STYLE / RESTAURANTS : AN OCEAN AWAY

Whether for health reasons or just because it sounds so light and delicious, everybody seems to want to eat fish these days. But since Opus closed in 1994, Los Angeles doesn’t have a single first-rate seafood house (Cantonese restaurants and sushi bars excepted). Enter La Mer Brasserie, a new French seafood restaurant from the folks at Le Petit Bistro that’s making a bid to fill the void.

From the street, La Mer Brasserie certainly looks like the real thing. It’s big and shiny, decorated with enormous brass chandeliers and Art Nouveau-style paintings of women with knowing looks. A mirror on the back wall doubles the size of the room and the number of revelers seated along the banquettes. Up close, though, the decor is more stage set: a few picture frames with artful jigsaw curves, a massive bar stained to resemble mahogany, a red canopy over the kitchen trimmed in gold fringe and announcing “La Cuisine.” Add a few men in berets and a slew of well-coiffed women dispensing air kisses and voila! French brasserie. Even the waiters in vests and long white aprons move across the room with an urgency uncommon in Los Angeles.

Despite the menu’s token poultry and meat dishes, everyone at La Mer (French for “the sea”) is here to eat fish. When I invite a pair of young, very homesick French friends to dinner, Jean-Paul’s response is “Great! It’s pretty hard to screw up brasserie food.” One of a brasserie’s staples is its plateau de fruits de mer. In France, people will save their francs to splurge on one of these towering, extravagant constructions of ice and “fruits of the sea”--several kinds of oysters and clams, rosy curls of shrimp, langoustines and, at the very top, crab. A blue-jacketed ecailler outside the restaurant opens the raw shellfish to order, his breath puffing white in the cold as he arranges everything.

But somehow our plastic basin of ice, inset with a meager amount of very sad-looking seafood and draped with a few strands of seaweed like a balding man’s ill-advised comb-over, doesn’t make anyone feel festive. The raw oysters are the worst I’ve ever been served (I can eat five dozen oysters at a sitting, I love them so much, but I can’t eat more than one of these tired mollusks); clams are pretty rank, too. King crab legs and langoustines look flashy but, like the mealy tiger shrimp, are tasteless. “You know what this is like?” asks a disappointed Jean-Paul. “A seafood platter you might be served in Romania!” And it is, unfortunately, no fluke: Another night, the “Ultimate Platter for Two” is no better. It should be La Mer’s pride and joy, with everything on it vibrant and fresh. That it’s not says a lot about the restaurant’s ambitions.

A smoked herring and warm potato salad is, however, decent. The ruddy Mediterranean fish soup is slightly watery but otherwise acceptable. And a bowl of steamed mussels in white wine and shallots is OK. But “crispy” calamari are heavily breaded and greasy. And as for main courses, sea bass in salt crust, which is no longer on the menu, is overcooked. Bouillabaisse is simply the fish soup with overdone shellfish and chunks of fish heaved in, but it does come with orangish rouille bitter with garlic, coarsely grated Gruyere cheese and a flotilla of croutons. The one truly appealing dish is Florida silk snapper grilled whole on the bone and with a delicate flavor.

To their credit, La Mer’s owners recognized they had a problem early on and quickly moved to simplify the menu--and to find a new chef. After two visits under the new chef’s tenure, though, I can’t say the food has improved much. I like the smoked salmon on crispy potato galettes, but a couple of the other appetizers are wildly ambitious: a perfectly horrible tempura of salmon rolled up with nori and feta cheese and an even worse “napoleon” of tasteless ahi tuna layered with avocado and oily, deep-fried wonton skins. The kitchen mercilessly overcooks everything, even a lone veal chop. And, sad to say, almost all the fish I try has the texture and taste of sawdust.

Good fish is costly, and so the idea of doing budget fish, while admirable, may not be entirely feasible. The kitchen has to compromise somewhere. But for a place that professes to specialize in seafood, I expect a great deal more expertise in cooking it. That La Mer is packed with French people goes a long way in dispelling the idea that the French have a corner on good taste.

LA MER BRASSERIE

CUISINE: French seafood. AMBIENCE: bustling Art Nouveau-style brasserie. BEST DISHES: herring and potato salad, Mediterranean fish soup, Florida silk snapper. WINE PICKS: Trimbach Gewurztraminer 1992, Alsace. FACTS: 826 N. La Cienega Blvd., L.A.; (310) 652-1520. Closed at lunch. Dinner for two, food only, $43 to $78. Corkage $15. Valet parking.