LOTS OF LEFTOVERS : 1986: Year of the Search for Divine Heavenly Grits

Everybody has at least one favorite restaurant. It is both my blessing and my curse to have about 30 of them--and that’s just in L.A. It all depends on what I’m after.

If my main reason for going out is simply to have a good, serious meal--and if l’Orangerie and Valentino and such are temporarily out of the budgetary question--there are two restaurants I particularly like right now, have been to recently and look forward to visiting again soon.

One is Colette, in the Beverly Pavilion Hotel in Beverly Hills. I don’t much like the way the place looks (which is sort of lightweight and hotel-like, unlike the food), and there’s something about the lighting and acoustics that always makes me feel slightly ill at ease--but chef Patrick Healy’s contemporary French food is simply some of the best in California. Everything is in balance in his cooking, everything is under control; above all, to my taste, he makes extraordinary pates and terrines and has wonderful ways with rabbit and with game. I’m convinced that if Healy were more “Californian” and less purely French, he’d be one of the most famous chefs in town.

Then there’s Camelions, one of the few really cozy restaurants in Los Angeles, and one of the most beautiful--a little country-house fantasy, part provincial French and part Southwestern in feeling, built in 1923 by noted romantic architect John Byers. Like Patrick Healy, the chef here, Elka Gilmore, was trained in France and is proud of it. She admits perhaps a few more American influences than Healy (crab cakes, for instance, though with French-style sauces), but also does absolutely splendidly with such purely Gallic dishes as a timbale of rare sliced lamb loin with garlic, spinach, and wild mushrooms and a perfect braised ragout of sweetbreads with mushrooms, pancetta, pearl onions and new potatoes. Camelions is also serious about oysters, incidentally, offering three or four varieties a day. The wine list could use some work--but, then, I’ve got other favorite restaurants for that sort of thing.