By Paul Reidinger

AS LOCI GO , the corner of Brannan and the Embarcadero is pretty uniquely San Francisco. You have your bay and your Bay Bridge (which is, perhaps, slightly less gorgeous when viewed from beneath, though still epic); you have your rugged but well-settled hills across the steel-blue water. You would never suppose you were in, say, Paris, despite the presence at the corner of a large restaurant wreathed with Ricard umbrellas and fitted with door plates that give operating instructions ("poussez," "tirez") in French. Parisian spectacle does include bridges, but not soaring ones of the suspension variety.

The restaurant is La Suite, and if its environs don't seem quite French, neither do they seem Vietnamese. Yet La Suite's handsome and rather sprawling bayfront space served, in a previous life, as a kind of halfway house for the Slanted Door as that wildly celebrated California-Vietnamese spot migrated from its Mission point of origin to its final destination, the Ferry Building. It was understood when TSL took up occupancy that the move would be temporary, and so it was – but there is no impermanence about the feel of La Suite. It seems like a place that has always been there and always will be.

The restaurant's maestro is Jocelyn Bulow, and its siblings carry familiar and mostly distinguished names: Plouf, the Chezes (Papa and Maman), and Baraka. La Suite is described as a "brasserie" – the first such, I think, in Bulow's constellation of restaurants – but we should understand that term here in its American, not French, sense. Brasserie means brewery in French, and the first brasseries were established in Paris in the 1870s by Alsatians fleeing the recently proclaimed Kaiserreich; their menus were (and still tend to be) beer-friendly, with choucroute, a dish of pickled cabbage and sausages, at the center of things.

You can get Kronenbourg, an excellent Alsatian beer, at La Suite, and the mainly Provençal menu does have a scattering of traditional brasserie entries, but the place is more truly a brasserie in the American sense – which is to say, it's spacious. It is by far the roomiest spot in the Plouf family, and it could well be the most handsome: a stylish compendium of wood, glass, zinc, nickel, and stone floor tile that seems both old and new in true European fashion, gazes on the great outdoors without slavering, and succeeds in channeling the liveliness of the clientele without becoming a roaratorium. Having nearly been struck deaf once from eating dinner at Plouf, I particularly appreciated this last.

A Kronenbourg ($4 buys a not-quite-immense, bulbous glassful) would be quite useful for washing down, say, a hot dog ($9) – a chubby beef sausage, lightly grilled and nested in a bun lined with sauerkraut. (Sauerkraut was one of those foods I was appalled to see my father enjoy – how could he bear the reek? – but I have come to like its earthy tartness.) Fries with that? Yes, and they're good. But chef Bruno Chemel's food, in the main, calls out more for wine than beer.

Chemel handles fish deftly – always a good sign. Strips of seared ahi ($11) end up inside a warm rosemary focaccia bun, with an inlay of haricots verts for a playful assertion of Frenchness. A halibut filet ($23) receives a gentle roasting before taking its seat atop braised leek and endive in ravigotte sauce (that's a kind of herbed mustard vinaigrette). Swordfish, meanwhile, hits the grill before arriving on a bed of saffron-roasted, herbes de Provence-dusted fennel. There's a dab of tapenade on top, which, like the ravigotte, provides a moment of staccato contrast to the generally soft flavors of the fish and their vegetable companions.

The kitchen navigates the arc between rustic and rarefied with apparent effortlessness. On the one hand there is a small pastry shell filled with tomato confit ($8.75) and dabbed with Montrachet crème fraîche – a nostalgic end-of-tomato-season treat. On the other there is a warm lobster salad ($15), which one dresses to taste with a perfectly balanced, and creamy, orange vinaigrette that waits in a small pewter gravy bowl. And in the middle, perhaps, is a trio of ravioli ($8.75) stuffed with Roquefort cheese and sprinkled with basil and pine nuts.

The only large dish that surprised me was the roast chicken ($18). Instead of the usual, simple presentation – a half bird, say, herbed and golden, possibly cut into pieces – I found myself staring down at an elaborate array of roulades (made from the breast meat), Frenched drumsticks, and a demiglace the color and consistency of caramel in which lurked matchsticks of zucchini and fingerling potato. I liked it, but because roast chicken, like roast beef, is one of the classic rustic pleasures, I found myself wondering: why?

Desserts are very much in the mainstream, from profiteroles ($7), filled with hazelnut ice cream and napped with a chocolate-Grand Marnier sauce, to a trio of pots de crème ($7): chocolate, jasmine tea, and orange-saffron. The first had enough richness and depth of flavor to stand up to the creaminess of the custard, but the flavors of the other two got lost, other than a faint, not quite agreeable nip of pungency from the tea.

Better, anyway, to sate oneself with a balloon of Calvados ($7 for the Lemorton Reserve), a fiery Norman apple brandy. Apples mean fall, and fall ... suits.

La Suite. 100 Brannan (at Embarcadero), S.F. (415) 593-5900, www.lasuitesf.com. Daily, 11:30 a.m.-midnight. Full bar. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Controlled noise. Wheelchair accessible.