RESTAURANT REVIEW : Upscale Brasserie : Barsac’s offers creative and delicious dishes from a chef who also hasn’t forgotten the virtues of simplicity.

Brasseries need not be brew pubs (the French verb brasser means “to brew”), but they are almost always casual, boisterous rooms serving French com fort foods.

Barsac Brasserie is different. It’s a spare, elegant place done in muted blacks and whites, though the open kitchen and industrial-type ceiling do lend some casualness to the proceedings. I wouldn’t call its dishes comfort foods, either. They’re creative combinations and mostly just plain terrific.

You might not expect this at the start. When you are seated, you are served a glass bowl filled with Elks Club-type crudites: iced celery sticks, carrot sticks, radishes and canned black olives. This I don’t get at all, since Barsac’s chef, Didier Poirier, is obviously such a serious talent.

Poirier can really cook. He’s a young, handsome Frenchman with such top-drawer places as Citrus and Patina in his resume, but he’s also someone capable of roasting a chicken plain and making it great.

He performed this feat for my 6-year-old nephew, who had looked askance at the whole idea of dining in an atmosphere of hushed tones and semi-darkness. “I don’t want any of the juice from the chicken to touch my mashed potatoes,” he said as the waiter brought the plate over.

Poirier’s roast chicken, golden brown with a light sauce naturel underneath, doesn’t look quite like mom’s roast chicken, and his garlic mashed potatoes are definitely more of a puree than most American kids are used to. But my nephew tasted them, and soon he was mopping up the sauce and potatoes like a hungry kitten.

I don’t mean to imply that this is a kid’s restaurant. In fact, most of these dishes are very, very grown up. Surely few 6-year-olds would go near the roasted potato shells with two caviars and sour cream. These are sculpted new potatoes done with flashy orange and black . . . well, they’re fish eggs, kid.

Another appetizer, goat cheese and arugula salad, turns out to be little brioche points topped with goat cheese mousse and one arugula leaf, arranged pyramid fashion (this pyramid stuff is getting out of hand) with good marinated yellow peppers and homemade potato chips.

And I love the spinach salad, too, though I wouldn’t have eaten spinach at age 6 even if my parents had promised me a new bicycle. Poirier’s version is ultra-rich, thanks to a creamy dressing, a small fortune in tiny, deliciously poached Louisiana rock shrimp and plenty of a sweet pungent red onion confit mixed throughout.

One very un-brasserie-like addition to this restaurant’s menu is its short list of pastas, which the menu attempts to Frenchify by referring to them as les pates. Don’t you believe it. Penne Marengo is a classic Italian pasta: small, chewy tubes (no self-respecting Frenchman would even consider eating a noodle unless it was soggy) with tomato, garlic, basil and black Kalamata olives, the type you don’t get with your crudites.

Poirier’s tomato linguine is tres chi-chi , thanks to a lobster tail and capers, celery and more olives. One that is distinctly un-Italian is capelli saucisson , a rich mixture of angel hair pasta, oyster and shiitake mushrooms, veal bratwurst and a creamy, full-flavored sauce.

Poirier likes to have fun with fish. One evening’s special, a perfectly turned out piece of sea bass, came resting on a nest of snappy green and yellow beans, with an herbal nage dominated by chopped tomato. The tournedos of grilled salmon are fine, with tasty wild rice pancakes and a subtle sauce perfumed with fennel.

Well and good, but I draw the line at the chef’s rare grilled ahi. I can live with a half-raw tuna filet, Napa cabbage and grilled baked potatoes, but the vanilla-bean lobster sauce is best left to its inventor, Parisian chef Alain Senderens.

There are no such shenanigans when it comes to the meats. Straightforward pork chops are accompanied by more of those fabulous pureed potatoes, and grilled filet of beef come with barley blinis , baby carrots and a green peppercorn sauce. I’ve had roast capon special with a dessert-like apricot-walnut stuffing. Poirier is an absolute master with poultry.

Too bad I didn’t order the stuffing for dessert. Like many talented chefs, he is not at his best with pastry. Beyond the workmanlike creme brulee and a poached pear with a grainy chocolate sauce, there isn’t much to get excited about. There’s a precious little pecan tart in caramel sauce, a fluffy but uninspiring cheesecake and the ubiquitous tarte tatin, one thing you would find in a brasserie.

Instead, have a glass of Barsac, a sweet dessert wine from a village near the home of the world-famous wines of Sauternes. Barsac is always on the restaurant’s superb small wine list. At least this place lives up to half of its name.

WHERE AND WHEN

* Location: Barsac Brasserie, 4212 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

* Suggested dishes: roasted potato shells, $7.50; spinach salad, $7.95; tournedos of grilled salmon, $15.50; grilled Georgia pork chop, $15.25.

* Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday to Friday; dinner 5:30 to 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday, till 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

* Price: Dinner for two, $45-$70. Full bar. Valet parking. All major cards.

* Call: (818) 760-7081.