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 up reasonably priced, competent preparations of sockeye salmon, spotted prawns, Dungeness crab, razor clams, and so on. Your mother makes an unexpected appearance on the plate in the form of sides like 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, generic main dining room. There are over a dozen ever-changing draft beers and several local microbrews. 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 half-pound 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.

Seasonal raw oysters have come sandy, the result of sloppy cleaning and shucking. 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 fits Portland’s locavore scene a little better than the others.