Welcome to the neighborhood

IT’S after 9 on a weekday night, a time when most restaurants are winding it up, yet at Bloom Cafe in Los Angeles, the beat goes on. One couple has just devoured a large Comte cheese and potato pizza (their favorite, and mine too) and are exchanging names with the family at another table they’ve been talking with all evening. As they leave, the toddler with a million-dollar smile and cornrows in her hair shyly offers up her name. Across the room, a big group of women is celebrating something or other with a great deal of laughing and teasing . After they demolish bowls of perky greens strewn with torn violets and marigolds, they ask the waiter if he can open another bottle of wine.

A trio of elderly folks pushes open the doors just as two intellectual types who have been huddled in conversation all evening over plates of linguini and steak get up to go, pulling on hats, gloves, mufflers. You’d think this was the East Village. But it’s Pico Boulevard, the ragtag stretch between Fairfax and La Brea. And the spot is the 6-month-old Bloom Cafe. A neon sign spelling out the name in modest green letters marks the spot.

The seeds for Bloom Cafe grew out of the friendship between two French restaurateurs in L.A., Arnaud Palatan, who used to own the French restaurant Pastis, and Jean Louis Bartoli of Louis XIV. The cafe began as a mere bud, moving into a long skinny storefront and, at first, serving breakfast and lunch.

A few weeks ago, the partners added an adjacent takeout pizza and smoothie bar and extended the hours. The sidewalk tables with comfortable aluminum garden chairs are now protected from the chill by a canvas awning with see-through sides, and plans are afoot to add seating in the patio out back. And despite early service and kitchen glitches when the cafe took off before it was really ready for prime time, it has garnered a loyal neighborhood crowd.

And why not? On this stretch of Pico, you can get tacos, soul food, Cuban cuisine and more, but nothing comes close to the food at Bloom Cafe with its emphasis on organic produce and healthy eating. The restaurant’s motto, in fact, is “where food is fun, healthy and delicious.” And for the most part, Bloom delivers.

Pancake heaven

AT breakfast (which is served till 4 p.m. for night owls and sleepyheads) diners are perched on chairs with seats in bright tropical hues -- lime, mango, lemon -- to match the fresh-squeezed juices. Hands are wrapped around big cups of cafe au lait, some of the best in anywhere, the foam fine-textured and loose. The look is fresh and inviting, with curtains in a midcentury print and white walls hung with photographs of the sea and icebergs.

Egg dishes are all made from organic eggs. I like them poached and served with goat cheese crostini and crisp slabs of apple-wood-smoked bacon. Every dish gets a heap of oven-roasted Yukon gold potatoes that avoids the greasiness of the traditional home fries. For kids and certain grown-ups (and you know who you are), Bloom Cafe is some kind of pancake heaven, dishing up fluffy lemon ricotta cakes along with fine buttermilk pancakes and a version dotted with blueberries. Granola pancakes, though, are just too darn hippy dippy for me -- and a little heavy to boot. If you want granola -- and I like their homemade variety punctuated with dried cranberries -- take it straight, or with some organic milk.

The ideal breakfast here may be the 2+2+2 option. That’s two eggs cooked any which way , two pancakes and apple-smoked bacon or chicken sausage. Oh, go ahead, get the bacon; it’s smoky and crisp, worth every calorie.

The kitchen turns out a very respectable omelet laced with chorizo and cilantro. There’s also one with bufala mozzarella, sweet peppers, tomatoes and basil, and another with smoked salmon, red onions and spinach. Or you can design your own to include any three of a long list of ingredients.

What self-respecting L.A. breakfast place can do without huevos rancheros? Here the eggs are nicely cooked, the avocado dead-on ripe, the tortillas fresh, but what’s with the white beans? They just don’t have the earthy flavor of pinto or black beans and end up muting the appeal of the lusty dish.

At lunchtime, Bloom’s strong suit is salad. Everything is pristinely fresh, not a browned leaf in sight; they come in big bowls, enough for two or three to share.

“Gorgeous green salad” is an attractive mix of organic lettuces and greens jazzed up with sprouts, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, pumpkin seeds and edible flowers. The carved tomato rose is a bit twee, but the vinaigrette is sprightly and lemony and -- this is the unusual thing -- the salad is neither over- nor under-dressed. All forks at my table head straight for this one and keep coming back.

The pear and blue cheese salad you see everywhere gets a fresh twist at Bloom. For juicy crunch, it’s made with finely sliced Asian pears fanned out on a bed of baby spinach leaves that taste as if they’ve been picked minutes before. Toasted walnuts are fresh, too, and golden raisins add the tease of something sweet. The cheese is Stilton, which is mild enough to work with all these flavors.

Even the Caesar is more than decent, made with fresh hearts of romaine -- no egg or Worcestershire, but a lovely Meyer lemon vinaigrette and sliced croutons instead of cubes. If you want dinner all in one, get the seared salmon salad, basically a green salad with a few hefty pieces of salmon lapping at the edges.

Pizza stars at night

COME dinner, the real attraction is pizza, which can be ordered in 10- or 18-inch sizes. No wood-burning oven, but they do a good job with a normal pizza oven. The crust is thin, almost cracker-like, with a fine yeasty flavor. The kitchen is very much on track with a pie that will appeal to the whole family because it’s close to the familiar, only made with much better ingredients than the usual.

I’m sure every pizza-loving carnivore goes straight to the homemade lamb sausage and sweet pepper pizza. How could you not? And it’s very worthy, spread with a loose tomato sauce, the mild crumbled sausage, fresh mozzarella, strips of roasted sweet peppers, soft velvety cloves of roasted garlic and tart kalamata olives.

Vegetarians with the south of France on their minds gravitate toward the Provencal pizza embellished with a smear of tomato sauce, plus a few slender anchovies, some grilled eggplant, the garlic and a drizzle of olive oil and thyme. I customize mine with some mozzarella, and even my sausage-loving companions take a shine to it. But my favorite has to be the Comte cheese and potato pizza. A light layer of tomato sauce is covered with a soft blanket of the French mountain cheese with thinly sliced potatoes, leeks, a touch of rosemary and shaved Parmesan . I wish I could say the Marguerite, i.e. Margherita, was as successful. The balance of cheese to tomato sauce is somehow off, so that the mozzarella tends to harden into a solid sheet of cheese before you get to the second slice. The very original butternut squash and blue cheese pie strewn with poppy seeds could use some tweaking too. The diced squash isn’t vivid enough and the taste of the blue cheese barely comes through.

In addition to the pizza, Bloom Cafe offers a handful of main courses after 5 p.m. That would include a superior burger that’s 8 ounces of beef with your choice of cheese (Stilton is definitely the way to go) and all the fixings, on a soft bun. For $9.75, it’s quite the bargain, considering it comes with salad or fries. Ask for the latter extra crispy, and everybody will be hogging them, especially since they come with an irresistible green, very garlicky, aioli.

Otherwise, there’s a flavorful grass-fed top sirloin steak from Niman Ranch, a moist organic “airline” chicken so named because it’s the breast with the wing attached, and a delicious wild-caught New Zealand red snapper filet marinated in Mediterranean herbs. All served with good veggies, snow peas and baby bok choy sprinkled with sesame seeds.

In California, it’s impossible to have a cafe without some pasta. And so at Bloom, there’s a nod to Thai cuisine with linguini and vegetables in a sauce that tastes strongly of coconut milk and lime. For my taste, it’s too sweet, and not hot enough, but the fresh noodles are chewy and good. Linguini also appears with Gorgonzola and walnuts.

The menu is structured so you can come for one dish on your own, or a roaring tour through several dishes with friends. And though service has been patchy, the cafe now has a tight crew of friendly earnest waiters, though sometimes not as many as needed to make it really efficient. But then again, how speedy does it have to be? Everything is cooked from scratch and for that, it takes at least a little time. This is not fast food.

The desserts need some work. They’re too fancy for the concept and not at all memorable. Instead of chocolate ganache on pistachios or individual tough-crusted tarts, why not something homier? A slice of real cake or pie, a pudding or clafouti. The one standout, though, is the snowy coconut sorbet from L.A.’s own Ciao Bella.

Bloom doesn’t have a wine and beer license, so it’s strictly BYOB. Look around on any night, and most tables have taken advantage of the fact they can bring their own , a policy that makes Bloom even more affordable. (There are, of course, iced tea, soda, mineral water and fresh juices too.)

Bloom, in fact, is doing what might have seemed impossible until very recently. The two Frenchmen who own it have moved into an untried neighborhood and instead of offering the minimum, they’re offering something irresistible: a real cafe.

virbila@latimes.com

*

Bloom Cafe

Rating: *1/2

Location: 5544 W. Pico Blvd. (at Curson Avenue), Los Angeles; (323) 934-6900; www.go2bloom.com.

Ambience: A casual cafe with an emphasis on the healthy and organic that draws a diverse neighborhood crowd for breakfast, lunch, dinner and eat-in or take-out pizzas.

Service: Friendly and unpretentious, if sometimes slow.

Price: Organic egg dishes, $6.50 to $9.50; waffles and pancakes, $5.75 to $7; salads, $8.50 to $11.50; sandwiches, $5.50 to $11, pizzas, $11 to $18; dinner entrees, $12 to $18; desserts, $5 to 7.

Best dishes: 2 + 2 + 2, lemon ricotta pancakes, huevos rancheros, burger, “gorgeous green salad,” Caesar salad, Comte cheese and potato pizza, homemade lamb sausage pizza, Provencal pizza, wild red snapper, “airline” chicken, grass-fed Niman Ranch sirloin, coconut sorbet.

Wine list: It’s strictly BYOB, with no corkage fee. But there are also juices, iced coffee and tea, and smoothies.

Best table: The one in the front window.

Details: Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Street parking.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.