying the resemblance to pork, he surrounds it with a bacon-fortified purée of mashed potatoes and melted leeks.

Like his pastry-chef wife, Bennington can flash his virtuosity but doesn’t seem dependent on it. He seems genuinely to like the simple things—whether it’s sending out a perfectly dressed salad to flank a trio of roasted-tomato crostini or thumbing his nose at steakhouse convention and surrounding a juicy New York strip with not one but four sides: a tower of stacked onion rings, a baked potato, a mound of creamed spinach, and butter mushrooms. Lunch’s tasty hanger steak looks naked and unloved by comparison.

He misses sometimes. The “scallop potato roll,” which swaddles four plump scallops in a thin, crunchy burritolike wrapper, is too clever for the payoff—the thin potato roll is overcooked, tasting oddly of fries. The dish is almost redeemed by the scallops, which, protected by the cooking vessel of the roll itself, have a wonderfully milky sweetness to them. Another “burrito”—the smoked-salmon salad, which comprises a thin filet of house-smoked salmon stuffed with a mixture of frisée, walnuts, and bacon—is just as clever and slightly more rewarding.

A conical mound of tuna tartare, pooled in a delicate, cucumber-Champagne broth and crowned by a thin sail of fried potato, is beautifully presented, but the tuna, like too much tuna these days, is mushy and tasteless. A dice of scallops or yellowtail would be a big improvement. The pork chop’s sauce is indeed yummy, but the chop itself was overcooked the night I tried it, and the German potato salad wasn’t the sharp, mustardy complement it needed to be.

Beyond the kitchen, where husband and wife can maintain constant watch over things, Cynthia’s isn’t nearly so detailed. One night I waited ten minutes for butter to go with my rolls. And the young servers, although enthusiastic, aren’t always knowledgeable enough to explain the intricacies of the dishes. Occasionally, they appear dazed.

The restaurant aims to pave over these lapses by offering great value. Portions are, for fine dining, gargantuan—it’s a wonder anyone can polish off the steak dinner or, for that matter, have room for an entrée after the foie gras. The wine list isn’t the price-gouger that some are, with three and four times the markup over retail; it offers bottles at 2 to 2½ times the retail price. One night, the list included two bargain-priced bottles—a crisp, refreshing St. André de Figuière for $24 and a supple Cusumano for $25.

And the Benningtons are alert to the power of gesture. They send you home with an individually wrapped cinnamon muffin—a thoughtful touch and straight out of the Gramercy Tavern handbook.

If you’re lucky, one of the waitstaff will have remembered to hold the door open for you. The strip-mall parking lot awaits, in all its dreary plasticity. But for a couple of hours, the world was a beautiful place—yummy, exciting, and new.