IT’S A FUNNY LOCATION FOR A HIP RESTAURANT

To the left of Alexander’s is a pair of burger basilicas, across the street a movie theater and to its right nothing but a plowed field and a dark stretch of Adams Avenue that will eventually find its way to Huntington Beach. Not where you’d expect a hip restaurant.

Nor does the menu at first glance suggest adventure. Teriyaki halibut! Eggplant parmesan! Chicken tetrazzini, for gosh sakes, and pardon my Italian! There really are some surprises, though, starting with the fact that although the bright red piano in the bar is thronged with jazz fans most nights, the menu doesn’t feature anything so obvious as barbecued ribs.

Instead, there’s a wood-burning oven turning out exotic California pizzas you wouldn’t expect to find next door to a Fuddrucker’s: chicken with eggplant, red onion, mixed bell peppers and several cheeses (including feta), or smoked salmon with cheeses and daikon radish. They’re really pretty good, with puffy dough and a faint wood smoke flavor.

The real surprise is in the cross-cultural combinations, which often involve Japan (Alexander’s is owned by a sushi chain called Sea Food Show, and the chef is Katsu Nagasawa). Gyoza--the Japanese name for those fried dumplings Chinese restaurants call “pot stickers”--are suave little pasta packets filled with smoked salmon mousse, served in champagne butter sauce dotted with green onion. The tuna sashimi salad is great: succulent slices of raw, apparently marinated tuna layered with crisp fried rice wafers, arranged over a Japanese sort of salad of carrot and daikon shreds. For cross-cultural effect, there’s a little whole mustard.

Nice, light appetizer stuff; in fact, the appetizers are just about always unusually good. Soft-shell crab comes in the same champagne butter sauce, enclosing a mound of exquisite, tangy ratatouille with mushrooms in it. Cajun shrimp is one of the best California-Cajun dishes around, barbecued in the shell with a nice charcoaly flavor and a decided dash of garlic and red pepper. It’s served with a crunchy nest of “excelsior” potatoes, which are essentially the world’s thinnest shoestrings--about as thin as actual string, though, of course, too fragile to remain in pieces longer than about half an inch.

Kal-bi, which you might call teriyaki beef ribs cut across the bone, are pretty good, though perhaps a little mild by Korean standards. Sesame chicken is a rather plain sort of Oriental McNugget with a nice bit of sesame and garlic flavor, though the actual garlic-sesame sauce advertised is a little hard to find. The only disappointing appetizer I’ve had is the seafood mixed grill (which might as well be called tempura). The crab tasted unaccountably old.

Among the entrees, the best by far is an amazing multicultural filet of beef, topped Continental-style with a cylinder of herb butter (you can remove it in plenty of time to keep it from turning the meat cold), and accompanied by two surprising Japanese-like hot sauces for dipping. One seems to be hot paprika mixed with daikon puree for texture, and the other is a delirious sort of barbecue sauce, sweet-sour and mildly hot, based on Oriental oyster sauce.

Another cultural mix is canneloni stuffed with a mild veal mixture and some smoky Black Forest ham, topped with both cream sauce and marinara. The ham is pretty loud and quite dominates the dish; call me irresponsible, but I loved it. A rather savage blackened mahi-mahi is also noteworthy, quite hot with a simple and effective mixture of red pepper and cumin.

The rest of the entrees don’t seem as inspired, though they’re perfectly OK. Prawns Genova are sauteed simply and served with vermicelli in basil cream sauce. Halibut teriyaki, with sauteed shiitake mushrooms under it, has a teriyaki sauce that might be flavored with stock. Chicken tetrazzini is a little short on the sherry cream sauce, but the noodles taste fresh. Eggplant parmesan is the sloppy, old-fashioned type with lots of tomato sauce and cheese. I should remark that vegetables, apart from the salads, have a tendency to be baby-size and a little overdone.

The dessert choices are completely dominated by a fruit sabayon: fresh fruit (kiwi and various berries) topped with sabayon sauce and stuck under a salamander so that the top of the sauce browns and turns meringue-like. A luxury variant of this dessert includes a ball of sweetened cream cheese, which shelters some raspberries--cheese and raspberries stay entertainingly cold. Otherwise the dessert list is mostly varieties of cheesecake, all OK but none a major contender, plus a simple mixed fruit tart.

Jazz is the usual entertainment at dinner time, plus a magician Thursdays and Sundays, but with its gabled skylight (surrounded by incongruous Doric columns and white tile walls), Alexander’s is actually handsomer, as well as quieter, by day. Prices: At lunch, entrees are $5.25-$8.50. At dinner, appetizers run $5.25 to $8.50, entrees $8.25-$15.50.

ALEXANDER’S CAFE 1565 Adams Ave., Costa Mesa

(714) 241-0123

Open for lunch and dinner daily. American Express, Diner’s Club, MasterCard and Visa accepted.