By Paul Reidinger

WHAT APPEARS TO be easy often is not, and the impression of effortlessness is often the result of much (unseen) effort. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert is remembered, in part, for his fluid, limpid prose – but he once famously needed a week to write a single crystalline paragraph. Afterward he doubtless treated himself to dinner at a good bistro and perhaps, while tucking in to a plate of steak frites, perceived an irony parallel to his own literary exertions: that simple French bistro cooking, redolent of earthy honesty and time-honored methods rooted in home and hearth, isn't necessarily as straightforward as we, seated expectantly at the table, might suppose.

Flaubert would have been pleased, I imagine, by Chouquet's, which opened in January in an Upper Fillmore corner space that had been occupied for more than a generation by a place called Pauli's. Pauli's had a wonderful street-side café appeal (including an unmissable awning) that never quite sufficed, alas, to draw us in; I was aware of Pauli's mainly because it was just across the street from the vet's office, and even routine visits to vets' offices are high-anxiety operations that have a way of quelling appetites.

Flaubert would have been pleased with Chouquet's in part because the new place preserves Pauli's street presence, and in larger part because it replaces Pauli's California-cuisine menu with fresh interpretations of French standards by a memorably named chef, Frédéric Proust. "Proust" is, of course, a name of profound implications: for literature, France, Paris. Marcel Proust was among the most Parisian of French writers, and his namesake's offerings at Chouquet's strike me (apart from a few discreet California touches) not simply as French but as Parisian.

By this I mean mainly that the food is quite meaty. Paris might be the City of Light, but it is a northerly, inland city, and while its cooking reflects the varied bounty and styles of France, it is not surrounded by fields of lavender or lapped by a warm sea full of tasty fish. Paris's everyday menus emphasize instead the fruits of animal husbandry: pork, beef, lamb, veal, poultry, maybe some goat.

Proust does offer lighter choices and, for those so inclined, a vegetarian millefeuille for dinner, but the meaty thrust is evident even in such lunchtime salads as the perigourdine ($11), a bed of baby greens topped by a heavyweight mix of giblets, lardons, tomatoes, and croutons (with a beguiling tarragon-goat cheese dressing, among other choices). If ever a salad thought it was really a cassoulet, it would have to be this one. (And several of the other salads are scarcely less fortified, one being built around prosciutto, another around duck magret.)

If poultry gizzards don't appeal, there's plenty of straight-on beef, from a baguette sandwich ($13) inlaid with tender strips of marinated, grilled beef and tomato rounds and served with excellent knobbly, parslied french fries; to a classic steak frites ($21), a grilled New York steak topped with a green-peppercorn sauce and accompanied by more of those superior fries. And if poultry appeals but poultry gizzards don't, the answer might be seared duck breast ($22): velvety-thin slices of meat bathed in a golden fig-honey sauce that's darkly sweet with a smoky edge, like a well-aged Sauternes. On the side of that plate we found a sprightly long-bean salad, which looked particularly summery as it caught the last beams of late-spring twilight slanting through the windows. Those who insist on California elegance will respond to such dishes as citrus-marinated halibut ($10), swaddled sushi-style in cucumber roulades and drizzled with pink-peppercorn sauce.

We know to a moral certainty that if profiteroles are offered on a dessert menu, Mr. Profiteroles will order them and I will be quietly dismayed, since profiteroles so often suffer from tough pastry and are, really, much ado about not much. Chouquet's edition might be the exception, however; the pastry chef plainly is in the house-made pastry business, and the resulting pair of profiteroles ($7) were as puffy and tender as buns fresh from the oven. The vanilla ice cream on the inside was a little plain, but the scattering of raspberries and strawberries about the plate brought a blush of life.

More to my taste was a cristalline ($9) of peanut-butter mousse. It looked like bar of fancy cocoa-butter soap, had a lushly soft texture in the mouth, and was much too small, disappearing in a few bites (not all of them mine) and leaving behind, as if in some dessert magic act, a forlorn pool of chocolate sauce.

Service is very much in the Parisian mode: friendly but not fawning, and big-city brisk. (Parisians, like New Yorkers, practice a mannered civility that can seem chilly to hail-fellow-well-met types; they are helpful and friendly but do not court the approval of strangers.) But while Parisian service is also notably efficient, the Chouquet's brigade dropped my soup order completely, not even remembering to bring it late, as sometimes happens at places determined to charge for everything they conceivably can. It was as if soup had been mentioned once and forgotten for eternity: I ordered it, it did not come, it did not appear on the bill, we obliterated the desserts and left happy – into our own city of light, limpid but nearly faded now, at dusk.

Chouquet's. 2500 Washington (at Fillmore), SF. (415) 359-0075. Lunch: Tues.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Dinner: Tues.-Sun., 5:30-10:30 p.m. Brunch: Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Beer and wine. American Express, Diners Club, Discover, MasterCard, Visa. Not noisy. Wheelchair accessible.