IF THERE REMAINS ANY doubt that the ever-so-unlikely West Seattle has become one of Seattle’s primary constellations of hip, Les Tamales will lay it to rest. The place pulsates with style. It’s small—a California Avenue storefront north of the Alaska Junction divided into a little bar area and a little restaurant area with a dozen or so tables—but it acts a lot bigger than it is. Maybe it’s the 27 kinds of tequila.

Indeed, if you drop in for the first time on a Friday night, you might think you’ve landed in a neighborhood outpost of the now-defunct Casa U Betcha, complete with mailing list and Les Tamales T-shirts and pickup lines hanging over the big brassy Latin soundtrack like hot-air balloons. Amidst the fashionable crush you might conclude that Les Tamales is too sexy for its cat, and therefore too pretentious for you.

Les Tamales 3247 California Ave SW, 923-3538 Sun-Thu 5-9, Fri-Sat 5-10, Sun brunch 10-2 MC, V; beer, wine, tequila

But let’s say you arrive on a Tuesday. The full force of Gloria Estefan’s formidable pipes will still be rattling the windowpanes, no doubt, but without the crowd you will notice that Les Tamales possesses a style quite apart from its scene. Call the decor Industrial Chipotlepec: hammered metal refracting twilight from handsome Mexican sconces amidst softly rose-hued walls. Backlit bottles of liquor gleam like polished jewels along the bar; the place is, in a word, beautiful.

But Les Tamales’ unique style is more than skin deep. It’s the joint venture of four partners, who opened the place last September to showcase a cuisine chef and co-owner Christophe Genet calls “Nuevo Latino.” A Frenchman by birth, Genet wants to mine the territory between French and Latin American food. Les Tamales, with its half-dozen appetizers and 10 or so entr饳, is his laboratory.

What does such fusion produce? Consider the chimichanga con chevre ($6.75), a flour tortilla stuffed with rosemary-fragrant spinach and goat cheese, then flash-fried, folded in quarters, and draped with red and green salsas. As an appetizer it’s hearty and satisfying and really, really interesting, provoking all kinds of culinary rumination. What’s a flour tortilla doing masquerading as puff pastry? (Something pretty darn well, thank you very much.) What are spinach and chevre doing in Mexican food? (Salsa dancing quite gracefully with the salsa, as it turns out.)

Emboldened, we tried to try the mango and Brie quesadilla ($5.95), but they’d run out. Instead we ordered the avocado frito ($5.95), which our waiter told us had gained a kind of cult devotion in the months since opening. Five fingers of mashed avocado with ranchero cheese and ancho and poblano peppers had been lightly breaded and quick-fried, and arrived at the table nice and hot. Perhaps our expectations had been unfairly raised, but we both concluded that this wasn’t a dish to sell our souls for. It was simply tasty finger food, which made a friendly guacamole for Les Tamales’ light, compulsively eatable homemade chips.

For dinner I ordered brocheto del mar ($12), two skewers of vegetables and seafood in a creamy tarragon-jalape�auce, and encountered another intriguing cross-cultural marriage. Grilled prawns, scallops, snapper, and salmon were nicely showcased in the buttery tarragon sauce with the smooth jalape�ite. This dish was grand alongside the beans (whole, with asadero cheese) and rice (clove- and turmeric-fragrant), and would have been just perfect were it not for tough seafood. (The salmon, for the record, was moist and lovely; only the snapper was dry.) Alas, the portion was stingy: I wanted more than a few mouthfuls of precious fish for my $12.

Darned if another great dish wasn’t marred by overcooking. Chuleta de puerco marinada en mango ($13.95) was two generous pork chops marinated in mango juice and seared in Mexican spices, and its flavors were sure and sensational. Too bad the texture was dry. With it came that terrific rice and jalape�ashed potatoes, a wonderfully zingy (and, for my money, superior) alternative to the garlic mashed potatoes one finds amost everywhere these days. As for the starchfest, our waiter simply told us that’s how food is eaten south of the border. Those with Yankee constitutions may depart pledging strict diets of raw vegetables and Metamucil for a week.

ALTHOUGH FRENCH-LATIN fusion is Genet’s main gig, a few menu items are simply Mexican. Every day he does a couple of different tamales, which on our visit included pulled pork ($8.50). Tamale fans will be enraptured: His are thick and velvet-textured, and quite delicious.

Better still is the burrito cristobal en mole ($8.95), which is a large flour tortilla stuffed with chicken, rice, and vegetables, then napped in a deep, deep mole sauce. Mole is one of the wonders of the Latin world; a chocolate-based concoction enriched with a whole world of peppers, nuts, and spices. Genet’s was emphatic and delicious, elevating this burrito out of the realm of the ubiquitous wrap.

You will be full by the time the plates are taken away; mercifully, desserts are not mandatory. We sampled three and weren’t knocked over by any of them. The flan a l’orange ($4) arrives like a big, pale tofu steak in a pool of rum-caramel; to my mind it was dead ordinary. A daily special dessert featured white chocolate and strawberry mousses encased in chocolate ($4), and was tasty. Best was the pastel de pina ($4), a refreshing and unusual white cake and pineapple mousse roll-up with mango sauce.

Refreshing and unusual: Les Tamales is that and then some. If I were a betting woman, I’d say West Seattle will not contain it for long; the owners are ambitious and are already talking of satellites in Columbia City or Belltown. Before they do, I’d hope they’d work out the execution bugs and polish up the service; we enjoyed terrific attention on our weeknight visit but found the crew altogether stressed out on the weekend.

After that, bring ’em on—this stylish place would be an asset to any neighborhood. Especially mine.