Meaning of 小気味のいい音？

Question

Original sentence: 食器のたてる小気味のいい音と、他のテーブルから聞こえるリラクスした笑い声。

This is the first sentence of the chapter, but the following sentences display the setting of eating your first proper meal after being released from the hospital, but only your table seems to have this dark foreboding air about it.

I feel like 食器のたてる小気味 would be the feeling of picking up tableware, but のいい confuses me, even more so with 音.

I’ve struggled with the sentence for months and always skipped over it as something like, “Along with the pleasing sound of shifting tableware, relaxed laughter can be heard from the other tables.” I’m really not sure if this is even close though.

I thought maybe it could be in the context of がいい while switching が for の but that doesn’t seem to work either.

I did find a dictionary entry for いい as a noun: “what was said, what it means, origin of a story; often used as ~のいい” but that doesn’t seem to help either since there’s no example sentences.

Answer 1

小気味がいい is an uncommon set phrase that means "pleasant" (or maybe "nice", "neat", etc). 食器のたてる modifies 小気味のいい音 as a whole (notice the が-の conversion). So a literal translation is:

食器のたてる小気味のいい音
pleasant sounds which the tableware makes

But your translation seems good already.

気味 is a noun that means "feeling/mood", but it's used almost exclusively in certain set phrases, namely いい気味だ, 気味が悪い, 薄気味悪い and 小気味がよい. -気味 also works as a suffix meaning "-like", "-ish".