My first thought on walking into Lonesome Dove was, I wonder what this’ll look like in six months. Not the restaurant — I was thinking of the wind-blown, rain-sodden cowhide rug spread on the sidewalk to limply welcome customers. But the sentiment could apply to the unusual restaurant as well.

A branch of a Fort Worth, Texas, hit, Lonesome Dove Western Bistro comes to the Flatiron District looking to impress. That rug is typical of chef and owner Tim Love’s ambitious showmanship. Invited to cook a meal at New York’s James Beard House in 2003, he literally saddled up and made the trip from Texas on horseback (with a little help from a tour bus). He sells a line of cookware, writes a column for Maxim magazine, and presides proudly at the new Lonesome Dove, striding beneath its antler chandelier in a big white cowboy hat. His attention-grabbing menu reads like Aesop with a grill: rabbit, deer, antelope, quail — close to 20 different beasts in all. They’re cooked with a brash, haute-ranch approach that I’m sure some diners find enthralling. It can be encapsulated in one telling sentence: The chef puts a chile rub on foie gras.

A $12 starter served on grilled bread, the liver is lavishly creamy, but that rub — there’s the rub. Despite the abundance of meat on Mr. Love’s menu, it seems to bore him, since he subjects almost every bit of meat to a thick coating of spice rub that overpowers any subtle flavors it might attempt to demonstrate. In the foie gras’s case, the rub tastes of scorched sagebrush after it’s bruléed, and the “camp bread” it’s served on is a bland, cottony flatbread that may be a hit at the chuck wagon but doesn’t offer much pleasure for us indoor diners.

“Prairie butter” ($10) is the marrow of bison, served in situ in lengthwisehalved leg-bones. The gelatinous, rich marrow holds its own under a heavy dusting of salty, spicy rub, although spreading it as directed on the accompanying camp bread does it no favors. A starter of antelope ribs ($12) is as close as the cooking comes to what the average New Yorker on the street thinks of as Texan food: barbecue. The sparse, bony ribs have a good slathering of tangy sauce, but the distinctiveness of their very lean meat comes through.

The too-much-rub problem recurs on the delicate surface of a deer chop ($31) whose tender meat is otherwise excellent, juicier than most venison and probably with great flavor somewhere under the spice. A duck breast ($27), too, gets lost under its over-salty seasoning. Neither the soggy truffled orzo that accompanies the deer, nor the cheesy potato cake that comes with the duck, is worth finishing. Beef tenderloin ($34) escapes the rub, but instead the meat is larded with roasted garlic that masks its beefy taste.

If you’re going to charge $125 for a steak, it had better weigh 40 ounces and come with a lobster tail on the side. Mr. Love’s Texas-sized “tomahawk chop” does, in fact, meet those criteria, but still I didn’t chance it — the chop came too highly recommended by the waitress, the same one who had raved wideeyed on my last visit about the wan orzo, the unimpressive duck, and the worst of the desserts. When she started waxing about the giant beef’s rub, I tuned out.

There’s an unkind Texan phrase used to describe something that’s showy but lacking substance: “All hat, no cattle.” Lonesome Dove is brimming with literal cattle, starting at the cowhide rug, but it’s also not entirely without metaphorical cattle. The “prairie butter” is delicious; and a dark-horse main course of lamb chops ($26) is fantastic. Two double rib chops from a succulent Australian animal, seared with raspberry reduction, show dramatically what the chef can do when he eases off on the drama. Under its savory crust, the meat is buttery and bursting with flavor — its own flavor — and a rich mushroom bread pudding on the side still lingers in fond memory. Even the flashy stuff can be delicious sometimes: Lobster strips fried crisp with bacon grease (a rather treyf $15 side dish) combine the sweet subtlety of shellfish with the smoky richness of pork.

The waitress promised great things from an individual chocolate cake spiced with ancho chile ($8) but the chile was barely detectable and the cake was subpar. A light flan ($8), fragrant with coffee liqueur and with a pudding-like delicacy, was much better.

Australia, in its role as honorary Wild West, furnishes not just a lot of the restaurant’s game, but also much of its wine. There’s not a European bottle on the list outside the sparkling category. Our waitress redeemed herself by recommending, not the Kenwood white zinfandel ($8/$30), but Chateau Reynella’s earthy, resiny shiraz ($12.50/$50), a wine whose power and structure are a pillar in this dizzying culinary menagerie.

Lonesome Dove Western Bistro (29 W. 21st St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-414-3139).