THE ACTION AT JACKSON’S : A Wagon-Wheel Motif With Gravlax and Seared Ahi Tuna? No Problem.

Like a well-bred woman who gets ready for a party and then takes off one piece of jewelry to make sure she’s not overdressed, Jackson’s has an elegant, understated look. The Western motif hovers discreetly in the background: a couple of wagon-wheel chandeliers, a horse collar on the wall, some plein-air paintings, a barbed-wire design on the business card.

All to the good. In the visually aggressive world of L.A. restaurants, people, except maybe restaurant designers, seem to like this subtlety. Plus, it’s hard to imagine what the Wild West has to do with the sophisticated cooking of co-chefs Josiah Citrin and Raphael Lunetta, both of whom trained under Joachim Splichal at Patina.

Their dishes show solidity, imagination and focus. Grilled rare ahi tuna comes on a delicious smear of emulsified shallot vinaigrette, with a little tower of julienned vegetables to one side. Goat cheese salad is just as much of a cliche as seared tuna these days, but here the cheese is a ball (with a skin, apparently pan-seared), while the salad is dominated by three big croutons of flattish ciabatta bread, one garnished with pickled red onions, one with salted, blanched tomatoes and one with minced olives.

The dish names often conceal surprises: Sauteed mixed mushrooms in grilled portobello mushroom sounds like a stuffed mushroom, but it’s really a mass of meaty wild mushrooms, sliced and sauteed with garlic, shallots and lemon. There’s a sort of cucumber-and- gravlax salad going around L.A. restaurants, with everything mixed together in a bowl, but the Jackson’s cucumber-and-gravlax appetizer spreads thinly sliced salmon on a plate and scatters it with olive oil, herbs and tart tomatoes about the size of cranberries. In the middle of all that, the cucumber slices taste definitely sweet.

The rest of the appetizers on this compact menu hew closer to the California Cuisine mainstream. You’ve got your crab-and-leek-stuffed ravioli in a buttery lobster-reduction sauce, covered with a thatch of fried leek threads. You’ve got your big seared sea scallops with parsley juice and julienned celery root, your very lightly poached asparagus, your roasted rabbit and polenta gnocchi. OK, that last one does take some explaining--it’s bits of rabbit in a garlic-and basil-flavored nage with finger-sized cylinders of polenta. The menu says something about fresh fava beans, but when I ordered this dish, crisp asparagus tips had been substituted without notice. No problem, but it was a surprise.

Let’s not make any secret about this: The best entree here is the second cheapest, roasted chicken breast. Those bare words do not convey how wonderfully crisp the chicken is, and “garden ragu” gives no idea of the bed of corn kernels, new potatoes, green peas, roasted garlic and pearl onions, also good and crunchy, that underlie the chicken. People who watch their salt may have reservations about this dish, but most roast chickens in this town could take lessons from it.

Rack of lamb comes on a vegetable risotto in a sauce with a welcome smoky flavor. Beef tenderloin arrives on a more orthodox bed of garlic mashed potatoes and a shallot-red wine sauce; the surprise is the potato disk resting against the steak at a rakish angle. Roasted duck breast, concealing a stash of wild rice, comes with sweet turnips and a sweeter honey and coriander sauce.

The crisp salmon on artichoke puree is a neat bar of salmon with crisped skin overlooking a pond of mild balsamic-vinegar butter sauce (pardon me, that’s not a sauce--it’s a nage ). Just to the left of the fish lies some sweet, aromatic braised fennel. Grilled dorade on a bed of spinach sprinkled with crisp, chewy, coin-shaped slices of parsley root might not be the best imaginable use of this fish, but the parsley root does have a subtle and intriguing flavor, and the Pinot Noir sauce a pleasant, faint horseradish bite.

Creme brulee leads the dessert list, but the rest of the sweets are a little less ordinary: quite tart lemon tart, a chocolate-and-berry ice cream thing. The rarity here is the banana-cream pie, filled with banana cream with a hint of chocolate and tiled with thin slices of caramelized banana resting on a powerhouse peanut-caramel sauce.

Here’s the funny thing about Jackson’s: You realize it has a Western motif, you wonder why, and after a while you don’t give it a thought. Everything seems to go together: plush booths and wagon-wheel chandeliers, gravlax and balsamic nage. You can’t imagine anybody having planned it this way, but it’s no problem. No problem at all.

Jackson’s, 8908 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood; (310) 550-8142. Lunch served Monday through Friday, dinner Monday through Saturday. All major credit cards accepted. Beer and wine. Valet parking. Dinner for two, food only, $49-$69.