RESTAURANTS : WEEP NO MORE, GUITARRA : A New Spanish Restaurant With Powerful Paella and Fresh Gazpacho. Ole!

Weep, my guitar, for Spanish cuisine. It started out strong with the paella and gazpacho crazes of the ‘60s and then stalled for a couple of decades (remember the tapas non-craze of the ‘80s, mi guitarra ?).

Maybe it has a chance at last; Toribio Prado has taken it up. Look at what the mastermind of Cha Cha Cha, El Mocambo and Prado has already done for the long-struggling “next thing,” Caribbean cuisine.

Of course, Spanish food is not as flashy as Caribbean. Prado’s newly opened Cava, in the Beverly Plaza Hotel, is the first restaurant where he’s had to cook without a lick of pineapple. But Spanish food has its own earthy charm, based on garlic, olives, saffron and sherry, and Prado often makes it look almost flashy on the plate.

Perhaps as a reference to those gazpacho-loving ‘60s, a corny cutout of a matador stands outside the restaurant, next to a valet-parking sign with the staggeringly nostalgic price of $1.50. The restaurant itself has a hint of Iberian austerity: deep red and mustard walls that appear to have been painted over rose designs, peasanty wooden tables that redefine the word solid . Only a painting that appears to represent a man being split in two by a chunk of watermelon and some chandeliers dangling with gilded cutlery suggest the wild look of Prado’s other places.

You can get breakfast here, mostly egg dishes; lunch scarcely differs from dinner. In the bar, you can order tapas and sherry from lunchtime till midnight and listen to flamenco music, Spanish opera and even, sometimes, Arabic pop music. In the dining room, tapas function as appetizers and entrees, though there are a couple of salads and soups as well, including a blessedly fresh-tasting gazpacho.

These are Prado-ized tapas , needless to say. Berengena con queso , three big slices of crisply fried eggplant rolled around Manchego cheese and Spanish ham, comes with tomatoes, bits of baby corn and hip lettuces, even radicchio. Patatas bravas (baked and fried potato chunks) and mejillones de Majorca (steamed mussels in tomato-and-sherry sauce) are spicier than you’re likely to find in Spain.

Palos del mar definitely has the Prado look: four long asparagus stalks, charred from the grill, their tips wrapped in salmon, on an amusing fish-shaped platter with creme fraiche and capers and a cucumber garnish on the tail. Don’t confuse this extravaganza with the plainer palitos de cordero , two lamb brochettes in a Spanish red wine sauce.

Nobody would dare open a Los Angeles restaurant these days without at least a couple of pastas. At Cava, you can get bow-tie pasta with duck, angel hair with clams or gnocchi with Manchego cheese and Spanish ham, a muted, soothing dish. The pastas seem unduly cautious for an ambitious menu like this one.

Paella would seem to be a stick-in-the-mud choice too, except that Cava makes the best paella I’ve had outside Spain, with plenty of saffron and solidly flavorful rice. Paella Valenciana is the familiar seafood version; paella Andaluz, with chicken, sweet peppers, Spanish sausage and peas, has a particularly bright flavor.

The most exotic of the seafood dishes, pescado de Toledo , treats grilled hake to a sauce with the outdoorsy savor of wine, wild mushrooms and fennel. Vieiras de viejo Madrid is a brochette of big scallops in a saffron-and-brandy sauce braced with hot paprika.

Cordero a la Segovia has a sauce positively thick with paprika, but it’s mild. This dish, above all others, looks as if it belongs on Cava’s heavy, knockabout tables: a rustic plate of saffron-infused rice carelessly topped with stewed lamb, carrots and potatoes.

Pollo asado con higos has a rustic look, too, in its own way. Glazed with sherry and figs, this is one of the brownest chickens you’ll ever see. It doesn’t taste quite as sweet as it sounds, and the occasional chunk of dried fig does produce an enjoyable explosion of earthy flavors in the mouth.

I wanted to try it side by side with faisan de Portugal (roast breast of pheasant in port and honey sauce), but it wasn’t available on a Tues day night; neither was the liver with onions and vinegar. That’s been my chief complaint about Cava--that and my suspicion that my cochinillo (pork medallions in white wine and thyme) looked and tasted a lot like beef--and now I’ll never try them because the pheasant and the liver are off the menu.

Anything Spanish tends to make you think deep thoughts about the tragic sense of life, which is probably not the best frame of mind for addressing dessert. Conveniently, Cava’s dessert selection has been a restrained one so far, often consisting of nothing but a sort of cafe con leche cheesecake, though one night there were also poached pears in an intense port and cinnamon sauce.

The trouble is that Los Angeles is easily bored with the tragic sense of life. Still, this is a bold attempt to get us on the Spanish wavelength. Buena suerte , kiddo.

*

Cava at the Beverly Plaza Hotel, 8384 W . 3rd St., Los Angeles; (213) 658-8898. Breakfast, lunch and dinner served daily. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$62.