For reasons best left to professors of marketing, Oceana is nearly empty while its street-level sister, Tia’s, has lines down the block. Perhaps the waterfront strollers are intimidated by the fancier hotel restaurant; or maybe they’re unwilling to take an escalator up a floor; or they might just be waiting for the terrace to open, with its panoramic view of the harbor, the airport, Charlestown, the marina, and Lewis Wharf. Or perhaps a tony seafood restaurant downtown is too squeezed among Meritage, Legal Sea Foods, the Chart House, Tia’s, and Sel de la Terre. Some are cheaper, some are better — what identity is left for Oceana? How about a comfortable restaurant, with validated free parking, that you can walk into without a reservation?

There’s really nothing major wrong with the food, although it tends to depart from what the menu says about it, and it’s simple relative to the prices. But lots of diners don’t want too much culinary complication; you might want to talk, for example, or savor the wine.

Food begins with simple, homemade white bread, with a white-bean-and-garlic spread, served with a little neutral olive oil. From there, you can go to a "grill room salad" ($6), a cylinder of romaine with julienne sticks of crisp bacon, bits of blue cheese, and drops of balsamic vinaigrette. Simple but effective.

Rhode Island calamari ($9) are nicely fried and served with a tapenade (olive paste) and crinkle-cut pickled cherry peppers, pepperoncini, and pickled onion. The dish’s name apparently refers to Rhode Island’s Italian population rather than the Azorean Portuguese relatives of chef Joe Chaves. Other appetizers include three kinds of fresh oysters ($9.95/small;$18.95/large) that rotate with the market. A couple of people could share the seafood salad ($16.95), which features two impeccably grilled sea scallops, three shrimp, a pickled red bell pepper, cipollini onions, field greens, and a purple creamy dressing. But this is really a menu item from the bar next door.

The only appetizer that isn’t perfect at least comes close. "Our award-winning chowder" ($5.25) is full of clams and potatoes, a little gritty (to let you know that actual clams are used), and only a little starchy. But the broth tastes more like cream than clam, as though the clam juices have been discarded. This is served with oyster crackers and a micro-cornbread. Cornbread is a fine, old New England dish, but it’s almost always better hot.

The daily fish specials are fresh from the dock, or sometimes the airport, since one I tried was "sautéed Lake Victoria snapper" ($22). The last time I checked, Lake Victoria was in Africa, but globalization is amazing, as this was an entirely decent fillet of fresh-tasting white fish. Even specials seem to wander from their menu descriptions, however, as the fillet was breaded and pan-fried over a sauté of buttered squash and carrots, and garnished with a sprig of thyme. At the same dinner, the regular-menu medallions of monkfish ($18.95) were served with limas (not Great Northern beans as the menu said), a "ragout of root vegetables" that amounted to sautéed carrots and a few wisps of parsnip, and an orange-butter sauce completely omitted in the menu description. Most of the changes were for the better, and this was an excellent dish, but this kitchen has a tendency to "mission creep."

On our second visit, one of the dock specials was "grilled Cape Cod sea bass" ($16.95), which was superb except that it had no grill marks; more likely, it had been broiled or baked, possibly even steamed. Again, it was a beautiful fillet, and this is a flavorful white fish. The vegetables were once more very buttery carrots, this time with underdone broccolini. Bouillabaisse ($23) is frankly described as a seafood stew rather than as an attempt to duplicate the saffron-garlic flavors of the classic Provençal stew. Given that, it’s something of a bargain with two lobster claws, two sea scallops, a nice chunk of halibut, a big shrimp, and a couple of littleneck clams, all on soggy toast like a real bouillabaisse, and garnished with more fresh thyme than one can eat at a single sitting. The only problem was too much salt in the fish, scallops, and broth.

The wine list is rather good, and some glasses and bottles are priced well. The 2001 Ferrari-Carrano Fumé Blanc ($11/glass; $41/bottle) is about as good a wine as you could pick for food like this. It’s a tart, lemony, intense sauvignon blanc, closer to a French style than to its California origins, except that it has rather more body than, say, a Sancerre. The 2000 St. Francis Merlot ($14/$54) is soft with some spice, probably not worth the premium over lesser merlots in the market. Both wines were large pours in average glasses. Decaf ($3) is rather good, served in a metal pot that holds three small cups. Tea, however, comes as hot water in the metal pot, and a bag next to an empty cup. That forces a quick scramble to get good brewing.

Desserts also sometimes departed from what the menu described, and not always for the better. A chocolate-almond torte ($8) was a crumbly mess with little almond flavor. It has since been replaced by a much better "chocolate triangle cake" ($8). This is a triangular cut from a layered cream-and-cake torte with lots of chocolate flavor, topped with a chocolate cigarette like a flagpole, and garnished with four perfect raspberries. Gingerbread with Guinness ice cream ($8) was an individual bundt cake of gingerbread, but my ice cream had no flavor or color of Guinness stout. Strawberry-rhubarb crisp ($8) was mostly apples — I thought this was an improvement — with enough strawberries and rhubarb to suggest the season without puckering. The crisp had walnut halves in it, a nice idea. A strawberry-rhubarb cheesecake ($8) was an individual round cake of soft cheese, on a nut-crust platform, but with only a swirl of the strawberry-rhubarb color on top. It was garnished with large blackberries and slices of strawberry.

The setting for Oceana is view and all view. The room is on two levels, with an outdoor terrace, but is otherwise nondescript. The walls are blue, like the ocean. This in contrast to the bar, which has a luxury-liner theme with posters of 1920s and ’30s travel. (It also has a wider and more modest menu, although it serves the Oceana menu when Oceana is closed for a private party.) The bar has live music after about 9 p.m., while the restaurant sometimes plays a tape of jazz piano and guitar. When relatively empty, the room echoes high noise painfully off the big windows, and it becomes surprisingly hard to talk. Some of this plainness serves to make the room adaptable to a fine Sunday brunch, the odd private party, and three meals a day served by the hotel.

Service on both our visits was good, but with odd lapses. The lobster claws in the bouillabaisse came un-cracked and without nut crackers. We had to request hand wipes afterward, and there was a long pause between appetizers and entrées on one visit. Forks and knives were cleared, but not always replaced.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.