This quirky new restaurant with its rustic Mediterranean food seems as if it will be a boon to theatergoers.

Yaffa's T-Room + (212) 274-9403 353 Greenwich Street TriBeCa $ All major cards This casually extroverted, quirky restaurant shares its quarters with a bar and draws a predictably motley crew.

The Cors, Laugharne (01994 427 219; www.thecors.co.uk), a quirky restaurant with rooms, is set in enchanting gardens with a consistently good repertoire using local lamb, beef and fish.

"I made my whole career here by taking weird, quirky, run-down restaurants and making them work, not by taking multi-million-dollar spaces designed by Philippe Starck," Bolthouse said.

Sisters & Beans, a quirky restaurant in an old house at 1122 10th Avenue South, (250) 344-2443, offers healthy soups and vegetarian Thai curries and pastas, with the occasional pork loin for good measure.

The owners of this quirky restaurant, Steve and Tami Latham, also operate a wholesale dessert company, Miss Tami's Pies, and their restaurant is the lucky beneficiary.

Quimet y Quimet You can see this tradition, from its simple beginnings to its most elaborate current form, at Quimet y Quimet, perhaps the quirkiest restaurant I know (Poeta Cabanyes, 25; 34-93-442-31-42).

Thinking interferes with pleasure, and there's a lot to love at this highly stylized, very quirky restaurant, which brings some much-needed fun to the New York dining scene.

Il Buco, a quirky, romantic little restaurant that serves a mixture of Spanish and Italian specialties, is known both for its former identity of antique shop by day, restaurant by night, and for its exceptional food.