Shore enough, a good seafood meal.

Shore, 41 Murray St. (betw. Church St. & W. B'way), 212-962-3750.

New seafood tavern Shore has one of the best new bars downtown: polished black wood, comfortable wicker-backed stools, friendly servers, a long bank of beautiful shellfish on crushed ice and still enough width at most seats for several dishes. It's a vision of Manhattan's history as a beer-and-oyster town restored.

The restaurant is a spin-off of Fresh, a Tribeca seafood specialist that quickly joined the neighborhood's roster of destination spots. I'd found the simplest preparations at the parent restaurant its best, so hopes were high for this street-level offspring. Advance press said Shore would specialize in classic New England seaside preparations. Such is the case with Pearl Oyster Bar and its competing younger sister Mary's Fish Camp?the sources of the best seafood in New York. You can't eat at either without waiting a long time for a table. There's definitely room for another purveyor of incredible lobster rolls.

Shore looks lousy from the outside. It's in a fast-food district near the Chambers St. A/C station. The door is under rotting scaffolds, flagged by a homemade temporary sign. Inside, expect to be very warmly greeted. Shore's entire staff seems to have been trained to draw repeat customers.

Beatles songs were on the system every time I visited. The music's loud enough that dining in the white-tablecloth area feels less natural than bellying up to the bar. This is something the proprietor is going to have to work out. Shore's menu reflects the same duality: steamers, chowders and fried-fish sandwiches on the one hand, goat-cheese salad, lobster Thermidor and a red wine-braised lamb shank on the other. All the tap beers are microbrewed ales, but cans of Pabst are available as well. One or the other of the restaurant concepts playing out in Shore's wonderful room will probably be judged a failure and scrapped.

The lobster roll ($19) is major-league. Though not quite as hefty as Pearl's or Mary's, the new contender has enough chunks of prime lobster meat?more than you get at real New England lobster shacks for about the same price?and the buttered, toasted white bread is just right. Watercress salad instead of shoestring fries is questionable, but this is Tribeca and it works.

Lobster was the star of our "Nantucket Bucket" ($23), served, pleasingly, in a metal pail with salty water and seaweed at the bottom. On top was half of what must've been a two-pounder. The meat was a little tough, though its flavor made up for that. The clams and mussels in the bucket came off as a bit bland, steamed plain as they were. We liked appetizer versions of those much better: the mussels in a scrumptious parsley-tomato broth ($8), the steamers in their own oceanic liquor with drawn butter on the side ($9).

From the raw bar there's good Jonah crab claws for $2.50 each, oysters of the day for $2 and littlenecks or unpeeled shrimp for $1.50. It's nice to not have to get multiples of six. I'll wait until autumn to judge the oysters.

A salad of smoked trout, frisée and Rhode Island Johnny Cakes ($9) brought an unwelcome surprise. The "cake" was a flimsy pancake instead of a lump of fishy fried dough, the smoked trout decidedly worse than the vacuum-packed standard. The one "Coastal Pot Pie" we sampled was also disappointing. For some reason, Shore puts a paper-thin crust over its "Lazy Man's Lobster" ($21), and leaves the buttery cream sauce underneath no more viscous than milk. Chunky lobster meat and potatoes tasted okay, but is it pot pie if they're sunken instead of suspended?

The blueberry pie Shore offers for dessert?now that's some pie.

From the high end of the menu, a Saturday-night surf-and-turf special ($24) featured a satisfying slab of filet mignon. The stuffed shrimp?topped with a dollop of wasabi-crab breading?were weak. Most of the shrimp at Shore were, in fact. The restaurant might need to replace its supplier. It's not hard to imagine it making whatever changes are necessary. I'm thinking Shore will live up to its potential. Hoping, too.

Chubo

Chubo, 6 Clinton St. (betw. Houston & Stanton Sts.), 212-674-6300.

Chubo is an inexpensive anomaly on Clinton St.'s edgy restaurant row. It fits right in by being overrated. The pull is a $24 three-course prix fixe and, of course, the kind of ambiance that comes only with fine dining in what was El Barrio just a few major trend cycles ago. Chubo's French-Caribbean fusion is punishment compared to the French-African fusion at crosstown price-class rival Ivo & Lulu (over on Broome St.; covered in this space in May). There's enough great cheap food in New York that we should never forget that weak fare is bad value at any price.

Grilled eggplant soup was just a liquid presentation of the vegetable, and a thin one at that. A lump of baked goat cheese on the side added nothing. Eel with hot seared chicken liver was interesting in that the two definitely went well together. It got old the way a parlor trick does. A special appetizer, whole quail, brought an $8 surcharge and wasn't worth it. Its bed of chicory salad with almonds was the best thing we tried at Chubo. The meat? Quail's always only four bites?here two of them were dry and tasteless.

The chicken in "poulet grand mere" was also dry and tasteless, as was the thyme-roasted hake. A sweet garnish of "tomato raisin fondue" might not have been too sweet an accompaniment if the fish's flesh carried a nibble of fresh thyme. Instead, a decorative sprig of the herb was all we got.

Grilled "head-on shrimp" in "gige-style broth" with "turmeric pappardelle" and "sauce harissa" was even sillier. It was noodle soup, built around a poorly executed version of the same hot-pepper-and-seafood broth hundreds of storefront Szechuan joints get right. The pasta had gone to mush; four puny shrimp were aged and mealy.

Bittersweet chocolate roulade turned out to be a rolled-up torte, heavy and arid. So-called "fresh fruit cream pie" was where the silliness peaked. We even asked our server to describe this dessert in advance, and still, high-handedness reigned. The dish is a custard-filled strawberry tart. Why should that be a secret? Don't let this be one: Chubo's a waste.