ETHNIC PLACES SERVE FOODS THAT THEY LOVE BEST

Angeli, 7274 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood , 936-9086. Open from 10 a.m.-midnight, Tuesday-Sunday. Street parking. American Express, Visa, MasterCard. Dinner for two, $15-$30 (food only). Takeout and delivery available. The Mandarette, 8386 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood. Open daily from 11:30 a.m-midnight (Fridays and Saturdays until 1 a.m.). Street parking. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Dinner for 2, $15-$30 (food only). ‘I’ve always had a really uncomfortable sense around ‘gourmetness’--around what I perceived to be food snobbery,” Evan Kleiman said a couple of years ago.

She had just given up her job as the highly acclaimed chef at Verdi, and she was considering her next move. “The thing that basically interests me is Italian home cooking,” she admitted, fantasizing about opening a place of her own. “When I go to Milan, I go to fine dining places, but the places I end up eating every night are the trattorie . For me, it’s where you get the best food.”

“What I always liked best was the food that we cooked for the employees,” said Philip Chiang, who ran the Mandarin Restaurant in Beverly Hills (which was started by his mother). Chiang liked it so well that when special friends came into the restaurant, he would serve them the food that was being eaten in the kitchen. “They always loved it,” he said. “It’s the food I grew up on. I decided that I wanted to open an informal place that served only that.”

Last month, Chiang did open his restaurant. So did Kleiman, and together they are bringing a whole new character to Los Angeles restaurants. Ethnic authenticity is certainly not new, but never before have we had it filtered through such sophisticated sensibilities. Both of these fledgling restaurateurs are young, and both have impressive backgrounds in high-class restaurants. And both have decided to open the sort of restaurants that they want to eat in themselves. The food that they are serving could not be more different, but it shares certain characteristics. Both are striving for the elegance of simplicity, serving inexpensive, rather rustic, old-fashioned food in an urban, hip and decidedly modern atmosphere.

Angeli attacks you with both its warmth and its sophistication the minute you walk in the door. The place is so fragrant with the mingled scents of of olive oil and garlic and basil and rosemary that you are already thinking of southern Italy before you look around and realize how modern and almost cold the design is. The visual effect of the glass brick wall in the front, and the solid wooden beam that goes crashing aggressively through the ceiling, is beautifully balanced by the sweet friendliness of the chef who stands twirling pizzas by the oven in the front. You know at once that you will get the best of both worlds.

“I tend to be less interested in meat, in main courses, than I am in antipasti and salads,” Kleiman once said. You’d know it from looking at the menu, which is pretty much limited to what she likes. There are wonderful salads like panzanella --a concoction of torn bread and tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers in a sprightly vinaigrette--that is a bit like having Italy spread out on a plate. There are delightful antipasto plates that offer little bites of pungent sauteed and marinated vegetables, rice salads, pieces of frittata and the like. The ingredients change, but they can be counted on to offer a wide range of appetite-whetting flavors.

There are also arancini , balls of saffron-colored rice the size of the tiny oranges from which they take their name, stuffed with cheese and then deep-fried. These are sold in train stations all over southern Italy, and anybody who has ever traveled on the cheap in Italy will feel instantly nostalgic. Less appealing are the melanzane in carozza --rather bland little eggplant sandwiches stuffed with mozzarella cheese and deep fried.

The pizzas, with their light crusts and fresh toppings, are wonderful. There is a fine garlicky pesto version, an anchovy-pepper-and-olive-laden putanesca , a seafood-covered version . . . and on and on. My favorite, however, is the Margherita, topped only with tomato, mozzarella and basil. If there is a better pizza in town, I haven’t had it.

The restaurant also makes a pungently flavorful lasagna, the thin sheets of pasta layered with cheese and so barely sauced that it is reminiscent of the spare food that Kleiman popularized at Verdi. This is not the southern Italy that comes out of No. 10 cans of tomatoes, but the southern Italy of light-handed cooks. There are calzone, both fried and baked (I found the fried version rather bland), and a whole range of wonderful panini , Italian sandwiches stuffed into crusty home-made rolls.

There are not a lot of desserts, but on occasion there is a sort of coffee jelly that is the most refreshing way to finish a meal that you will ever find, and a fine house-made cannoli that is barely sweetened. There is also an appealing Italian wine list. “I was surprised to discover,” co-owner John Strobel said, “that while I had no trouble finding good Italian white wines, it was difficult to find inexpensive Italian reds that I liked.”

Nevertheless, he has done well, and you should be able to find something to please you on the list. And that’s important, for this is a true cafe, the kind of place where you will want to drop in for an afternoon snack, eat alone at the counter in the front, or linger with some friends over a bottle of wine.

Philip Chiang was so taken with the idea of having a cafe that when he opened the Mandarette, he left the old neon “CAFE” sign hanging over the door. “I wanted the place to feel like it was here already,” he says. “I didn’t want it to feel new.”

The place does feel quite new, however, with its unusual contemporary style. Simply done in black and green, the tone is set by two large Chinese ancestral paintings that contrast starkly with a canvas by Roger Hermann. Chiang may have named the place the Mandarette, as in luncheonette , but it is a luncheonette as filtered through a cool sensibility; if anything, the place looks Japanese.

Chiang, in fact, was raised in Japan, which explains the lightness of the cooking. All the dishes share a clean quality; almost nothing is cooked with starch or oil, and even dishes that you expect to be oily--such as the wonderful Sichuan noodles with minced pork and spices--are virtually greaseless.

“My staff were surprised when they saw the menu,” Chiang said. “They were expecting chop suey, but this is really authentic cooking, the sort of food we all eat at home. You rarely find it in restaurants.”

There are dishes from all over China--delicate spicy won-tons in paper-thin wrappers doused in a fiery Hunanese sauce, delightful Shanghainese green onion pancakes, a simple but tasty Cantonese lemon chicken that presents boneless pieces of chicken in a piquant lemon sauce. Red cooked gizzards are also Cantonese, the texture of the meat soft and smooth in its five-spice and soy dressing. And from Shanghai there are rich lion’s head meatballs, the plump spheres of pork almost uncannily light, cooked with Chinese cabbage in a fine broth. There is also an excellent drunken chicken, the silky flesh perfumed by its wine bath.

There are some truly original dishes as well, like the hamburger Mandarette--sauteed pork with onion and a bit of chili sauce stuffed into small, home-made fried buns. A dish of eggplant slices with garlic dressing is extraordinary, the slices plump, almost squeaky clean, in a cool, briny soy-and-garlic sauce with absolutely no oil. Even more addictive are the steamed pork dumplings, served in a little bamboo steamer with a sauce of soy and shredded ginger on the side.

This is home cooking, not peasant cooking, and many of the dishes have great finesse. The squid with bean sprouts is a very refined dish, each element sliced to the same length and width, so that the effect is a subtle one of white on white. And the vegetable fried rice arrives looking like a bowl of confetti-sprinkled snow, the bits of vegetables scattered through the pristine white rice.

The food comes in little bowls rather than in large portions, so that one person can have a simple snack or taste a few dishes for a more substantial meal. At the moment, you have to bring your own wine, but Chiang has a wine list ready for the time when the license comes through. He plans to offer wines by the glass as well as by the bottle, and it is easy to imagine spending a whole evening tasting bites of food and sips of wine when that happens.

A cautionary note: Angeli is tiny; the Mandarette is small, and neither place takes reservations. Expect to wait for a table. But this is less onerous than you might expect; there is such a friendly feeling in both places that the waiting can be quite jolly. The Mandarette staff is young, jocular, extremely polite, with none of the edge of the professionally blase waiter. And over at Angeli, Kleiman noted that something strange was taking place. “You know,” she said, “every restaurant I’ve worked in, the waiters have grumbled about the customers. But here they keep saying how nice the customers are.”