THE girl on the telephone might well have been in Indochina. The cacophony behind her surely came not from a classy restaurant, a place to lie back in wicker chairs under whirring ceiling fans, but from peak time at a Da Nang fish market. ''I'm sorry, butwe are full on Saturday evening.'' She was shouting above the din. ''I'm sorry, but we are full on Friday evening. We could fit you in at lunchtime.'' Fit us in? Fitting in is something dentists do to people with toothache. Indochine, talk of the town, was not going to be fun. But the nice thing about cynicism is that once in a while a slave to it can be pleasantly surprised. Indochine is not an affected place serving invented dishes from a region made fashionable by Oliver Stone and Catherine Deneuve. It is not particularly expensive - although it is far from cheap - and it does not have conical straw hats hanging from every wall. Closed minds are designed to be opened a little and for once the advance publicity, at least the bits of it that I had heard, had not done a place justice. Indochine - Indochine 1929 to give it its proper name for the record - is less thematically hamstrung as it might have been. The waitresses do wear ao dai, but there can be no complaints about that. In fact I can only feel admiration for a nation that can turn a nylon bed sheet with a hole at each end into a sexier outfit than has ever graced the body of any overpaid catwalk clothes-horse. In deference to political correctness, the men were all pretty well turned out too, in linen waistcoats. There are no ceiling fans, just cream walls, shuttered windows along two sides and generally unobtrusive decoration; ecru lampshades, linen tablecloths and plain, stone tableware. Quiet French music, no oversized candlesticks and no plastic foliage. Wine is expensive in restaurants and Indochine is sadly no exception. The argument is a purely economic one - this is where these places make a great deal of their money. It's hard to argue with spreadsheets, but what makes it such a bitter pill is that there are no half bottles, no half-litre carafes of economical but effective plonk, and in the company of virtual teetotallers a bottle seems extravagant. That said, Indochine is the kind of place where you can get nicely relaxed and not have to suffer looks of contempt from maitre d's whose dickie bows prevent them from relaxing their necks to the extent God intended. It's your money so to hell with decorum; take a bottle of something light, drink the lot and let them carry you out. Chateau Roseline, a $280 French rose, seemed about the best value on the menu and by accident or design turned out to be just that; light but not vacuous and with a kick reminiscent of good Kir. The food is not really why people go to Indochine, not at the moment. Pleasantly low-key it may be, but in spite of that, perhaps because of that, it is still a place to be seen, particularly during the evenings. At lunchtime it is far less self-conscious and at weekends it is positively laid-back. Passers-by wander in for noodles, families bring children and grandparents for the set lunches, and couples bring each other, perhaps because this is one of the few trendy places in town where you can eat without giving the people at the next table a black eye every time you lift your chopsticks. But one day, when the in-crowd gets restless and moves on, the food should ensure that Indochine continues to hold its own. Nothing springs to mind as being particularly outstanding, but everything springs to mind as being rather good; fresh, well-presented and served quickly and efficiently. On a day when the wind was blowing through Lan Kwai Fong like cold steel, Indochine's soup's were difficult to ignore. The chicken vermicelli soup ($33) was far better than the surprisingly bland crab and asparagus soup ($38). In fact Vietnamese food is generally and deliberately lacking in the kind of punch Thai or even Szechuan cuisine can deliver. The tastes are less blatant, but no worse for it. The best thing at Indochine is to subject the menu to some calculated pin-pricking; take anything that sounds appealing, which is almost everything, and spread it around. The barbecue beef ($38) is served with sauce bursting with peanuts, the beef in thebeef salad ($52) is undercooked to perfection and the chicken curry ($88) is nutty and peppery without being so overspiced that the point of eating it, to taste it, is forgotten. My own recommendation would be barbecue prawns, drunk but not quite drowned in garlic ($85). With the wine, steamed rice and a couple of cups of good coffee - difficult to find anywhere in Hong Kong - we paid $881. Hardly a pittance, and we had still got nowhere near the desserts. If we had, there would have been a choice of six, including creme caramel, black eye beans with sticky rice, and a couple of daily specials, all $33. Indochine, 2/F, California Tower, Lan Kwai Fong. Tel: 869-7399. Hours: Noon to 3pm; 6.30pm-10.30pm (weekdays) and 11.30pm (Fridays and Saturdays); closed Sundays