Largo Dining: Coffeehouse Goes New Age

Cafe Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 852-1073. Open for dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Beer and wine. Street parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $36 to $54.

Say, maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe we are living in a New Age after all.

My evidence is Cafe Largo, an heir to the ancient tradition of artistic hangouts. The entertainment is Bohemian-eclectic and might be a Jackson Browne clone singing to a heartless world, or a writer reading short stories from his book, or an Indonesian orchestra sharing the bill with something called Toad the Wet Sprocket. On the front window, it posts a list of actors and writers who’ve been by.

But behold, Cafe Largo isn’t a seedy coffeehouse. It’s a spacious, respectable-looking nightclub. It looks a little like a sophisticated club from the ‘30s--the walls are even some shade like beige. Performers, and would-be performers, check it out and coin expressions like “great little set-up.”

And of all things, the menu is not quiche du jour and varietal wine by the glass, much less the invariable carrot cake and espresso of the coffeehouse era, but Franco-Italian-Oriental-Nouvelle. The chef, Bruno Morin, formerly worked at places like L’Orangerie.

So this is what we’ve come to; even aficionados of the cutting edge in the outre and experimental don’t want to do without their beurre blanc sauce. It is a New Age.

Still, Cafe Largo is mostly a lounge, not a restaurant, and the emphasis is primarily on entertainment and hanging out. It doesn’t start serving food till 7 p.m. (and then not not necessarily with terrifying promptness), while on the other hand the bar, and possibly entertainments such as poetry readings, keep the place open till 2 a.m. most nights and 4 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

So food keeps its place, and the menu does not exactly weary us with endless choices. Apart from appetizers and salads there are just two regular pastas plus a pasta of the day, and two regular entrees plus a fish and a meat dish of the day. And as for that beurre blanc sauce, nice though it is, it does tend to show up on rather a lot of dishes.

Two appetizers come in beurre blanc. They’re triangular pies, like largish boreks or samosas made with filo pastry, filled with either salmon or cheese. The delice au salmon includes mushrooms, spinach and a surprising slice of tomato with the salmon, and the delice au fromage is a mixture of three unidentified cheeses, very good, rich and funky, maybe with a little kirschwasser thrown in. The beurre blanc is faultless, with a couple of mounds of chopped raw tomato spotted around in it, but the filo pastry has an occasional tendency to get a little scorched.

The fish of the day always seems to have beurre blanc too. Once, I had halibut on a bed of spinach I could have done without, but the fish had been perfectly fried and there were little olive-shaped pieces of zucchini and carrot scattered around. Another day, I had an imposing layered fish concoction: both John Dory and salmon, sliced thin and alternating with spinach, mushrooms and zucchini. It was like a colorful fish terrine, except that it was served hot, or perhaps a bizarre sort of Napoleon. Nice. The only meat of the day I’ve had was a simple rack of lamb with some winey sauce.

The regular dishes, always available, are fowl. Poulet Largo is a simple roast chicken with reduced meat juices (not chicken juices, so far as I can tell) and a paper-thin tissue of fried potato. The menu refers to it as “potato pastry,” but to the rest of the world it would be potatoes Anna. The other dish is somewhat odd, a mound of German potato salad with chives topped with sliced duck breast, surrounded by some mandarin orange slices. It struck me as OK, if not the most interesting culinary thinking.

Desserts are not a big issue here. You can get a simple tart with raw fruits arranged on a bed of cream, or somewhat disappointing profiteroles filled with ice cream rather than real cream, or an obtrusively eggy creme caramel.

If you wanted to eat severly in coffeehouse tradition, you could concentrate on the salads. There’s a “Moroccan salad” that consists of bulghur wheat mixed with tomatoes and onions, accompanied by some cooked sweet pepper slices and a very good mustardy vinaigrette.

The house salad is mostly greens, but just far-out enough. When the waitress asked me whether I wanted pepper on it and I said, “Sure, and let’s have some on the black olive there,” she gave me a look. “It’s a grape,” she pointed out.

Recommended dishes: delice aux fromages, $6; salade marocaine, $8; poulet Largo, $10.50; fruit tarte, $5.