SEATTLE — As great restaurants will do, JuneBaby pulled me in from more than one direction. The first of course was the sheer pleasure of the cooking. (Without that, the others wouldn’t matter.) The food is Southern, which I was primed to like before I walked through JuneBaby’s Dutch doors in this city’s Ravenna neighborhood. And whenever Edouardo Jordan’s menu offered a dish I’d expect to see at a Southern restaurant, he gave me something better than I’d imagined.

Fried catfish over grits can be better in theory than reality. At JuneBaby, the fish, from an Idaho farm, is firm, tight, fresh and free of bottom-feeder muddiness. The crust is semolina, which stays crisp and unsoggy. The grits are fluffy, yellow, full of corn flavor. Ringing the grits is an orange circle of shrimp bisque. Strictly speaking, shrimp bisque has no business on fish and grits, but if you see the bisque as a tamer, richer stand-in for hot sauce it makes a delicious kind of sense.

This is the tactic — find superior ingredients and bring some fancy kitchen tricks to bear on them — favored by most of the South’s prominent restaurants. If that were all Mr. Jordan had in mind, I would still think JuneBaby is a very good restaurant. But on the menu of this nearly year-old establishment are dishes that I wasn’t expecting, that many of those other restaurants don’t serve, that pulled me in deeper.

Like any good Southern chef, Mr. Jordan loves his pork. But I paid closer attention when I noticed which parts of the pig he’s cooking. He will boil ham hocks with collard greens until the leaves are soft and velvety and wonderfully smoky. He stews pigs’ ears until they surrender their ornery stiffness, then slices and fries them into irresistible, crunchy sticks. He seasons okra and tomatoes with a North African spice mix and stews them with hog maw, otherwise known as the outer wall of the stomach.