The ownership has changed at Atlas restaurant, but everything else seems largely the same.

Husband-and-wife team Michael Roberts and Jean Donnelly ran Atlas for about seven years before selling it last year to Bryan and Diane Carr of Pomme fame. Chef Daniel Dreher now runs the Atlas kitchen, and he's kept the menu close in theme to the old Atlas, adding a touch more Italian accent to Roberts' French-bistro approach. It's a lack of change you can believe in.

Piccolo Fritto ($8.50) — a fried, breaded vegetable appetizer — was there at the beginning and evolved into a signature dish. Its current version still has an ethereal quality to the coating and crisp asparagus, onion, broccoli and other veggies inside, perfectly accompanied by "lemon-garlic aïoli." (Maybe it's just me, but "garlic aïoli" seems redundant to the point of déjà vu all over again.)

Two slices of the fat-wrapped country terrine ($8) were smooth in texture but dense with various pork bits, served with a half-dozen olives and sliced raw vegetables.

Gnocchi ($8) had a wonderful textural interplay between the dumplings and butternut squash, while scallop gratin ($9) was the only dish during either of our visits that struck me as mundane, perhaps because the delicate scallop flavor was a little too mild.

My wife tweeted the following about the braised lamb shank ($23) while we were dining: "… And an absolutely microscopic taste of Joe's lamb shank because he growled and showed teeth." The cut-off-the-bone preparation of the shank meat was terrific. Removing the meat from the bone before serving made the portion size seem smaller, but this was an illusion. There was more than enough of the richly flavored and textured shank meat, with strips of mint topping a suitably reduced red wine, lamb jus and garlic sauce that dribbled into the accompanying couscous. (And I'm sorry I growled, dear. Next time, bat my nose with a newspaper — preferably mine.)

The strip steak part of steak-frîtes (steak and fries, $22) was good, although we've probably become jaded by the amount of prime-grade and other specialty beef we've been eating lately. A dollop of herbed steak butter topped the meat, but the star of this dish was the fries, which had an airy crunch almost like a cheese straw and just a hint of sweetness in the potato flavor. We thought this might come from frying in peanut oil, but our server told us that the oil is standard cooking oil and that the texture and flavor are produced by frying twice.

The flavors of the season were captured by pumpkin ravioli ($19). The herbal edge of its brown-butter sage sauce was an ideal match for the sweet squash flavor, while the nuttiness of the brown butter was picked up and amplified by toasted pine nuts.

Marjolaine ($6) — layers of flavored meringues, crème fraîche and chocolate — is another signature dish that dates to the restaurant's early days, and it's still a wonderful stack of fluffy and creamy textures followed by bursts of nut and chocolate flavors.

I kept feeling something was missing in the service, and it finally occurred to me that the something was Donnelly. That's no fault of the new management; it's just not the same when the restaurant is your baby, as it was for Donnelly, who somehow always managed to pay multiple visits to every table in the place.

And while Roberts had a similar intrinsic tie to the kitchen, Dreher has orchestrated a seamless transition as far as the quality of the food is concerned. That's much more difficult than it sounds, especially when the standards and expectations for an existing restaurant are quite high.

Dreher, the Carrs and their team are making Atlas their own, and they're doing a great job of making sure you don't notice any difference.