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The first time I went to Anne Marie’s in Corona del Mar I ordered espresso, and espresso I got. Along with it, though, came a confounding pot of cream, as if I’d ordered American coffee. This was following a peculiar entree that consisted of a sauceless swordfish topped by a quarter slice of grilled pineapple and three macadamia nuts.

Is there a name for this style of cooking? Maybe “ingenue cuisine?” It somehow puts me in mind of the young bride who artlessly decides to stuff a chicken with strawberries: depending on your mood, this sort of thing can be utterly charming or slightly maddening. Ultimately, I found it charming, though I can also imagine being driven slightly mad here.

It’s a very pretty sort of restaurant. One of the rooms--the one with the fireplace--is smallish and somewhat masculine, but the main dining room looks more like what you’d expect from the name used on Anne Marie’s credit card forms: Fern Leaf Caffe. It’s full of light, all white and pastel with a lot of plants and a gabled skylight that makes it rather like a greenhouse.

If this sounds at all familiar, it may be because Anne Marie’s is the old Pave, complete with the original Pave phone number, somewhat remodeled (the stained glass windows in the main room are now covered with huge sleek mirrors). The name was changed earlier this month and there certainly is a real Anne Marie who greets customers--she’s a sunny and charming young woman with ingenue qualities.

It should be clear that this is a place serving a highly personal sort of food: light, greenhouse-restaurant sorts of things, mostly, largely avoiding sauces and in particular heavy cream or meat sauces. Sometimes the dishes have the same giddy air as the swordfish with macadamias. On special, there’s been a salad of pheasant dressed with a light sauce of cream and pheasant stock, served on lettuce with the following garnishes: grapes, raspberries, sliced strawberries, sliced almonds, chopped walnuts and one macadamia.

Warm duck salad is the most whimsical-sounding salad on the regular menu, the duck meat being mixed with raspberries (practically raspberry preserves) and walnuts. Actually, it’s rather enjoyable, although it did make me feel like a school kid gorging while Mom’s away rather than like a sober and high-minded connoisseur. In the same raspberry-oriented line, probably the best entree on the menu is the half duckling in fresh New Zealand raspberry sauce with wild rice.

The rest of the dishes are eclectic but a little more conventional. Anne Marie’s lobster salad has a slightly odd dressing--sour cream and watercress?--on somewhat muted pieces of cold lobster. Escargots are borne on mushroom caps in a garlic, onion and white wine sauce that comes off like a delicate vinaigrette, a refreshing dissent from the universal practice of serving snails with loads of butter. There’s an OK shrimp cocktail with horseradish tomato sauce and a rather good spinach salad with the usual bacon and onions and a little bit of less-usual sour cream dressing. Crepe surprise did not surprise me a whole lot, just a crepe (not a Russian buckwheat pancake, which is traditional for caviar, but a French crepe) filled with sour cream and, I believe, salmon caviar. It was for me a little too much like just eating sour cream straight from the carton.

The best of the entrees after the duckling seems to be a somewhat low-keyed lobster, the body carved up and served over a bed of saffron-flavored angel hair pasta. All the pasta at Anne Marie’s is homemade, and I was sorry to find the great-smelling angel hair with scallops a little parsimonious. There were exactly four scallops and three pieces of sun-dried tomato in a basil cream sauce that didn’t quite moisten the whole hank of pasta.

Light and greenhousey as it is, Anne Marie’s does serve red meat. There’s a New York steak that must be marinated (there are pieces of onion sticking to it), which has a good flavor if a faintly mushy texture. It comes with irregularly shaped and very fresh homemade French fries. The lamb rack, tender and sweet, and the veal chop are both pretty nice, though the sauces (respectively fresh mint and truffle-cream) are not quite memorable.

The menu advertises cream puffs and eclairs, though I haven’t found them available. However, I have had a good tangy cheesecake, a great chocolate mousse cake, a classic old slippery-textured creme caramel, and a trifle of a trifle--a tiny bit of sponge cake buried under kiwi, berries and cream in a high coupe.

Lunch includes some of the dinner entrees plus the odd sandwich and omelet. At lunch the light entrees run $4 to $8 and the desserts $3. At dinner appetizers and salads are in the $4 to $8 range (garlic bread is $2, soup $3) with entrees at $10 to $17, and desserts are $3.50.

ANNE MARIE’S 2640 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar (714) 720-9000

Open for lunch Monday through Thursday, for dinner nightly. All major credit cards accepted.