Chaya Hits the Beach : It started in Los Feliz and then spread to West Hollywood. Next, it appeared on the Sunset Strip. Now it’s finally made it to the ocean’s edge and Chaya Venice is everything you have come to expect from the Chayas.

Like a great spangled beast taking glacially slow steps, Chaya moves to the sea.

Or at least that’s how it seems. Ten years ago La Petite Chaya, the pioneering Franco-Japanese restaurant, opened in Los Feliz to great acclaim. A couple of years later, a second footprint of the Chaya Beast appeared in West Hollywood up the street from the Beverly Center--Chaya Brasserie, where Japanese parasols hung whimsically from the ceiling.

Less formal and with a more eclectic menu, Chaya Brasserie targeted the emerging L.A. taste with uncanny accuracy. Then a couple of years later, as if the Chaya Beast were moving its hind foot westward, the original place on Hillhurst closed down and the Chaya Diner appeared on the Sunset Strip.

Now the latest step has appeared: Chaya Venice. It’s definitely in the tradition, a little like a cross between La Petite Chaya (relatively sober decor) and Chaya Brasserie (if anything, an even more eclectic menu).

Great stuff. The crowd swigs its mineral water and roars.

It’s certainly the handsomest Chaya yet, managing to be both impressive and comforting. The door and the bar are the impressive part, dominated by a huge, arresting metal panel, partly corroded blue-green and leaning at an imperious angle.

The rest of the warehouse-sized room is warmer. From the ceiling hangs an odd frame of blond wood that suggests a vault curving cozily over the diners, but the real ceiling is flat, painted with flowering branches and perching birds. From it hang lamps that split the difference between Art Deco and Oriental, alternating with little snake’s-head spotlights that recall the cute robot in the movie “Short Circuit.”

Altogether it’s a very pleasant place, with about a medium sonic level; you can hear yourself think most of the time. Maybe that’s because, fashionable and crowded though Chaya Venice is, people don’t seem to be there merely because it’s the latest place to be. The room has a buzz of food-lust. People openly crane their necks to stare at the plates being brought to the next table.

Of course, the plates are worth looking at in themselves, always lyrical and colorful in the Chaya manner. Take the seaweed salad. Seaweed is there--chewy, gray-green, paper-thin sheets with a licorice-like flavor contrasting with the pickled ginger vinaigrette--but buried under a mountain of at least six salad greens, including peppery radish sprouts. It’s a chaste, vegetarian picture of wild abandon.

There are also the usual Chaya-type marvels of food technology. How in theworld do they make the tuna spring roll? Inside the flimsiest imaginable layer of filo-like pastry is an oblong chunk of tuna, surrounded by a forcemeat that tastes like a mixture of ground shrimp and calamari . Here’s the trick: somehow the forcemeat is cooked, while the tuna is raw. It’s like a sort of fishy baked Alaska.

There’s a mild mania for stuffing things on the appetizer menu. Jalapeno peppers are stuffed with shrimp, like tiny, sneaky-hot chiles rellenos . Scallops are hollowed out, filled with ground shrimp and then cooked in a sort of armor plating of sliced almonds; a bit fussy, that one.

The appetizers begin to prepare you for the cross-cultural tendencies of the entrees. In the middle of a delicious curried crab soup, slightly sweet and mapley, stands a thick slice of crab-stuffed cabbage roll topped with a tiny, strictly ornamental crab the size of your thumb. What would you call it: Indian, French, Hungarian?

The best of the entrees is at least partly Frenchified, the Moroccan lamb chops. These are particularly meaty rib chops in a thin tomato and sweet pepper sauce dashed with mint--a bit too dainty for real Moroccan food. On the side comes a ratatouille featuring rather a lot of tomato sauce, and unless these taste buds fail me, some sweet fennel bulb. Instead of rice, though, there’s a bit of couscous.

There’s a huge rib-eye steak on the menu too, served with grilled vegetables and quaint little balls of mashed potato encased in almond slices. Basically, though, this is more of a fish than a meat menu. Halibut in soothing spinach and chive sauce. Swordfish with sweet peppers.

And lots of Oriental stuff, pure and cosmopolitanized, particularly on the specials menu. Pure is, for instance, lobster with to-bang jan sauce, a thin peppery tomato sauce made in an exceptionally clean and classical manner. Cosmopolitanized might be seabass in Chinese scallop and onion confit ; the fish is topped with a sweet, aromatic hash of scallops and wilted onions and surrounded by a thin chive-sprinkled cream sauce.

The specials are also where to look for unusual, meaty flavors. Salmon might be available in a Chinese brown sauce flavored with capers and thin, chewy slices of giant clam. Duck with walnut oil and confit comes in a meaty sauce with slices of fried potato, and on the side, resting on top of some thin, baby asparagus, a square of mashed potato mixed with fried duck confit .

The biggest cross-cultural extravaganza on the menu is tuna nicoise. It’s made with smoked tuna, raw inside and barely charred on the outside, dressed with whole-seed mustard and tarragon vinaigrette. But instead of being laid on a bed of European vegetables, it rests next to lettuces, peppers, radish sprouts and a mysterious pink paste that turns out to be an exotic variation on the Greek dip taramosalata , made with mashed potato and flying fish eggs.

Not everything is so inspired. Rather thick veal scallops marinated in pesto are tasty grilled, but hardly a breakthrough. Chaya Venice’s version of penne arrabbiata , tarted up with Montrachet cheese, is actually sort of a flop; the French cheese is nice in itself but has nothing to do with the dish, and the tomato sauce is, shockingly, not peppery in the slightest.

The only thing I’ve positively disliked here, though, was a special appetizer of mussels in “spicy tomato sauce.” The fresh but un-spicy tomato sauce could not save these lukewarm mussels.

Yes, there are desserts. They’re perfectly good, really, but not quite the center of attention here. The best of them is the somewhat dangerous Chaya square: layers of cake alternating with layers of chocolate, cream and hazelnut. The chocolate mousse cake is imposingly dense, like the soft center of a candy with a bit of mocha flavor.

The apple tart is unassuming, a single layer of thin-sliced apples with a bit of apricot glaze. One cake is a sort of Black Forest with a particularly clean flavor, and there’s an extremely rich praline cake with a sprinkling of crunchy praline on top. But the almost flourless chocolate cake is extremely dry, more like a fallen souffle than a cake. The pecan pie is unusual only in having two crusts.

Anyway, I hail the great Chaya Beast, and pray the next step doesn’t mean we’ll have to swim to Catalina.

Chaya Venice

110 Navy St., Venice. Telephone (213) 396-1179.

Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, noon-3 p.m. Saturday, Sunday; dinner 6-10:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 6-11 p.m. Saturday, 5:30-9 p.m. Sunday. Full bar. Parking lot on Navy St.; valet parking in evening. American Express, MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $44 to $84.

Recommended dishes: curried crab soup, $7; tuna spring roll, $11; Moroccan lamb chops, $25; tuna nicoise, $11.50; Chaya square, $5.

* THE WINE LIST: See Page 96.