The transaction for the development site, between Second and Third avenues, closed on Nov. 18, just nine days after the seller, Hotel East 44th Street LLC, filed the lawsuit against the Government of the Republic of Senegal. According to the lawsuit, Senegal originally agreed to pay $27 million for the vacant land, but kept stalling on the delivery of the $25 million balance on the purchase, "a seemingly easy enough requirement for the government of a country that wants to be taken seriously."

The suit went on to claim that the sellers got personal assurances that the money would be delivered from Ambassador to the U.N. Paul Badji, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, and Senegalese Energy Minister Samuel Sarr.

Apparently, the dispute was settled out of court, and the price renegotiated.

The day the transaction closed, Senegal's attorneys at Cozen O'Connor issued a press release on PR Newswire announcing the transaction and saying the lawsuit had been withdrawn. The release even contains an apologetic quote attributed to the "sellers":

We are hereby withdrawing our lawsuit and apologize for any unnecessary publicity this may have caused. We understand that this has been a difficult financial climate in the world and these difficulties have contributed to what, in the end, turned out to be a misunderstanding. Fortunately, it was a misunderstanding that both we and the Senegalese Government worked closely together to resolve quickly. The representatives of the government of Senegal at all times acted with integrity, in good faith and proceeded with due diligence to complete the transaction.

The West African nation plans to erect a building called Maison du Senegal, which will serve as the country's mission to the United Nations and as offices for culture and trade.

The seller's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

drubinstein@observer.com

"Thank God it's Friday," said our hostess cheerfully as she showed us to a candlelit table in the upstairs dining room.

Indeed. The place was packed, and judging from the sound of laughter and clinking glasses, the people here-most of them young and stylish-were having a rollicking good time. With the exception of a couple in the corner, they were all Japanese.

My companion wanted something to snack on with his cocktail. "How about cheese sticks?" suggested the waitress. An odd choice, but why not? They turned out to be a kind of deep-fried spring roll, made with a thin wonton-like skin wrapped around melting mozzarella cheese. They were cut in two-inch pieces and served not with a dipping sauce, but with a wedge of lemon.

"A great snack for a guy watching football on TV," said my friend as he took the last one.

Butai is a two-tier restaurant offering two different experiences depending upon where you sit. On the ground floor, the music is quite loud and people mill around the bar or sit at the counter, where they can watch the chefs making sashimi and cooking on a robata grill. A long, high communal table set with stools takes up the center of the room. The main dining room is upstairs. It is spacious and comfortable, with high ceilings and large windows, hung with swagged, metallic-looking silk taffeta curtains, that look out over the street below. The walls are covered with dark brown velour that absorbs noise, and the polished dark wood tables, placed far apart, are set with votive candles.

The restaurant has a very, very long menu: several well-thumbed pages presented on a clipboard, with over 150 items, under no less than 19 headings. It's as confusing as a menu in a Chinatown restaurant; there are so many dishes that you feel you may as well simply order at random and see what you get. Which is exactly what I did.

Chef Seiji Hanahashi's assorted "inspirational" sushi platters are priced at $40, $60 and $80. The $40 platter was plenty for two, with very fresh sushi that included uni and yellowtail. The choice of sushi, sashimi and "special" rolls is vast, and it includes a "live shell" selection with Japanese conch in soy sake glaze and orange clams. The "special" rolls are particularly good. Crunchy dragon roll is made with eel, cucumber, tempura flake and avocado topped with tobiko (flying fish roe); a spider roll is filled with fried soft-shell crabs; and whitefish tempura is wrapped in a bean sheet with asparagus, tomato and jalapeño.

The most expensive dish on the menu by far is the aburi toro, which costs $30. This is bluefin tuna, cut from the richest, fattiest part of the fish, a connoisseur's delight. We were served five pieces, and they had been briefly seared to give them a subtle, slightly charcoal taste, but I found them greasy. I would have preferred the toro raw.

Under the section headed "kushi yaki" (grilled chicken), the menu reads like a found poem:

Momo thigh 3.00

Mune breast 3.00

Kawa skin 2.50

Teba wing 2.75

Tsukuno meatball 4.00

Whatever you order-main course or appetizer, thigh, meatball or skin-all the food comes at once. Homemade tofu (a luscious, creamy custard in a bowl) and squares of pork belly threaded on skewers with charred scallions appeared alongside grilled, salted whole chicken breast cut in chunks under a crackling golden skin. "Today's Zensai," an appetizer, showed up at the same time, too- a platter of five small bites: meaty pieces of seared, marinated duck, peppered tuna, a squared-off nob of Japanese yam, eel sushi and asparagus with sesame sauce. It came with a glass of plum wine on the side.

There are over two dozen items cooked on the robata grill, from flame-broiled lamb chops to "striped arabesque greenling." The latter name sounds like a badly translated line from a poem by Baudelaire ("striped arabesque greenlings greet the yellow dawn … "). Our waitress, a beautiful young woman from Senegal, struggled to explain exactly what it was. All I can tell you is that it's a whitefish, called "hokke" in Japanese, and it arrived at our table as a perfectly grilled fillet, with a sweet flesh. Another fish from the grill, sanma (helpfully translated for English readers as "saury"), looks like a cross between a mackerel and a huge sardine. It's related to the needlefish and has a long, sharply pointed nose. The saury is served whole; those who can successfully fillet it with their chopsticks should be entitled to a free dinner.

To go with this food, there's a selection of chilled sake; if you prefer wine, the gavi and pinot grigio are good white choices. A New Zealand sparkling wine, the spumante Lindauer Brut, is surprisingly agreeable and nice on a hot day. Whatever you do, don't order the house cosmopolitan. It's made with Midori and peach schnapps and is so sickeningly sweet that I found it undrinkable.

I've eaten in a great many Japanese restaurants in the past year, from Lower East Side noodle bars, midtown sushi counters to mega-celebrity hot spots like Megu, Matsuri and Ono. Butai is not cutting-edge; the food's not innovative, nor is it served on fancy pottery in Zen-like or lavishly decorated surroundings complete with pools and Buddhas. But I was won over by this restaurant (even though I only made a dent in the menu). It's a lively, modest, unassuming place. The service couldn't be friendlier, and the food is not only good, it's inexpensive. I didn't go home feeling as I did a few months ago after an $800 dinner for two at Masa in the Time Warner Center: that if they brought back the guillotine and set it up in the square outside the restaurant, I shouldn't be surprised.

album approximation of the world. "Specialist in All Styles," indeed.

The laboratory for this honest-to-God one-world music was not, happily, Peter Gabriel's garden studio or Paul Simon's travel diary, but rather Senegal's port city of Dakar in the 1970's. Beginning in the 40's, Cuban music had made the reverse migration back to West Africa, whence had come the slaves and rhythmic sensibility that had helped give rise to the son and the rumba in the first place. The Africans not only "got" the Cuban style, they recognized it as kin. Owing to the vicissitudes of European imperialism, the Senegalese spoke French; Spanish was just a bunch of syllables to be sung phonetically, but that proved no great obstacle.

Soon enough, Senegal boasted its own roster of crackerjack Cuban-style combos, with the Orchestra Baobab-an all-star group that came together at Dakar's Baobab Club in 1970-first among them. In a postcolonial Africa increasingly in love with the ideals of African-ness and Negritude, the Orchestra Baobab were able to modify the Cuban template, adding percussion elements from the Casamance region in the south and "praise songs" from the Wolof country in the north. These tribal tales of moral advice and uplift were voiced in eerie, impassioned timbres that had never graced Cuba's Orquesta Aragon or the Beny Moré band.

By the mid-80's, it was over: The Orchestra Baobab was "old school," replaced by a new generation of Afro-Pop superstars like Youssou N'Dour and Baaba Maal playing a jumpy six-beat Wolof-rock hybrid called mbalax . Though as heavily indebted to Western pop and rock as Baobab was to

Cuba, Messrs. N'Dour and Maal nevertheless captured the imagination of Senegal, as well as a large and emerging Western world-music audience. They were, and are, revered as latter-day griots -traditional storytellers-in a way that was beyond the Baobab group in their chinos and sport shirts.

In this story, musical evolution never proceeds in a straight line; everything bends back to the starting point. Nick Gold, the World Circuit records chief who did his part to usher in the 80's craze for West African world music, fell in love with traditional Cuban music through some old recordings of the Orchestra Baobab.

Suitably inspired, he rounded up a bunch of overlooked, long-in-the-tooth Cuban musicians, came up with a fictional pedigree (in some parallel universe, they might have played together in a real but long-defunct Havana nightclub), and launched what became the Buena Vista Social Club juggernaut, ushering in a second, Cuba-centric world-music wave.

The Orchestra Baobab made for an ideal follow-up. Its members, after all, had actually lived the Buena Vista story line-i.e., the brilliant, discarded band whose fortunes rose and fell with a legendary nightclub that gave them their name. Last year's reissue of some choice '82 tracks, the double-CD Pirates Choice (World Circuit/Nonesuch), found an audience, paving the way for Specialist in All Styles , a full-dress rehabilitation and reintroduction of the band which, after having fallen apart completely in 1987, is now up and running as a touring unit-a shockingly good one, based on the evidence of this record. Key members of the original band are back, among them Wolof praise singer Ndiouga Dieng and two other vocalists, Balla Sidibe and Rudy Gomis, who bring a harmonic sensibility peculiar to their Casamance region.

Or so the ethno-musicologists tell me. But even the innocent Western ear will pick out Issa Cissoko, a saxophonist from the James Brown school of muscular funk, and the revelatory electric guitarist Barthelemy Attisso, who emerged from a 15-year musical retirement to offer up immaculate single-note solo runs that, depending on the tune, can recall Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian or the Ventures.

And just in case you missed the Buena Vista connection, World Circuit saw fit to drop B.V. crooner Ibrahim Ferrer into one improvised tune, dubbed "Hommage à Tonton Ferrer." Such is the relaxed, men-of-a-certain-age swagger of the Orchestra Baobab that he sounds right at home.

With all its tony production values, Specialist in All Styles , like the Buena Vista Social Club album, sounds almost too good-closer to a memory or a dream than a slice of musical history. I'm not complaining. A similar artful perfectionism runs through Nothing's in Vain (Coono du Réér) (Nonesuch), the new album by Youssou N'Dour-who served as a co-producer on the Orchestra Baobab album, just in case any dots remain unconnected. If Specialist in All Styles is a testament to the pleasures of a resourceful collective, Nothing's in Vain speaks to the ravishing power of the solo virtuoso. He sings in three languages-Wolof, French and English-and he seems to contain within him at least that many voices, from the suave baritone heard on the French love meditations to the pinched, slightly hysterical tenor he uses to exhort his people to better themselves. Here, Mr. N'Dour has toned down the pop elements from his earlier work, the synth lines and sax solos, in favor of a highly produced, self-consciously folkloric sound.

It suits him. Mr. N'Dour has been a savvy world traveler for some time now, and unlike the Orchestra Baobab, he didn't have to wait 15 years to be reinvented by a Western record label. He built a studio in Dakar and did it himself.