Atlas Bar and Grill Makes the ‘A’ List

This is Victoria Granof. She is the chef at the new Atlas Bar and Grill in the Wiltern Building, 3760 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 380-8400. We’re showing you her picture instead of the restaurant’s because you really ought to go and look at that yourself. It’s a spectacularly theatrical place; you walk in through a sort of curtain and sit surrounded by towering curved steel sculptures that depict Atlas in various stages of holding up the heavens. Meanwhile, huge gold suns grin in the corners and starbursts light up the air. Only in Los Angeles. . . .

The menu is pure L.A. too--and at pretty reasonable prices. Four of us ate a lot of food for $90. We began with lusty slices of grilled Portuguese sausage snuggled up against slices of fig; goat cheese and guava quesadillas (the world’s best cream cheese and jelly sandwich); tamarind-chile shrimp with corn and coconut salad. If all that’s too much for you, there is always pizza, pasta, hamburgers and Caesar salad. Entrees include fish wrapped in banana leaves, lamb chops with red onion marmalade, a vegetable tagine with couscous, and a grand aioli.

What does all this have to do with Atlas? “Well,” says owner Mario Tamayo (you may remember him from the original Cha Cha Cha), “I’ve always been intrigued by his story. And besides it begins with A.”