Even if you love to hate upscale chain restaurants, it’s hard to hate this entry from the Pacific Northwest. For one thing, they serve local fish. Not exclusively, but it’s still a more conscientious effort than one might expect.

McCormick’s serves reasonably priced cornmeal-fried catfish from Palacios, amberjack from Flower Garden Banks, and grouper from Galveston. These fishes tend to be underrepresented, and it’s bizarre to see a chain taking up the slack. Salty, peppery blackened redfish from the Gulf, when available, is a rousing success, juicy, and cooked not a moment too long. Its rich, nutty citrus butter works surprisingly well, and wild rice is sweet and inexplicably addictive. Your mother makes an unexpected appearance on the plate in the form of bitter asparagus and useless carrot slices, but your childhood ghosts will be exorcised, because she’s powerless to make you eat them.

Another good reason not to hate McCormick & Schmick’s is the happy-hour deal at the dark-wood bar tables—and we actually prefer their pubby atmosphere to the more sedate, romantically lit, but generic main dining room. If you’re drinking—not just from 4–6:30pm, but at some locations during the Euro-Argentine dinner hours of 9–11pm—they give away giant appetizer plates for two, three, or four bucks: fried calamari, seafood tostadas, salmon cakes, and so on. The cheeseburger is one of the cheapest dinners in town. Don’t expect service, though—what’s attentive in the dining room turns disastrous in the bar.

There’s a commitment to seasonal raw oysters, which are right on the money. As for those fried calamari, they’re very salty, not quite rubbery but not quite tender, and their sauces are subpar; it’s best with a simple squeeze of lemon or dash of malt vinegar, whose acidity balances out the salt. It’s not worth anywhere near its rather high price.

In an effort to appease the lowest common denominator, this restaurant dilutes its quality by crowding the menu with too many losers: Fettuccine alfredo? Cioppino (sold here as “San Francisco Seafood Stew”)? The latter is a preparation we’ve never understood; watery and bland, it’s the worst offense to seafood since the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests.

Chains will be chains. But this one could hold a fish seminar for some of the independent restaurants in town.