By Paul Reidinger

THE MALL IS not a place most of us associate with food – at least if we are talking about actual food as opposed to food product. The latter tends to be well-represented and isn't difficult to find, for food courts in malls do emit a sweet-greasy odor to steer by, a combination of the scents of doughnuts, popcorn, pizza, and super tacos that becomes either intoxicating or intolerable as you approach ground zero, with its bright fluorescent lighting and orange plastic furniture.

Malls belong to the suburbs, of course, or should, but as suburb-spawned yuppies have crowded into the city in recent years – eager for urban experience, so long as urban experience isn't too different from suburban experience – they have brought along their suburban tastes and ways, from actual (Chevy) Suburbans (to see one of these behemoths parked at a city curb is to be reminded of Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians) to a yen, possibly nostalgic, for malls. Hence Metreon, the mall in the middle of the city.

To be fair to Metreon, it isn't your typical mall. For one thing, it isn't surrounded by acres of dead-zone asphalt for the parking of suburban Suburbans. (There is a parking garage across the street, however.) For another, it is a high-technomall whose shops deal in the electronic gewgaws of our time: if you are looking for Crabtree and Evelyn, you must look elsewhere. For a third, it houses a real restaurant, LJ's Martini Club and Grille, which, despite the slightly dopey name, is quite stylishly appointed and serves food we found to be remarkably good at a pretty fair value.

LJ's began life as Montage, a dot-com-days competitor to XYZ (in the nearby W Hotel) and the long-defunct Mercury (a few blocks east on Howard Street). Perhaps to emphasize the non-food-court, quality nature of the operation, the restaurant was situated on the second floor, at the top of an escalator. The basic architecture of the place was (and remains) futuristic: the large dining room is arc-shaped, as if it's part of a flying saucer. But the Montage-era video-art screens have been eighty-sixed, and the overall tone strikes an appealing balance between warmth and modern sleekness. The dining room is also booth-rich, and that is a boon to intimacy, not to mention martini-drinking.

LJ's offers a range of libations that bear the honorific title martini, but if these drinks mostly bear little resemblance to the traditional martini, that doesn't mean they aren't good, particularly if you aren't wild about traditional martinis. My non-martini-loving friend became quite fixated on a pistachio martini ($7.50), a creamy-sweet concoction spiked with an Italian cinnamon liqueur whose existence we doubted until our server brought the bottle to our table for inspection. (Many gold flecks suspended in the clear liquid.) A creamy-sweet martini is the sort of drink nondrinkers love – drinkers too, because lurking in all that infantile goo is a real vodka punch.

Luckily one does not grow so punchy as to miss the tastiness of the food. The menu is a blend of "American" and "international" items, and if that is something of a false division in a polyglot culture like ours, it translates at LJ's into a happy-go-lucky grab bag of dishes, from an excellent Mexican tortilla soup ($5.95) – peppery, with a cone of crisp tortilla shreds rising like a beaver's dam in a woodland creek – to a Mediterranean flat bread ($11.95), an oblongish pizza topped with tapenade, goat cheese, pesto, and slices of red and orange heirloom tomato, as well as a wealth of all-American choices.

These include a marinated (hence very tender) skirt steak ($15.95), served with garlic mashed potatoes and onion rings and napped with an ale-hued beer sauce, and a pair of grilled artichokes ($7.25), presented whole so you can peel off the leaves one by one, dip each into the tub of herbed aioli on the side, and strip the velvety inner flesh away with your lower teeth: a ritual as Californian as that of drinking chilled chardonnay with cracked crab.

There are even accommodations, snug but not without charm, for vegetarians. Apart from a selection of meatless choices among the small plates and salads, the lunch menu offers a grilled portobello-mushroom sandwich, while the dinner menu discreetly proposes a napoleon ($11.95) of crisped eggplant, grilled tomatoes, portobellos, goat cheese, and a nicely acidic slurry of tomatillos and avocado – a kind of cross between salsa and guacamole. I was especially impressed by the kitchen's handling of the eggplant, which can become soggy and bitter. Not so here.

On warm afternoons in late summer, the best seats in the house might be outside, on a broad, well-shaded terrace overlooking one of the greens of Yerba Buena Gardens. Unlike many al fresco setups, LJ's is not impromptu but emphasized, and service is accordingly quite sharp. It's also the sort of idyllic setting in which one's noble aspirations to vegetarianism can erode a bit – in which slices of Mediterranenan flat bread can be exchanged for a bite or two of soft steak tacos carbon ($7.95), which you assemble yourself from heaps of the constituent ingredients: grilled meat, shredded lettuce, grated jalapeño jack cheese, salsa, and guacamole. Or when you split a set of crèmes brûlées ($5.95) – one chocolate, the other vanilla – with perhaps a friendly tussle over who gets the last of the three ginger meringue cookies on the side. Loser of said tussle might take comfort in a last martini.

LJ's Martini Club and Grille. 101 Fourth St. (at Mission), S.F. (415) 369-6114. Lunch: daily, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Dinner: Sun.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m., Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. Full bar. American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Pleasant noise level. Wheelchair accessible.