RESTAURANT REVIEW : Nature Club: Too Much of a Good Thing

The Nature Club is a small complex with yoga classes, massage, acupuncture and aromatherapy upstairs and a cafe and elixir bar downstairs. If you just need a surge of energy or something to help you relax, a quick elixir of concentrated oils, water and/or tea may serve you well. If you’re hungry, however, the Nature Club Cafe is open daily for lunch, dinner and juice.

A cheerful homage to tropical colonial aesthetics, the cafe is a luminous green room full of banana palms, both living and painted on the walls. Papier mache parrots perch on brass hoops. The chairs are attractive wicker, the tablecloths are white. On the P.A. system, a soundtrack begins with chirping crickets and evolves first to bird songs and eventually to human New Age music.

The food here is strictly vegetarian. Menu items are coded for those who eat only “food grown from the Earth” and for lacto and/or ovo vegetarians, who eat dairy products and/or eggs.

We always start with fresh vegetable or fruit juices. Made to order and pulpless, they’re served at room temperature. The Green Moon, a blend of cucumber, celery, parsley and more, is astonishingly green, the color of unadulterated virtue. The Earth Root Tonic, of beets, ginger, ginseng and carrots, is a muted red-orange and redolent of the soil.

Crusty yeast rolls arrive in the little terra cotta flower pots in which they were baked. Butter is not served; instead, there are various purees--bean, carrot, guacamole, mango, some unfortunately reminiscent of baby food.

The staff is young and enthusiastic, aglow with good health. Whole new species could evolve between their visits to us, but we nevertheless admire their radiance and assume diet is partly responsible. We take their recommendations. This is a mistake. The food our waiter recommends is ghastly. If this is the price of robustness, give me pallor and apathy.

The truth is, I had two good meals and two terrible meals at the Nature Club. The good meals occurred when I ordered salads, the bad meals when I ordered entrees.

Salads are pre-made and can be seen in the glass counter. Rice-stuffed grape leaves are juicy and delicious. A generous scoop of mild goat cheese, studded with tiny black olives and whole cloves of sweet baked garlic, makes a good spread for those flowerpot rolls. The Chinese noodle and seaweed salad is simple and clean, the potato salad with grainy mustard lively. The tabbouleh could use more parsley. I’ll be back for salads, especially at only $4.25 for three large portions.

Had I seen the entrees before ordering them, I would not have punished myself. The most benign is the so-called “wonderfully warm pasta salad with stir fry vegetables,” off the lunch menu. The ingredients--green soba noodles, carrots, yams, sun-dried tomatoes and partially reconstituted mushrooms--are decent, but somehow, the overall flavor is more therapeutic than pleasurable.

Nothing can redeem my big sloppy bowl of five-bean dal with curried vegetables, rice and chutney, not even the adorable little puff-pastry elephant on top. The beans themselves might be good, before they are mixed with soggy hunks of squash and carrots and cranberries and mango. The whole mess is mooshed-up, unwieldy and far too sweet.

Equally excessive and ill-conceived is an entree with the enticing and misleading name “sizzling kabobs,” a kind of vegetable version of strawberry shortcake. The base is a fat slab of corn bread. Stuck in the corn bread are skewers loaded with dull grilled vegetables. Nature Club’s paella , mixed rices with root vegetables, sun-dried tomatoes, unresurrected dried mushrooms and Kuzu sauce, tastes punishingly medicinal. We eat this valiantly, identifying with cows who must know such sheer tedium of chewing.

For dessert, there are crepes, a daily strudel and “frugels,” frozen, dairy-free fruit purees. Foolishly, I take the waiter’s suggestion and sample the mango strudel. Will I never learn? Mangoes, when cooked, resemble nothing so much as pithy, watery squash. Worse yet, and therefore hilarious, is the crepe with poached fruit: soupy hot grapes, peaches, melon and banana in a soggy whole wheat chapati . I give up. And stop for ice cream on the way home.

* The Nature Club Cafe, 7174 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 931-8994. Lunch and dinner 7 days. No alcohol. MasterCard, Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $16-$42.