When I first moved to New Jersey in 1987, residents of downtown Jersey City who cared about the latest trends in food did their dining in Hoboken. In 2001, Marco & Pepe opened to accommodate the growing influx of urban homesteaders, and now there are Madame Claude Cafe, the Light Horse Tavern and Thirty Acres, among other notable restaurants. There is also Satis.

Michael Fiorianti, formerly a chef at Goldman Sachs, became the executive chef at Satis when it opened in December 2010. (Satis means enough in Latin, as in the word satisfied.) Now the rest of us can enjoy the dishes he mastered by observing his Italian-American grandmother in her Brooklyn kitchen and, later, celebrated chefs like Thomas Keller.

I learned these facts during a telephone interview with Mr. Fiorianti after my visits, but only by tasting his pillow-soft ricotta gnocchi or lusty hanger steak can one appreciate how thoroughly he has absorbed these lessons. I ate simple dishes at Satis (bread, cured meat and cheese) and complex ones (a duck ragù entwined with stracciatella cheese), and all of them had the same effect: I wanted to move to within walking distance of Satis so that I could eat Mr. Fiorianti’s dishes every day.

Other talents helped create Satis. Michael Garcia and Geza Gulas, the owners, discovered a century-old building where Eastern European immigrants who settled in the area in the early 1900s bought their bread and meat. The soaring space inspired them to create a restaurant that had at its heart a salumeria. From here, patrons can purchase cheeses and meats to go — Satis orders them from Salumeria Biellese, which also supplies Eataly in Manhattan — or they can sample them in any of three beautifully renovated dining areas.