TABLES FOR TWO.

PRE:POST -- 547 W. 27th St. (212-695-7270)--Even before the meatpacking district became hell, there was a respite from it, at Florent, the regenerative twenty-four-hour bistro. Not so in West Chelsea, the night-club vortex up the avenue, where the right kind of late-night chow has long been scarce as silence. Such, anyway, is the theory, or one of the theories, behind Pre:Post, a new dusk-to-dawn restaurant where the slick kids are encouraged to gather and dine before and after their submersion into the clubs down the block. Like a lock-in/lock-out chamber in a submarine, it provides a transition from one environment to the other, containing elements both of club life (subwoofers, private "cabanas," hotties) and life outside (windows, nourishment, affordable alcohol). Incongruities abound: the cabanas in back are glassed in, like squash courts, whereas the booths in front are phony log cabins made out of birch, and the tables are sheathed in white rubber--perhaps to make them spill- and snort-proof.

There are two menus; the switch happens at midnight, when the place is suddenly all but empty. The "pre" period, which peaks at around eleven and suits the sybarite better than it does the claustrophobe, features the usual ...