Soul is a mighty word to wear as your credo. Whether you're a singer or a cook, it implies a gift for conveying the deepest of emotions from deceptively simple art. In so many ways, performing true soul is more about channeling a deep power source than going through the conventions of a specific genre.

So I didn't blink when Samantha Johnson and her mother, chef Angiebrown, told me that their new Chestnut Hill BYOB, Soul, was absolutely, definitely not a soul-food restaurant.

"My food is soulful, not soul food," says Angiebrown, who merged her first and last names a few years ago when she ran a restaurant by the same name. "I'm fabulous - I can do that!"

"Modern Creole," rather, is the term being used to describe the cooking here. And it invites images of Louisiana that, coming up on Mardi Gras, had me nostalgic for my old New Orleans days. Of course, the great Creole dishes I savored during my residence there, from the gumbos and griddled pecan pies to the smothered pork chops and definitive fried chicken, rank among the greatest soul food I've ever eaten.

But it's all a matter of semantics, I suppose, as long as the cooking is good. The name, said Johnson, is really intended to illuminate the restaurant's personal approach, drawing upon the connection between mother and daughter.

"It's about me and my mom, and the food she makes," says Johnson, 24, a former Temple film major and the 2007 Miss Pennsylvania U.S.A. "It's about us."

Of course, close family work relationships aren't always seamless.

"She thinks she's the boss of me," says the chef of her daughter. "She's a foodie, but Samantha isn't always right."

We experienced our own mini-version of the familial miscommunication after Angiebrown had left a message on my guest's phone confirming our reservation.

"We don't take reservations," snipped Johnson when we showed up to a nearly full dining room for our meal. (In fact, reservations are accepted for parties of five or more - we were four.)

There was, luckily, one last table to squeeze into. Unluckily, my disappointing meals here made it clear that this mother-daughter act had put more polish into the personality of their concept than into actually nailing down some satisfying flavors - Creole, soul or otherwise.

This tiny 26-seater has been transformed from the former Citrus into a moody, intimate homage to the family tree, with low lights, bead-draped chandeliers, and black damask curtains framing a multigenerational portrait gallery stretching from a glamorous head shot of Brown as a model at Johnson's age to great-great-great-great-grandfather Shabba Foster.

With lady crooners on the stereo and the promise of Southern flair from the kitchen, I could anticipate, for a moment when we arrived, what a pleasant gem this might be. The complimentary cornbread, warm, lightly sweet and crumbly, was a promising welcome nibble.

And then the food started arriving - with seriously mixed results. The organic greens with beets and goat cheese was a refreshing, albeit prosaic, salad. The fried Portuguese sardines were an oddly out-of-place Mediterranean note, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless. They were fresh and crisply fried, a treat for any adventurous eater. Less exotic, but also tasty, was the thick pork chop over moist buckwheat with sauteed eggplant and peppers.

The steamed clams, though, were a problem. They were full of sea grit, pieces of broken shell, and wild bursts of jalapeño heat, and one of my guests who'd swallowed all three needed a brief trip to the Germantown Avenue sidewalk to gasp for fresh air. An artless hand with spice and seasoning would strike again soon, and often.

I'm not yet completely convinced that collard greens are a poor match for baked oysters. They're not as delicate as the traditional spinach, but the greens paired with the baked mollusks here had a coarseness that reminded me, in a good way, of seaweed. But a heavy dose of Tabasco spice sent the whole oyster platter into a numbing, off-kilter burn.

Likewise, I might have really enjoyed the lumpy crab cakes had it not been for the sauce, supposedly a remoulade, but overspiced with such a ridiculous helping of chile powder, I expected it to burn a hole in my stomach. (Cough, cough - was that smoke?!)

The jambalaya was less off-base than some of the other dishes, but surprisingly dull. It was more of a soupy chicken and andouille stew ladled over white rice than the traditional rice dish that simmers with those ingredients, and wasn't as flavorful as I would have liked. The real question, though, was how it came to be filled with mysterious gritty bits.

I'm all for creative liberties with the classics, but much of this menu isn't "modern" Creole as much as it is simply made up, with virtually no true connection to the iconic dishes it references, and not enough command of good flavors to make the case either way.

Since when is shrimp Creole (usually a chunky tomato sauce over rice) a mushy seafood pasta in an overthickened sun-dried tomato cream sauce? The fish Creole was even more disorienting, and not simply because the tilapia (pricey at $21) was buried beneath a mound of very un-Louisiana-like black beans and tomato salsa. The fish was stained a jarring yellow, a treatment that had rendered it unpleasantly salty.

We didn't actually complain officially. But Angiebrown, after someone had apparently overheard our private conversation in the tiny dining room, tromped out of the kitchen to confront the uneaten plate.

"I heard someone say the fish was salty," she said. "Mmm-hmmm . . . that's my seasoning."

The dish was kindly removed from the bill. But a variation on that seasoning, a common Latin supermarket spice, was also responsible for turning boneless chicken tenders the weird orange hue of lobster claws. It certainly brought a festive look to the pecan maple chicken, a family favorite since Johnson's 12th birthday meal. It's so treacly sweet - topped with a veritable liquid praline of pecans soaked in maple syrup tinged with grain mustard - that I can see why a kid might like it. Grown-ups without such a sweet tooth, not so much.

For a more traditional savory entree, stick with the pork chop, though I understand this dish has since been modified to go with red beans, rice and apples. Not a bad combination.

One thing that probably won't see any changes soon is the sweet potato souffle, deftly made by the chef's mother, Phyllis Brown.

I understand that Brown is also the homespun touch behind Soul's fluffy pound cake and densely sweet bread pudding. I know this thanks to Johnson's terse pronouncement at the table: "My grandmother made them, and if you said you didn't like them - then that would be bad."

No worries. They were the best, most soulful part of our meal.

Correction: In last Sunday's review of Butcher & Singer, I singled out the wrong waiter for praise. It was Michael Galluccio who did such a fine job serving our table.

Contact restaurant critic Craig LaBan at 215-854-2682 or claban@phillynews.com.