Fishing Village Flavors Dock at G Street Mole : THE FISH MARKET. 750 N. Harbor Drive, San Diego. 232-3474. Lunch and dinner served daily. Credit cards accepted.

If you build it by the water, they will come.

The trio of partners who own The Fish Market presumably didn’t need a Voice to persuade them to build on one of the choicest parcels of San Diego shoreline.

Everybody knows that ownership of a waterside restaurant entitles you to print money faster than you can say Alexander Hamilton. And a menu headlined by Puget Sound oysters, Oregon Dungeness crab and Catalina swordfish can only help.

If a place on the water is good, the only thing that can beat it is a really huge place on the water. The Fish Market has built a monster of a seafood house on the tip of Tuna Harbor. This spit of land, formerly known as the G Street Mole, slices into San Diego Bay between the Navy supply pier and Seaport Village.

The place definitely is pricey, but, although San Diegans generally are resistant to expensive restaurants, they seem drawn not only by the diversified and carefully prepared menu but by the boatwright-style wood decor and the grand bay views offered at virtually every table. It was jammed on a pair of visits between Christmas and New Year’s.

The Fish Market, part of a six-unit California chain that includes a successful Del Mar restaurant, has space in its two floors of dining rooms, lounges, outdoor decks and sushi and oyster bars to accommodate more than 600. This isn’t a restaurant, it’s a fishing village.

Other major cities, especially those with convention centers, offer massive restaurants, and the opening of this city’s first such establishment may suggest what is in store for San Diego in the 1990s.

The menus brim with a superb and wonderfully broad selection of seafoods, and--wonder of wonders!--the kitchens seem to prepare them uniformly well despite the sheer volume of orders. In addition to the sushi and oyster bars, which have their own lengthy menus, a distinction exists between the casual downstairs room and the relatively more formal and “gourmet” upstairs room, which is called Top of the Market.

The lists in both duplicate each other to a fair degree and run to exhaustive surveys of raw and cooked shellfish, smoked fish, salads, chowders, pastas and grilled seafoods. The upstairs menu acknowledges reality by also offering lamb, veal and beef.

Dinner in Top of the Market was a leisurely, well-served affair that opened with really fine shellfish. The Fish Market owns an interest in a Puget Sound oyster farm, and ships down coppery Belons, its own hybrid Westcott Bay oysters and Manila clams, all quite alive when placed in front of diners. A plate of a dozen tiny Olympias included several that still bore fragrant seaweed beards; Olympias are among the most delicate of oysters, and these were fine specimens.

Seafood cocktails include such specialties as salmon ceviche and tiger prawns in spicy sauce, but the choicest is the Dungeness crab, sweet and briny and served lavishly, which is the only way it should be served (especially at $7.25, a price that would provoke fainting spells among the customers at seafood houses on the Oregon coast). The kitchen tops it with a dab of decent cocktail sauce but relies on the diner’s good sense by also providing thick lemon wedges.

A list of “specialty” starters includes roasted peppers with anchovies; prawns sauced with garlic, or with pesto, Sherry and chowder (!), or Mexican-style with peppers and cilantro; a bucket of assorted shellfish steamed in white wine, and Japanese-style ichiban of ahi, first marinated and then seared briefly to leave the interior quite rare. There are also a warm spinach salad with bay scallops and feta cheese; New England and Manhattan clam chowders, and several appetizer-sized pastas, including one in rough-hewn tomato sauce and another dressed with smoked salmon and cream.

If the menu sounds like it goes on forever, well, it does, but it also has the virtue of avoiding the perfunctory in favor of thoughtful and imaginative preparations. Besides several clever and luxurious seafood pastas, the entree list offers barbecued fresh Idaho trout (most of what comes into town is frozen); mahi-mahi in lemon-lime cilantro sauce; steamed halibut with an Oriental-style flavoring of black beans and ginger, and tender sea scallops grilled in wrappings of the newly-available Italian prosciutto, which comes from Parma, the same place that gives us Parmesan cheese. This last was excellent.

The list of simple grills recently has included Hawaiian hebi, Canadian salmon, local thresher shark, New Zealand John Dory and Catalina swordfish. The swordfish was, quite simply, amazing; moist, soft and gently marked by the grill, it tasted mildly of the coals, almost as if the smoke were a gentle seasoning. But, above all, it tasted remarkably fresh.

The biggest splurge on the menu was local white abalone ($32.50 for a good-sized portion), rarely found in restaurants these days and even more rarely prepared with any style. A server assured that it was “exquisite,” but while tender--this costly seafood can be like shoe leather--it also tasted quite bland under its lemony butter sauce. The sauteing process was evidently too gentle to crisp the abalone’s flour coating, which properly carried out would have given the dish better definition.

Top of the Market side dishes and desserts also are a little grander than those served downstairs. Southern California seafood houses typically serve a soggy goo--the soggier and gooier the better--that they call “rice pilaf.” It is so standard than many diners may not know there is an alternative. The Fish Market’s wild rice pilaf was grudgingly agreed to when the kitchen quite unaccountably ran out of french fried potatoes, but this toothsome, al dente blend of rice and broken vermicelli had excellent flavor and body. Among the desserts, a crisp almond tart chosen from a well-stocked pastry tray was likable for its caramelized glaze and intense flavor.

The downstairs menu repeats many of the same starters, including the sashimi of Florida ahi and Japanese tuna, which is a well-presented offering of clean, fresh-tasting raw fish meant to be dipped in wasabi -powered soy sauce ( wasabi is a particularly hot horseradish paste.)

The entrees tend to be simpler in their approach, and the bulk of the very long list of fish and shellfish is char-broiled over mesquite. An attractive cut of Florida yellowfin tuna had been cooked beautifully and tasted beguilingly fresh, but the kitchen also, rather appallingly, had heavily dusted it with paprika. This is an old trick from the days of not-so-fresh fish and not-so-talented fish cooks, and it was surprising to encounter it here.

The cioppino , on the other hand, was quite superior, except for the fact that the featured Dungeness crab legs had not been cracked and the meat was, therefore, inaccessible. This richly seasoned stew of tomatoes and seafood arrived in a low-sided but immense aluminum cooking vessel that, half full, contained several quarts at least; the sauce washed over sea scallops, large shrimp, juicy chunks of whatever fish with which the kitchen was oversupplied, and quantities of clams, domestic black mussels and New Zealand green lips, many of them submerged under puddles of molten Parmesan.

Reservations are suggested for the Top of the Market, where dinner for two with a glass of wine each, tax and tip will cost $45 to $100. Dinner for two downstairs should run $35 to $60.