When chef John Chapman’s restaurant in Biloxi, Miss., all but floated away in Hurricane Katrina, Chapman, a.k.a. “Chappy,” packed up his flamboyant toque and hot-pepper pants and fled to Nashville, where friends graciously offered his family refuge from which to build a new life. Less than a year later, when he hung out his shingle on Church Street in June 2006, Nashville diners—stirred by his heartrending story and the promise of authentic Creole food—also embraced Chappy.

Just ask around and you’ll find that Chappy—or at least his story—cuts a wide swath. His triumph over hurricane-inflicted adversity coupled with his intriguing lineage (the son of a British consul in Curaçao, Chappy learned to cook from his New Yorker mom as she embraced the native spices of the Caribbean) earned the veteran restaurateur an unusual amount of sympathetic ink and airtime from media eager to broadcast a tale of hope among so many hopeless Katrina stories. Consequently, it seems like everyone has heard the name. And a lot of people have tried the food. In fact, on several recent Saturday nights, it was impossible to get a last-minute reservation in the cavernous establishment in the burgeoning midtown section of Church Street.

But ask around in foodie circles, among people who split hairs over the texture, taste and presentation of their meals, and there appears to be less appetite for the restaurant. The sweeping menu of bayou-soaked items offers what feels like endless permutations of heavy spices and classic sauces—meunière, béarnaise and hollandaise—that drench or otherwise overwhelm fish and shrimp so much that the overall experience becomes a soggy WrestleMania of flavors. And with so-so meals coming out of the kitchen for top-dollar prices, the kindness of strangers—especially those who don’t like mealy shrimp, who expect gumbo to have flavor without adding ounces of hot sauce, or who prefer fresh whipped cream on their dessert—can quickly ebb.

That said, three visits—two lunches and one dinner—and several failed attempts to reserve a table on the weekend clearly demonstrate that plenty of folks love the place just as it is. One enthusiastic diner describes Chappy’s as having “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful food,” with an exuberance that can’t be ignored. Such endorsements are great news for Chappy, a resilient and amiable character who has found a niche in his adopted hometown while he works to transplant his restaurant roots here and rebuild his franchise of hot sauces and cookbooks. And the adulation bodes well for the midtown area, which continues to gain critical retail mass along the Church Street corridor.

But for diners who prefer their oyster-and-artichoke soup to have a flavor beyond salt and cream, or who believe that bread pudding should be moist, it’s discouraging news, for the simple reason that one of the many fans of Chappy’s on Church—possibly a client, possibly a relative—will want to share a meal there, and the invitation will come with such exuberance as to make it difficult to decline.

So rather than beat a dead fish with a catalog of grievances about Chappy’s, let us accentuate the positive, with all the optimism of President Bush drafting an email to Brownie.

First, Chappy has done a heckuva job with the old Carter Flooring Building. With two private dining rooms and a series of alcoves, the spacious restaurant seats a diverse crowd of families, couples and business groups with plenty of space between tables. The color scheme of muted red, green and yellow, along with the French Quarter-style wrought-iron lamps, alludes to the kitsch elegance of Mardi Gras, but with restraint befitting a restaurant hundreds of miles from the Pelican State. A carved wooden bar imported from Belgium serves as a focal point and lends a sense of tradition to the young restaurant.

And who doesn’t like to be greeted personally by the chef? On one of our visits, Chappy, decked in 2-foot-tall toque and pepper-printed pants, delivered a plate of chicken fingers to our table, bringing a wide smile to our toddler companion.

A meal at Chappy’s opens well, with gracious service and the festive delivery of fresh-baked bread and signature butters: strawberry, garlic, smoked gator and plain. But as the warm bread starts to cool, losing its initial appeal, so too do the cracks become visible in the larger meal.

The house salad of greens topped with tiny cold pasta shells, cinnamon-tinged homemade pickles and flavorless kidney beans (sometimes the beans were mushed up, sometimes they were whole, but they always raised a lot of questions at the table) presaged entrées of odd combinations that yielded few synergies. Trout Long Beach, a fried fillet, was smothered in a cream sauce with shrimp, mushrooms and crabmeat that recalled a topping of canned cream of mushroom soup. Similarly, scallops “from the pan” arrived as several pale, flaccid hunks in a haphazard tangle of angel hair pasta. The flavor was completely masked by mushrooms, herbs and Parmesan cheese in a nearly monochromatic palate broken only by a side of sweet, heavily cooked carrots—which, at first glance, looked startlingly like cocktail wieners. And the mini crab cake in the center of the barbecue shrimp entrée had the texture of fried tuna salad, which both distracted from the shrimp dish and warned against ordering crab cakes as a stand-alone item.

While the menu at Chappy’s teases diners with alluring specialties such as turtle soup au sherry, crab cakes or grilled grouper, we consistently benefited from sticking with the deep fryer.

Fried green tomatoes emerged with a light and crispy coating, which would have been embellishment enough without the overkill of hollandaise and Parmesan. Chicken fingers and the generous fried seafood platter both arrived piping hot, with light, non-greasy coatings, and the trout meunière was elegant in its lightly dusted, deep-fried simplicity.

That said, Chappy might do well to educate his friendly staff a little better. On one visit, our server recommended several items that included “Ma Mere sauce.” Unfamiliar with Ma Mere sauce, we assumed it was so named because Chappy’s mom had handed down the recipe. (In French, “ma mere” means “my mom.”) But further conversation revealed Ma Mere was nothing more than a malapropism for “meunière,” a sauce traditionally made with butter, Worcestershire sauce and lemon.

When another server asked why we did not make a dent in our shrimp remoulade appetizer, we explained sheepishly that the shrimp were “too mealy.” Misunderstanding our criticism, she graciously replied with something along the lines of, “Yes, it really is bigger than an appetizer—more the size of a whole entrée.”

The best piece of advice we got from a server was to order the coconut cake for dessert. While the disappointing bread pudding was more of a crumbly spice cake topped with caramel sauce and nuts, and the chocolate mousse lacked both airiness and the bitter richness of dark chocolate, the coconut cake satisfied both in texture and taste, packing generous shredded coconut into moist, golden layers. We carried ours home in an adorable to-go package of aluminum foil fashioned into a bunny.

And there, in the foil-formed bunnies and swans filled with leftovers, may be the mysterious allure of Chappy’s on Church. While Chappy’s may fall short of what Nashvillians have come to expect from fine restaurants, it is perhaps what many people remember from them: the white table cloths, the heavy sauces, the grand gestures, the butter mints by the door. And while we can’t agree with the enthusiastic statement that Chappy delivers “wonderful, wonderful, wonderful food,” we can agree with rest of that diner’s endorsement: “He really knows how to put on a show.”

Chappy’s on Church serves lunch and dinner Monday through Friday and champagne brunch and dinner on the weekends.