RESTAURANT REVIEW : California Cuisine a la Tokyo

No. It’s no relation to the TV show.

Melrose Place the restaurant is on Melrose Place the street . Inside, Melrose Place has all the muted, gleaming ambience of a hotel dining room, or the dinner restaurant at an international airport. There’s live easy-listening music in the bar; large, loud, cartoony works of art hurtle disconcertingly from the wall.

Service here is distinguished by a hopeful attentiveness. Needs are promptly met. The owner himself patrols the dining room. This can, at times, border on annoyance. How many times should a dinner conversation be interrupted in order to assure the staff that yes, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s just fine?

The food at Melrose Place is California eclectic from a pan-Asian point of view--that is, this is what California cuisine might look and taste like in a restaurant in Tokyo.

Presentation is often dramatic. The potato-leek-and-lobster terrine is a large, stratigraphic cross-section of a lobster salad circled by a halo of beef coulis --it’s good enough, but served so cold as to chill out the flavors. Four steamed dumplings, little noodle packets of tasty ground chicken and shrimp come in a cunning little bamboo steam basket on a bed of spinach with a good, hot, sweet, chile sauce.

The food, eclectic and experimental, does tend to be uneven, with delicious and not-so-delicious elements often sharing the same plate. The duckling egg-roll, quartered on a slant on a mound of slaw, is eye-catching, but the egg roll is just OK--frankly, the inside isn’t 100% warmed through. The accompanying slaw, however, a warm sweet-and-sour daikon-cabbage mixture, is delicious.

The Melrose salad consists of perfectly fresh field greens and thin, colorful, crunchy vegetable chips including magenta beet and lotus root. The dressing seems to be all olive oil, however, and leaves one yearning for a touch of lemon or vinegar, some kind of acidity. On the other hand, the Caesar salad is juicy, fresh and lively.

I have tried two pastas at Melrose Place and found one was a soup and the other was a plate of meat and potatoes! A few slices of delicious rare beef were propped up against a round structure composed of a tasty mixture of mashed potatoes and wild mushrooms layered for no apparent reason by a few round discs of noodle product. Although not a bad plate of food, this was not what I expected when I ordered what the menu described as wild mushroom lasagna.

Another time, I got a big seashell-shaped bowl that held lemon radiatore in a bright-yellow saffron broth with vegetables, shrimp, scallops and chunks of salmon and bass. There was a lightness and purity to this bowl of food.

Pizzas have always been the blank canvas for California cuisine’s most flagrant eclecticism, and the pizza selection at Melrose Place carries on this tradition. One night, the special menu offered a pizza made with black beans and fresh greens, which turned out to be, in reality, a black bean, chicken and heavily cheesed pizza with perhaps a few greens wilted into oblivion under the hot cheese. It wasn’t so bad, although the house crust, spongy and uninteresting, needs work. A heavy coat of cheese also glutted the spicy, already-too-rich shrimp and avocado pizza.

Entrees are especially uneven. A huge slab of charred ahi tuna wasn’t very tasty or texturally compelling. The sesame-roasted squab comes with steamed cabbage rolls that were in essence packets of bland, boiled vegetables, and the star-anise sauce was watery and flavorless.

The roasted organic chicken, however, was perfectly cooked and served with wonderful basil-spiked potatoes. But a seared, peculiarly spiced pork tenderloin, elaborately arranged to look like so many petals of meat in pale yellow corn coulis around a jiggly cylinder of cilantro flan, was just a disjointed mix of flavors.

For dessert, a coconut custard was bland and only faintly reminiscent of coconut. Homemade ice creams were thin in taste and texture. The best thing about the filled chocolate roll cake was the garnish--small sections of candied orange dipped in bittersweet chocolate.

* Melrose Place, 650 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 657-2227. Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. Major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $24 to $62.