RESTAURANTS : A TEST OF TIME : Day and Night, This Downtown Restaurant Offers Hot-or-Cold Ambience With Hit-or-Miss Food

Some restaurants are like the elephant encountered by three blind men--mostly a matter of perception. Depending on when you go, downtown’s newest restaurant can be everything from a raucous spot for a cheap date to a sedate place for a business meeting. It can even be romantic.

Saturday night. It’s 7 o’clock, and the streets are deserted. During the day, this is a frantic tangle of snarling traffic, but now there’s not a car in sight. We pull right up in front of the massive new First Interstate World Center and park on the street.

In the waning light, McCormick & Schmick’s, on the fourth floor, seems vast and forlorn. The hostess attempts a sort of forced cheer as she peeks in first one room and then another, searching for signs of life. But the booths are empty, and the dark wood walls show off their suave masculine look to no one. The hostess comes to the last room and sees, with some relief, that two tables are occupied. She seats us in a booth, hands us the enormous menus and scuttles off.

Fish is the specialty here (the restaurant is the 10th in an upscale chain that started in Portland) and it comes in every imaginable form. There are seafood tacos, seafood pot stickers, seafood ravioli. Fish is stir-fried, steamed, sauteed and grilled. It is deep-fried, blackened and made into chowder. The menu is so daunting that we turn it over and contemplate the drinks. This isn’t much easier--there are eight kinds of single-malt Scotch, 21 kinds of beer and 10 wines by the glass. We order wine and settle in with the menu.

Ultimately, we are so overwhelmed that we take the easy way out and order oysters--there’s quite a good selection--and lobster. The waitress is pleasant, the wine is cold, the oysters are fine, and when the people at the other tables depart, the room becomes incredibly quiet. There’s a sedate luxury in having a room like this to yourself. The lobsters are two-pounders, perfectly cooked and served with buttery, sauteed spinach and little red potatoes. They’re so satisfying that we skip dessert and skip down the steps.

We are relieved to find that the car is where we left it. “Were they crazy,” we ask each other, “to have opened such a large restaurant downtown? How can they ever fill it up?”

Monday lunch. “Table for two?” says the maitre d’, when we finally push our way to the front of the throng milling around the entrance. “There will be a 15-minute wait.”

The joint is jumping; it looks as if everybody who ever had reason to do business downtown is here. And they are all in a hurry; the uniform is blue suit, the pace is slightly frantic.

We have barely ordered when the spicy salmon stir-fry with pea pods and water chestnuts arrives. It is an enormous pile that provides the daily quota of all five food groups in one fell swoop. There are fried rice noodles at the bottom topped with a mountain of sauteed vegetables. What must be close to half a pound of fish is strewn about in hefty chunks. The waitress manages to spill most of the sauce onto the carpet before she puts it down, and this turns out to be a blessing, given the sweetness of the stuff. I get through half the dish before giving up in utter defeat.

We have seafood moo shu (McCormick & Schmick’s spelling), only because it sounds cheap and weird. It turns out to be surprisingly good--large pieces of fish wrapped up in a pancake with scallions and hoisin sauce. The fish is nicely cooked and, somehow, the edgy sweetness of the sauce works well with the fish and the scallions.

We have a cheeseburger, too, a giant creation that shares the plate with a small mountain of limp French fries. Add pickles, lettuce, tomatoes and onion, and you’ve got one of your better $4.95 deals. (The same hamburger between 4 and 7 p.m. on weekdays is a remarkable $1.95.)

It’s all served quickly and efficiently. We’re out the door in less than an hour, and even if the cappuccino does taste like Swiss Miss, we forgive the restaurant. Where else in this neighborhood can you get a nice room and good service for less than $10 per person? Thursday lunch. In two visits, I’ve barely made a dent in the menu, so now 10 of us descend in force, determined to take on the monster. The meal does not begin well; despite our reservation, we are kept waiting 23 minutes, standing around with about 30 other supplicants for seats.

The best thing we have is petrale sole coated in Parmesan cheese. This is comfort food for people who don’t much like fish, a slim filet trapped in a crisp golden coat of wonderfully crunchy fried cheese.

But it soon becomes clear that you can go seriously wrong with some of the more creative dishes on the menu. I think anybody who orders lobster ravioli with coconut-mint-lobster sauce gets what he deserves; in this case, that turns out to be big, tough, multicolor ravioli in something that tastes like mouthwash. A salad of endive, pecan and blue cheese inexplicably contains horrible little bits of mandarin orange. Grilled sturgeon with chestnuts, lima beans and prosciutto sounds good, but the fish is tough and the beans are tougher. The crab cakes, good on one visit, are mushy on this one. Grilled ahi isn’t bad, but the Sichuan vinaigrette is more sweet than spicy, and the nori roll that comes with it is squishy. The scallops in the ragout are good, but the prawns in the same ragout are tough.

When we walk out, we’re a disgruntled group.

Friday cocktails. The place is packed at happy hour. No wonder: a nice bar, a great martini served in a glass shaker and, on Fridays between 4 and 11 p.m., lobster for $12.95.

Here, as in so many places, timing is everything.

McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurant, 633 W. 5th St., Los Angeles; (213) 629- 1929. Open Monday through Friday for lunch, nightly for dinner. Validated valet and self parking . Free shuttle to the Music Center. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $16-$90.