RESTAURANT REVIEW : Tres Chic Thai : At Talesai, the Valley’s new and possibly most beautiful restaurant, you’ll be served platefuls of style, with atmosphere to match.

Upscale Chinese is a tough sell, because people think of Chinese food as bargain dining. Thai cuisine gets off lucky. It’s more exotic and elegant, somehow, so we don’t have fixed ideas about how much it should cost.

This works heavily in favor of Talesai, the new Studio City spin-off of a Sunset Boulevard restaurant known for its elegance. The original is a chic, art-filled space featuring the vivid oeuvres of a Thai modernist named Ka Mon. The new Talesai is also gallery-like and almost impossibly chic and gorgeous.

Talesai just might be, in fact, the most beautiful restaurant in the entire Valley. I don’t mind a bit that prices are slightly higher than you normally expect to pay for Thai food. I’d pay just to sit here and not even order so much as an outrageously sweet Thai iced tea.

Just look at this room--which is easy to do, because an all-glass front makes it fully visible from the outside. Ka Mon’s color-splashed art is everywhere, and an arrestingly snaky neon sculpture is suspended in thin air right by the front entrance. The room is cut in half by a handsome, semi-circular satay bar, which must be the first in Los Angeles.

The side walls are framed by long banquettes upholstered in jet-black Italian leather. Across from them are tables napped in white cloth, opposed by beautiful designer chairs with tapered metal legs. Nothing on top of the table is exactly shabby, either. Yellow orchids sit regally in slim glass vases like elegant test tubes. Copper-colored metallic chopsticks, looking like something you’d find in the director’s cut of “Blade Runner,” have conspicuously been set out next to the flatware.

Face it--this restaurant oozes style, from the gray granite floor to the buttons on the jackets of the hip, solicitous staff. The Sunset Boulevard Talesai is used to a celebrity crowd, and boy, are the Valley waitresses on the spot. All you have to do is open the menu cover for a series of handwritten, high school yearbook-style testimonials from famous customers like Brooke Shields, Chuck Norris and Ricardo Montalban.

I suspect the celebrities (and everybody else) have been lured to the original Talesai partly by the restaurant’s chicness, but most of all by the food. Some of Talesai’s dishes are more elegance than you can eat, platefuls of style. But if you’re looking for inexpensive, country-style Thai fare, Talesai may not be for you.

It is for me. The food is prepared by a glowing Thai grandmother named Vilai, a woman who is apt to come out of the dining room asking you how you like her food . . . in Thai. Can’t speak Thai? Mai pen rai , never mind, as the Thais say. Vilai can tell.

A must appetizer here is hidden treasures ( hor mok ). Served as it is in a series of covered clay pots, it is easily the most beautiful dish in a beautiful restaurant. Underneath the clay covers are the treasures: shrimp, crab meat, squid or scallops, softened by steam and a rich reduction of basil and coconut milk.

Talesai lamb is equally superb: crusty sliced lamb with a coriander crust. (I actually prefer this to the satays, those tiny skewers of barbecued beef or chicken smothered with an unctuous peanut sauce.) Super wild shrimp is another good one. But watch out--just having slices of devastatingly hot Thai green chiles lying on top of the steamed shrimp makes for serious heat; don’t even think about putting one in your mouth.

Frankly, the hotness of that dish is uncharacteristic. Many others have been toned down for the Western palate, some even to the point of losing their appeal. Take the papaya salad ( som tom ). In Thailand, this is raucous street food, a mixture of shredded green papaya and salted crab or tiny dried shrimp, searingly flavored with lime juice and chiles. Talesai makes it with grilled shrimp in a sweet dressing. Why serve it at all?

The duck salad is so finely chopped it’s hard to discern exactly what you are eating. A dish called gourmet vegetables gives you asparagus, snow peas and black mushrooms stir-fried in oyster sauce--a tiny portion for $7.95. Wrapped chicken consists of six beautiful corn husk-wrapped bundles, looking for all the world like conceptual art, which it almost is. Open one up, and presto--just a few pieces of steamed chicken.

Nothing is disappointing about any of the delicious Thai curries, though. There is a wonderful off-menu green curry, redolent of mint, and the Mussaman lamb curry is deliciously fragrant. Needless to say, they all come with masterfully steamed Thai jasmine rice.

The desserts are stylish too. Banana fritter flambe with homemade coconut ice cream.

The bottom line is this: Thai food is still a great buy--less expensive, in its class, than French or Italian could dream of being. But style is something you pay for, no matter what the cuisine.

WHERE AND WHEN

* Location: Talesai, 11744 Ventura Blvd., Studio City.

* Suggested Dishes: hidden treasures; $9.95; Talesai lamb, $7.95; super wild shrimp, $7.95; Thai curry, $8.95; banana flambe with coconut ice cream, $5.

* Hours: Lunch, Monday-Friday 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner 5:30-10:30 p.m. nightly. Valet parking. Beer and wine only.

* Price: All major cards. Dinner for two, $35-$60.

* Call: (818) 753-1001.