RESTAURANT REVIEW:

When I was young, I remembered what a big deal California Pizza Kitchen was when it opened in 1985. The pizza with its exotic ingredients seemed so revolutionary at the time.

An old girlfriend and I were in college in the late 1980s, and that used to be our special place. We would order the roasted garlic chicken with extra garlic. It was a nice change from the pepperoni or sausage we got at the local Italian place.

The salads seemed equally unique. The barbecue chicken chopped salad with black beans and tortilla strips certainly had ingredients we hadn’t seen in a salad. Even the Cobb salad, which was her favorite, had applewood-smoked bacon that tasted so good.

We had such naïve taste buds back then, but CPK did make us feel more mature than I am sure we were. It’s kind of like being a waitress at Red Lobster and thinking you are an expert on seafood, or restaurants in general.

The CPK concept appears to have become a cliché, and there are so many chain restaurants that hide behind a hook and a sappy television commercial.

The reason I believe CPK has avoided that pitfall is the constant evolution of its menu. It hasn’t relied on one or two menu items and has routinely added new entrees. It doesn’t seem content in what it has, and the visits I have made have always found something new and often intriguing.

The risk, however, is having a new menu item that you like get yanked because it wasn’t as popular. That happened with me with the Mediterranean salad. I really liked the romaine leaves and cucumbers, red onions, feta cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and Greek olives. It is served with a lemon-herb vinaigrette on a bed of hummus. Pita bread is on the side of the salad with homemade Tzatziki sauce.

But on my last visit to the Bella Terra location, it wasn’t there, and that was disappointing. Luckily, I still have the Miso salad. The Miso salad is a mix of shredded Napa cabbage (Chinese cabbage), red cabbage, avocado, julienne cucumbers, daikon, and carrots, edaname, green onions, cilantro, wonton bits and rice noodles.

The dressing is a combination of miso paste, sugar, soybean oil and rice wine vinegar. I could have sworn I tasted ginger in it as well.

The salad is outstanding, the vegetables are plentiful and the Napa cabbage has a mild, sweet flavor. It took me three bites to realize they had forgotten to put the dressing on, and it was so good dry, I almost didn’t request it.

Of course, you can always be assured that other salads are going to be put in the rotation. The newest one is a Moroccan chicken salad. The spiced chicken breast with crisp Romaine lettuce, roasted butternut squash, Medjool dates, fresh avocado, toasted almonds, fresh beets, chopped egg, carrots, dried cranberries and red bell peppers combined for an unusual taste, and the champagne vinaigrette only added to the rich flavor of the salad.

The retooling continued on the pizza menu. On a visit a year ago, I liked the Cajun pizza, but the blackened chicken and spicy Andouille sausage with a Creole sauce was a little too eccentric for a lot of people.

The newest pizza, though, more than makes up for it. The combination of sweet Italian sausage, pepperoni, Canadian bacon, Capicola ham and julienne salami is a definite overdose on meat, and they don’t skimp when putting it on top of the pizza.

The other pizza I would recommend is the tomato and basil. The imported Italian tomatoes, Mozzarella cheese and house tomato sauce, topped with fresh basil and Parmesan cheese, is a nice blend of seasonings and makes for a very subtle, yet enjoyable pizza.

The last dish I tried was the pesto cream penne. It is penne pasta with a basil pine nut pesto cream sauce, sun-dried tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. I could have added chicken or shrimp, but didn’t want to complicate the dish. My server did suggest asparagus, and I am glad she did. It was perfect with the pesto and really added to the dish.

On my last visit, I counted five dishes I hadn’t seen since my last trip four months ago, and my taste buds will happily evolve along with the menu.

JOHN REGER reviews local restaurants and may be contacted at Nolimepublishing@aol.com or P.O. Box 2984, Seal Beach, CA 90740.