Find one answer to two questions at Niko’s, located in Lebanon’s recently re-opened Market House: Whatever happened to Brian Kent’s? And, how can a hot young chef top his early success?

Brian Kent’s restaurant was the signature creation of Brian Kent Matlick II, the Palmyra native who returned home after award-winning gigs in Hawaii, Pittsburgh, Lexington, KY, and Atlanta. His 38-seat restaurant and its towering entrees won over doubters who said that fine cuisine couldn’t succeed in Hershey.

But one day, after six years in business and two small children at home, Matlick’s four-year-old daughter said that daddy lived at the restaurant. With that wake-up call, Matlick shut down Brian Kent’s and spent six months with the kids — “the greatest experience of my life,” he says now.

When it was time to return to work, Matlick wanted to indulge his passion for restaurant design, but he turned down potential start-ups from Harrisburg, York and Philadelphia because he chose to raise his family in Palmyra. The right match came along when Bill Kolovani, developer of the Lebanon Farmers Market , sought Matlick as a chef partner to design a steak-and-martini restaurant.

The restaurant was named Niko’s, honoring Kolovani’s father, an Albanian immigrant who rose from dishwasher to restaurant owner. Kolovani and restaurant manager Mike Campanella freed Matlick to design the kitchen and implement the rest of Kolovani’s vision — raw bar, cigar lounge, wood oven, the kind of place that would welcome both the fine diner and the late-evening socializer. The kitchen is open for view, 20 drafts are on tap, and Matlick himself infuses liquors such as the gingered apple vodka and cigar-infused bourbon (you just have to try it to experience the smoothness).

In the fine dining room, guests sit in tall, discreetly lit booths under the old building’s arched ceiling of wooden beams. The lounge’s warm and elegant décor begins with a 36-foot oak bar rescued from a Pennsylvania hotel. Local memorabilia adorns the walls — a 1950s Budweiser poster found in the ceiling, plaster cutouts of debating politicians from Harrisburg’s old Penn Harris Hotel, childhood portraits of Kolovani, Matlick and Campanella in a corner conversation pit.

All of the items on the menu — Mediterranean-inspired but flavored by every place where Matlick has touched down — are available in either room, except for the dinner entrees at lunch. They range from the Hunan seafood medley appetizer ($5) to the Niko’s signature prime filet mignon ($48), from the same distributor that supplies Ruth’s Chris, Morton’s and other great steakhouses.

“With a piece of meat that good, you don’t even have to prep it,” Matlick says. “Put it on the grill, add some salt and pepper, and it’s mouth-watering.” The sauces are all made in-house from Matlick’s recipes, including the roasted garlic herb butter accompanying the steak and the lemon herb beurre blanc served with the horseradish-crusted Scottish farm-raised salmon. Freshness is Matlick’s mantra, and the entire staff is well trained in the qualities of the food.

“I like to give people something they know but with a twist on it,” Matlick says. So, for example, the well-traveled chef feeds the central Pennsylvania soul with pork tenderloin roasted in an apple-butter barbecue sauce.

Ultimately, the dishes at Niko’s are flavored with a pinch of Kolovani’s drive and a taste of Matlick’s passion for restaurant design and good food.

“I just want people to have fun here,” Matlick says. “I’m lucky enough in my life to find what I’m really good at. Not many people find that – something that they really, truly enjoy and get to do. I see myself doing this when I’m 80, 90 years old.

This is my restaurant. It’ll always be a part of me.” SS