› paulr@sfbg.com

When a service station is torn down to make way for an art gallery, we cheer. When the art gallery folds and is succeeded by a restaurant, we shuffle our feet uneasily. At least they won't be tearing the building down to bring back the service station — but art galleries are harder to find than restaurants.

Pacific Catch is a pretty good seafood restaurant in a neighborhood already chockablock with restaurants. The prices are moderate, the service is friendly and efficient, the food is good, and the look is handsome in a not-overbearing way. But those who remember that the space was home for several years to the Canvas Gallery — a blend of art forum, café, restaurant, and meetinghouse, with a general university-town flavor — won't recognize much when they step inside. The interior floor plan has been heavily reworked: the central coffee and pastry bar, once surrounded by naves hung with paintings and photographs, has been replaced by tables, chairs, and booths.

There is also now (at the far side of the restaurant as you enter) a shiny and bustling exhibition kitchen, along with a bold color scheme of red and blue, and light fixtures that look like clusters of bottomless Bombay Sapphire gin bottles. All that remains of the original layout is a smaller dining room along the building's north face, looking across the busy street at Golden Gate Park.

Still, there is a nice irony in the transformation of a filling station — or indeed any other urban eyesore — into a haven of civilization, whether it's a locus for art or food, and to have a seafood restaurant on a site that once reeked of gasoline fumes must be accounted an improvement by any standard. I only wish Pacific Catch weren't a nascent chain; there's a tiny sibling outlet on Chestnut in the Marina, another (of unknown scale) in Corte Madera, and a general sense, as a friend of mine put it, that still more Pacific Catches can't be far off.

The food is accordingly mainstream, with tweaks and tunings that reflect sensibilities on either side of the Pacific, trending sometimes in an Asian direction and at others in a Latin American one. Among the great Mexican seafood dishes must be the fish taco, and Pacific Catch offers several versions ($4.25), all creditable on their beds of shredded cabbage: Baja, with chunks of batter-fried halibut or cod; grilled mahimahi, slathered in the restaurant's ubiquitous avocado-tomatillo salsa; and barbecue shrimp, enlivened by little flares of fresh ginger (a nod across the Pacific there). Side dishes enhance the south-of-the-border aura; black beans ($2.95 for a sizable crock) are well seasoned and sprinkled with crumblings of queso fresco, while grilled corn ($2.95) — still on disks of cob — is suitable for dipping into accompanying pats of chipotle butter.

If Pacific Catch can seem like a cantina in Cabo San Lucas, it can also present itself as a sushi bar on Maui. A variety of sashimi is offered (as is its New World cousin, seviche), along with a selection of sushi rolls and — for that Hawaiian touch — poke ($8.50), cubes of lightly seared ahi drizzled with soy sauce and served atop a Fritos-like mélange of rice ...