“I don’t hate salmon, I’m just tired of it,” my friend said. He’s not alone. Salmon is affordable and innocuous, but hard to muster passion for. The orange filets are ubiquitous on restaurant menus as the fallback option for unadventurous eaters, and they give chicken breasts stiff competition at catered weddings.

Wild Salmon, a new restaurant that specializes in the popular fish, is the latest project of restaurant magnate Jeffrey Chodorow, the owner of China Grill, Asia de Cuba, and numerous others, including, most recently, the Kobe Club. Wild Salmon occupies the three-story space that has now housed four successive Chodorow restaurants: Tuscan Steak, Tuscan, and English Is Italian. Charles Ramseyer, for the last 14 years the executive chef at Ray’s Boathouse in Seattle, is now in charge of the kitchen, and the theme is the Pacific Northwest. The region is renowned not for its culinary inventions but for its bounty of distinctive ingredients: mushrooms, berries, pinot grapes — the restaurant pours an artful collection of Northwest wines and beers — and of course seafood, salmon in particular. Patrons walk into the huge main room past an impressive raw bar populated with various West Coast oysters, shrimps, crabs, and enormous staring fish, glistening for show, under a school of sculpted salmon hanging from the high ceiling. Much of the service staff, too, has been imported from the Northwest, from whence they bring an unpretentious enthusiasm for the food they’re selling.

In New York, a spotlight on ingredients and their provenance has until now been largely the domain of smaller-scale restaurants whose chefs haunt the greenmarkets and clearly love the local materials of their trade. Wild Salmon can’t quite cash in on that approach when its scale and feel is so businesslike, and when the “local” ingredients it’s honoring are flown in from some 3,000 miles away. Instead, the angle is closer to that of a Chodorow steakhouse, with tireless hype about the supremacy of the main ingredient.

We gorged on salmon. First came a tasting platter of house-smoked Alaskan salmons ($18): king salmon, sockeye, and coho, just a couple of slices of each, laid beside crisp potato pancakes. The appropriately mild smoking gives a little savor but doesn’t interfere with the scientific tasting process. King, aka chinook salmon, produces the smoothest, richest meat; coho is milder and firmer, and sockeye is vivid vermilion, with the strongest fish flavor — a front-runner in my book. A pair of tartares ($15) offers another chance to compare fish: There’s one of king salmon, heavily spiked with wasabi, and another, unaccountably huge, made from delicious, buttery sockeye.

Other appetizers include ravioli ($15) stuffed with delicate crabmeat and exceptional little bay shrimp afloat in a tarragon-freshened cream sauce, and big scallops ($19) wrapped in strips of fatty, savory lamb “prosciutto” that comes from Mario Batali’s father’s Seattle cured-meat shop.

Main courses can be ordered in build-your-own style, picking a fish, a sauce, and a preparation style. The three salmons top the list of choices, joined by halibut, sable, and some distinctive West Coast species like lingcod and rockfish. Beef is also on the list. I wonder who chooses it. Having picked a fish, pick a style: poached, grilled, planked, or baked en papillote. (“That’s a French technique, so, like, it’s cool,” the boyish waiter explained.) The sauces are missable: complicated, unhelpfully strong concoctions, such as a salty morel mushroom-pinot noir reduction and blueberry-jalapeño salsa. I picked sockeye salmon ($26), since it won my loyalty during the first course, and had the kitchen plankgrill it, placing the rich red filet skin-side-down on a cedar board and then putting the plank on the heat till it charred, and the beautiful fish was medium-rare and gently infused with wood flavor.

The rest of the dishes are a mixed bag. Succulent sablefish ($29), rich enough in its own right, is gilded exorbitantly with bacon and butter after being smoked. It’s dense, flaky, and fatty, with intensely concentrated flavor that’s unfortunately three times saltier than it should be. A piece of black cod ($28) has the inverse foible: the Japanese preparation, semi-cured and ostensibly marinated in sake lees, is disappointingly austere.

A soft-shelled baked Alaska ($9) is filled with great huckleberry ice cream and accompanied with a rock-hard ganache penguin; the cheddar-studded ice cream alongside a decent apple cake ($9) makes a more interesting gimmick than most.

Very good salmon is still salmon, and I don’t think Wild Salmon is going to change any salmon-weary minds, but I can think of worse ways to spend an evening than over fresh wild fish, and worse themes for a corporate restaurant than the celebration of a region with a lot to offer.

Wild Salmon (622 Third Ave. at 40th Street, 212-404-1700).