Open since late summer at 2948 W. Devon Ave. in Chicago, the restaurant is not only kosher (with certification by the Chicago Rabbinical Council) but parve-a rarity in the kosher world, where eateries usually come in one of two varieties, meat or dairy.

Morgan Harbor Grill specializes in fish, and thereby hangs a tale-a fish story, you could say.

Walk in to the place and you can hardly help but notice that the eatery is next door to the venerable Good Morgan Fish (in fact, you walk into the restaurant through the kosher fish store). Aharon Morgan has owned Good Morgan for 18 years and has been in the fish business for 40, and all that time dreamed about opening a restaurant, he said in a recent phone conversation.

"It was something I always wanted to do, but the opportunity never arose," he says. "The only practical way to do it would be to take the store next door to me," but that space was never available. "One day, I saw a 'for rent' sign, and I said, I want to take the store, and that's how it happened. It was a dream I always wanted to fulfill."

His concept for the restaurant, which seats 52 diners, was "everything made fresh," he says. "I have very high standards in the fish market-nothing here comes out of a can, except tomato paste we use in soup. I wanted to carry that over to the restaurant." The food, he decided, would be "medium priced, but high in quality." And because the market is parve, the restaurant would have to be too. "It's the only kosher parve restaurant I've ever heard of, and it's working very well," he says.

Morgan had ideas about what kind of food he wanted-sushi, plus "different kinds of cooked fish prepared in different ways, grilled fish with pasta, fried fish, with a good portion of the menu devoted to imaginative ways of cooking fish with a Japanese theme to it."

Enter Chef Erik Williams, who had cooked at upscale Chicago eateries including Volo and Bin 36, and specialized in fish dishes. He and Morgan got together through a mutual friend and, Williams says, "I originally started talking with him about coming in to help him open a restaurant, a consulting kind of deal. It ended up as it is now," with Williams cooking at Morgan Harbor Grill and staying for the duration.

Although Williams is not Jewish and hadn't cooked at a kosher restaurant before, he caught on fast to the requirements, Morgan says. Not that the two men always agreed. "He said, put rare tuna fish" on the menu, Morgan relates. "I said no, the customers won't eat it." Morgan finally agreed to add the dish to the menu, specifying on it that the tuna was cooked rare, and "people loved it," he says. "That was very surprising."

The same thing happened with escolar, a fish from the Pacific Ocean similar to tuna. "I thought people would be reluctant to buy it, but we put it on the menu and it's the biggest seller we have," he says, especially the miso and cedar escolar, where the fish is cooked over cedar planks on the grill.

There are also a number of vegetarian items, including vegetarian sushi prepared with tofu, and grilled tofu. And for the sort-of traditionalist, gefilte fish and gnocchi is popular.

He calls his style "fresh contemporary kosher cooking, lighter cooking, with sushi a large part of our business." There's also a limited selection of desserts.

Morgan says he aims to keep prices in line with other fine dining restaurants, hovering at $8-$13 for lunch and $12-$25 for dinner, with an average dinner price of around $20.

You can check it out on Sundays, 5-9 p.m.; Mondays through Thursdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. for lunch and 5-9 p.m. for dinner; and 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on Fridays. Call (773) 764-8115 for more information.

With the restaurant rolling along, Morgan and Williams have a new ambition: to improve the ambience. "When we opened, it was basically a box," Williams says. "Now we're looking at curtains, at decoration. It's something we're working on. It's just a matter of finding the time to get it done."

In addition, they'll eventually have a liquor license and be serving wine and beer, Williams says. (The place is now BYOB; the wine must be kosher and mevushal). Williams has his eye on some microbrews that he thinks would be "really nice to have."

Williams says he is delighted to be bringing "contemporary food to the kosher community. In Chicago, you don't have a lot of that. When I did preliminary research into what was happening on the kosher scene, there really wasn't a lot going on. There was a lot of home-style cooking, traditional Jewish foods, pizza. But what the big trends are in non-Jewish cooking, there wasn't really anything like that."

Now there is.