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Time flies. It’s been a year and a few months now that chef Nicholas Batey and general manager Saundra Jackson have been running Bicycle (1444 Light St., [410] 234-1900), after buying the Federal Hill charmer from Barry Rumsey and Deborah Mazzoleni. The place is humming with its characteristic downtown energy and the food is better than ever.

Everything that always made Bicycle so appealing is still in place. It still feels like a night out here, the bright and intimate interior still shimmers with possibilities of good city living. The back garden remains fragrant and well-tended. Perhaps the place has mellowed. Both the serving staff and the clientele are more diverse, and the front bar, which accommodated overflow crowds on a recent weekend night, feels less like a place to be seen in than a room in which to hunker down with friends.

The menu has changed gradually and considerably, with now only three or so signature dishes from the Rumsey days still on hand—the sashimi tuna and avocado tartare, the lobster ravioli, and the Mongolian barbecue beef short ribs. What remains is the enthusiastic and confident management of quality ingredients given, whenever possible, an exotic spin. If anything, the effects have been amplified. If a typical dish before had four intertwining motifs, it now has five. And the portions are definitely bigger, staving off complaints of preciousness.

Batey has managed to hold onto two of the sous chefs—Colin McCann and Lauren Glover—that preceded his arrival and, with them, he’s made Bicycle feel brand new. Even that war-horse, the luscious, squid-inked lobster ravioli ($12 appetizer/$23 entrée), is something to rediscover, with oven-dried grape tomatoes replacing the chopped tomatoes and spiked with tender shoots of broccolini and slabs of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

A meal here can nearly overwhelm with flavors and devices. Neither is the kitchen shy about bathing its food in butter and shaking it down with pepper. Things could go wrong but seldom do. Even when a dish fails to fuse together, as with a Gulf Stream red snapper ($27), done in by a too-intense tomato and fennel bouillabaisse broth, the component parts—a delicate fish, an accomplished sauce—gave real pleasure.

Every other time the nerve paid off. It did resoundingly with the two available soups, both masterful: a roasted red pepper bisque ($7) and a spicy corn soup with blue crab ($7). Garnished with seared spicy tuna, the aromatic bisque had full and deep sunshine flavor, suggesting careful roasting of hand-picked peppers. The corn soup, topped with a grilled corn salsa and chive cilantro sour cream, held its interest and power through every spoonful. If anything, the portion of each was too big. There’s much more to experience.

A salad of peppery greens with a lineup of six plump and briny fried oysters ($12) is drizzled with a simple aioli, the tender lettuces blended with a chipotle vinaigrette and underscored with diced hot and sour cucumbers. A salad of baby mache ($10) is more soothing, with warm goat cheese, apple crouton, baby tomatoes, and pumpkin seeds over a nest of spaghetti squash. Neither one screams summer, perhaps, on what’s being promoted as a seasonal menu. It’s not a problem.

Goose fat-roasted fingerling potatoes tossed with leeks and bacon send what is already a fiercely good grilled New York strip entrée ($29) soaring. Crusted with horseradish, garlic, and cracked pepper, the steak is gorgeously tender and juicy, simmering in Roquefort butter and a vigorous sauce espagnole. Everything the kitchen threw at a specimen rack of lamb ($28), mild and meaty, took—the cilantro lime marinade, the grilled pineapple and roasted poblano chutney, the dabs of spicy apricot sauce—and it all made sense.

Much happens also with a soft-shell crab ($32)—a blue-cornmeal crust, an ancho remoulade with capers, bacon, and anchovy, a green chile and avocado sauce, a sunchoke purée—and the effects here, as elsewhere, accumulate rather than compete. Every bite matters, and the crab’s inherent mouth-filling sweetness survives intact.

And what’s a bread pudding ($7) if it’s not floating in a raspberry sauce, and without fresh mango, dried cherries, and broken bits of Belgian chocolate shoved into its dense but pliant layers? It’s not dessert at Bicycle, where nothing succeeds like excess. The only change for the worse—Bicycle no longer serves dinner on Monday nights.

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