By Paul Reidinger

YOU WOULD THINK that a Market Street address at the intersection of Gough and Haight would be a can't-miss proposition for a restaurant. There's tons of automotive traffic, for one thing, flowing past in an endless, Mississippi River-like stream. And the government quarter and its legions of hungry worker bees are tantalizingly nearby, as are the symphony, opera, and ballet and their moneyed pre- and post-performance diners.

It all sounds promising. Yet when you're sitting in Piyassa, the elegant Turkish-French-North African restaurant that recently opened in the space that used to be Piaf's, you find yourself conscious of the reasons Piaf's might have gone under and of the mountain Piyassa must climb. True, the traffic is relentless, but it's relentlessly in motion, as drivers hurry to wherever it is they're going. The big institutions, rich with potential restaurant patrons, are close, but not as close as they are to some other places. And the little stretch of Market Street on which Piyassa actually fronts is slightly bent off the main thoroughfare, as if it were part of some other stubby little street. I nearly lost the restaurant one evening before the daylight had entirely failed.

But I'm glad I didn't, because Piyassa (the name means market in Turkish) is worth finding. Once you're inside, enveloped in a red-and-gold color scheme, carefully tended by efficient, friendly service, and tucking into flavorful, reasonably priced food, you will forget all about the weird angle in the street, the remorseless stream of cars, the 10-minute hike to your concert. You will just relax.

The Turks cast a rather fearsome image in the Western imagination (from the siege of Vienna in 1683 to Midnight Express in 1978, they have demonstrated some capacity for brutality), but Turkish civilization is deep, ancient, disciplined, precise. There is an attractive, almost French formality in their manner; like the French, they do it right (whatever it is), and as in France, the food culture is profound.

All of these parallels serve Piyassa well. The kitchen moves gracefully among the ethnic constituents of the menu, offering, say, a crock of flawless French onion soup ($3.95) – the caramelized onions beautifully balanced between sweet and salty under their cap of pungent melted Gruyère cheese – to one side of the table and a mezes plate ($4.25) – with hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, tomatoes, cucumbers, and pimento-stuffed green olives – to the other.

Then the diners might switch places, with one opting for a seafood crepe ($8.95), the other for sautéed swordfish ($16.95). The latter dish is a veritable circus of taste, texture, and color, with thin slices of fish (drizzled with spiced butter) surrounded and nearly buried by a mélange of roasted potatoes, zucchini, carrot coins, green beans, and red bell peppers. The crepe, meanwhile, having been stuffed with prawns and scallops in a luxurious white sauce, is crisped to a lovely gold, like a chimichanga. Your party of two would certainly be forgiven if its individual members had trouble resisting the temptations of the dish just across the table, whatever it might be.

Lamb tends to loom large in all the Mediterranean cuisines, sheep being, like olive trees, well adapted to the sunny, arid, rocky hills of the region, and Piyassa's treatment of lamb chops ($19.95) is appealingly straightforward: a sprinkling of herbs, on to the broiler, then straight to the table on a bed of rice pilaf. The meat is like butter, the rice deeply perfumed – the whole thing stylishly simple.

Scarcely more complicated is chicken shish kebab ($7.50 at lunch), which arranges boneless chunks of broiler-charred chicken on a bed of broiled tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, and carrot coins. It is colorful, it is tasty, and it leaves room for dessert.

Offerings are limited on that point and seem to be concentrated on the theme of crème brûlée. There is crème brûlée itself ($4.25), fabulously creamy, though it wouldn't kill them to make the caramelized sugar crust on top a bit thicker. And then there is rice pudding ($3.95), which sounds dreadful but is really a tapioca under a caramelized crust.

If caramelized sugar crusts aren't your thing, you might be happier with some Turkish coffee. It's served in demitasses, like espresso, but is chunky (because the grounds aren't filtered out) and carries a slightly nippier flavor (because the coffee comes in contact with boiled water). It's a nice small touch of the sort Piyassa, open just over a month, already seems to have perfected. Another is the dipping sauce brought with the bread – ground walnuts blended with cumin, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar.

And still another is the gracious attentiveness of the staff. Busboys refill water glasses and replenish stocks of bread. Servers make repeated checks to make sure their diners are happy. And at the door stands the host, ready with a greeting and smile for those coming and going – a kind of god of small things who understands that small things are inordinately important.