By Paul Reidinger

TWILIGHT AT LADDA'S Seaview Thai Cuisine, and from the dining room windows can be noted a spectral mist raised by the surf pounding on Ocean Beach. Not far away, though invisible, are the Beach Chalet and the renovated Cliff House, a pair of high-profile establishments that in recent years have brought elegance and quite a few BMWs to San Francisco's lost coast.

Elegance has its place, of course, and one does admire the heroism of restaurateurs who plant their flags in inhospitable lands of fog, wind, rocks, and kelp. No one would ever mistake the Great Highway for one of the sunny corniches along the Riviera. Still, there is something to be said for modesty and unpretentiousness and even dusty kitsch, and Ladda's – which adjoins a motel (the Great Highway Motor Inn) whose inland face has the gray, squinty-eyed look of a prison – excels in these categories. It exudes the mildewed-carpet smell of many a damp in-law apartment, and its decorative touches, from the fake-evergreen wreaths dotted with mistletoe berries the size of late-summer cherry tomatoes to the bubbling aquarium full of neon-blue fish that are far too small to eat, radiate a slapdash charm. One has no choice, really, but to look out the windows at an unspoiled vista of beach, sea, and sky – at least until the food starts coming, and that won't be long.

In keeping with the traditionless traditions of American polyglottony, Ladda's bills itself (per the sign mounted above the largely empty parking lot – could there possibly be another like it in the city?) as a "coffee shop" in addition to a Thai restaurant. Another sign over the entrance proclaims an "American-Thai" cuisine. This does not mean fusion; there is no pad thai served in a hot dog bun. It does mean you can have Thai food or American food, just as, at Ichi-Ban Kan Café, you can have sushi or a cheeseburger. There is a training-wheels aspect to these kinds of menus; they offer a world of variety but also the drive-in staples for those who lose their nerve or are simply feeling nostalgic for the foodstuffs of their Main Street USA youth.

Whatever the motivations of the menu's architects, Ladda's kitchen delivers the goods (though if the American stuff's your thing, better make it breakfast or lunch, because by dinnertime the mood is entirely Siamese). The Club House sandwich ($7.95) doesn't offer lobster like the club at Postrio, but in every other way it is a worthy match: a double-decked stack of turkey, ham, crisp bacon, tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise on toasted white bread. Good fries too. And I doubt you would find at the otherwise estimable Postrio anything like the phra-ram gai ($6.95 at lunch, including a cup of soup), boneless pieces of deep-fried chicken arrayed across braised, gingery bok choy in a chunky-spicy peanut sauce. It has texture, it's sweet, savory, spicy, nutty – Thai as can be.

At dinner, Ladda's offers a long list of Thai standards and renders them with a commendable lack of shyness. The restaurant's som tum ($6.95) – the salad of shredded green papaya – is dressed with a puckering lemon potion and decorated with tomato quarters, green beans, and a little bloom of raw cabbage at one end of the oblong plate. The cabbage looked rather anemic, like an attempt to dump refrigerator inventory about to go south, but it turned out to be crisp and fresh and we devoured it once the papaya was gone. And if you've had one too many bowls of tom kha gai, the coconut-milk soup with chicken, Ladda's tom kha talay ($9.95) will be a welcome variation on a beloved theme. Here the chicken gives way to mixed seafood (shrimp, calamari, and slivers of salmon), and the broth is emphatically infused with lemongrass.

The duck lover swooped on the duck, naturally, with a brief but agonized pause to weigh options: better the larb version (ground, with seasonings) or the Chinese-inflected ped tod ($8.95), boneless crispy pieces served on seasoned vegetables with plum sauce? We ended up with the latter, so no duck larb at our table, but a consolation prize of larb-like chicken (missing only the magic word "larb"): gai gra-praw ($7.50), finely minced bird sautéed with a classic combination of garlic, onions, chilis, and wonderfully aromatic basil leaves.

Dessert? None offered, and just as well in light of the previous week's quart of ice cream, plus the homemade gelati. We stepped outside, into a fog that apparently had assembled itself from the surf mist as we ate, and paused for a moment to note the nearly $3-a-gallon gasoline being peddled by the lonely Unocal station across the street: a conspicuously posted numerical reminder that time rolls on and it is in fact no longer 1970 – not even out here amid the ticky-tack buildings and surfer dudes in Jeep Wranglers on this remote stitch of North America's western hem – but 2005 in the crazed America of George II. The Age of Aquarius is over, the age of aquariums, not quite.

Ladda's Seaview Thai Cuisine. 1225 La Playa (at Lincoln Way), S.F. (415) 665-0185. Breakfast and lunch: daily, 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Dinner: nightly, 4:30-10 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible.