A tough name to live up to

Take the “A’’ word, which is all over as of late. Domino’s now has a range of “artisan’’ pizzas. Tostitos offers “artisan’’ chips. And Boston has Artisan Bistro, headed by chef de cuisine Adam Kube. The restaurant replaced Jer-Ne in the Ritz-Carlton.

The food here is substantially closer to the artisanal spirit than mass-market junk food, of course. But it never feels quite so hand-hewn or special as to warrant the name.

Some dishes are very good. The New England clam chowder does the region proud - a just-thick-enough soup that emphasizes flavor over flour, brimming with potatoes and pieces of clam. It’s hard to stop eating.

Chicken comes in a licorice-honey glaze, sweet and herbal, delicious and unusual. This could have been the obligatory bland hotel restaurant chicken dish, and it’s not.

Best yet is Friday’s daily special: whole grilled branzino, simplicity itself. It’s a perfectly cooked fish, the flesh juicy and lightly charred. It’s the sort of thing you might eat in a Mediterranean seaside town, a more relaxed, vacation version of yourself. Our charming server, from Turkey, is positively gleeful as he bones the creature for us tableside. “This is exactly like what you eat in my country,’’ he says, beaming. “Enjoy!’’ We do.

Some dishes are downright bad. Pork Milanese, a special served on Tuesdays, is a vast slab of tasteless breaded pork, too thick to be tender, gummy and undercooked at one end and burned on the other. A salad with tomato, bacon, egg, and blue cheese lacks both dressing and flavor. An otherwise innocuous antipasto plate of Serrano ham with roasted peppers and olives comes with “red eye gravy’’ - an abominable condiment that is not gravy at all but tastes like coffee-flavored mayonnaise.