ADDING UP THE PLUSES AND MINUSES AT ABACUS

Abacus, 11701 Wilshire Blvd., West Los Angeles , 207-4875. Open for lunch and dinner, Monday-Saturday. Dinner only on Sunday. Valet Parking. Full bar. All major cards. Dinner for two, $22-$60 (food only).

“The two things I insist upon in restaurants are valet parking and toilet paper in the ladies room,” said my guest one night.

These are not the things that I insist upon, but it’s something restaurateurs ought to keep in mind. We arrived at one of Los Angeles’ most attractive new Chinese restaurants to find the parking lot full, the attendant unable to take our cars, and the patrons forced to drive endlessly around one of Los Angeles’ busiest corners looking for nonexistent parking places. As if this were not enough, the beautiful marble ladies room, despite its unquestionable cleanliness, had run out of toilet paper. Dinner had been ruined for my guest.

The rest of us, however, looked around at the luxuriously modern restaurant, with its marble columns and its trendy rose tones, and sank gratefully into very comfortable chairs. We picked up the menus with their striking graphics, and ordered wine from the well-priced and thoughtful list. And before any of us really had time to start singing the parking blues, the wine was poured and the appetizers served; it immediately became clear that some of the things that I insist upon were very satisfying.

The waiter deftly assembled spring pancakes with vegetables, folding a cornucopia of crisp vegetable shreds into thin pancakes and handing them around the table. You might call this a sort of egg roll unraveled; the little packages were fresh tasting, each vegetable somehow standing apart, creating a delightful harmony of flavors.

“Don’t let me eat any more of these,” pleaded one friend as he popped yet another slice of eggplant with pepper-salt into his mouth. The slices of slightly astringent eggplant were soft beneath the crunchy, slightly sweet batter that enclosed them. The contrast of the crisp coating and the buttery vegetable, the bitter and the sweet, was made even more pronounced when topped with a sprig of fresh cilantro. It was hard to stop eating these little morsels.

Next came seaweed shrimp roll, an unusual dish of whole shrimps wrapped in leaves of seaweed and then deep-fried. The crackly seaweed enclosed slightly toothy shrimp, creating a surprising play of texture and flavor. Abacus spareribs were also wonderful--meaty slices of lean chewy pork that had totally absorbed the pungently sweet, garlicky flavors of the marinade. Won ton in chili sauce were an admirable accompaniment, the little dumplings spooned into bowls over bright green leaves of steamed spinach and stalks of scallions, and then doused with a clear, fiery sauce. The brisk, cool Honig sauvignon blanc was the perfect wine for this heat, and I for one was very happy.

“Don’t eat with your ears,” the 18th-Century philosopher of the table, Yuan Mei, once said. “By this I mean, do not aim at having extraordinary out-of-the-way foods just to astonish your guests. For that is to eat with the ears, not with the mouth.” The first courses were, in some sense, unusual dishes, but with the next course we began eating with our mouths. And that is when disappointment set in.

“I don’t think it is for you,” said the waiter when I ordered kung pao squid. I should have listened to him, but being a stubborn lover of squid, I did not heed his warning. I winced as soon as he put the dish, which contained slices of some giant animal you would not want to meet in the water, on the table. I winced once again when I tasted it. But the waiter did recommend the crab in black bean sauce, and I wasn’t much happier with that; the flesh was overcooked and slightly stringy. And although you rarely get overcooked vegetables in a Chinese restaurants, the Sichuan-style string beans were wrinkled and on the paler side of green.

But even some dishes that were perfectly cooked had problems. The restaurant has its own fish tanks, and the catfish had that subtle flavor you get only when the fish is just minutes out of the water. The flesh was tenderly cooked, but a cloying garlic sauce threatened to inundate the fish and drown the flavor. (On another occasion, an equally well-cooked catfish was overwhelmed by a messy black bean sauce.) Tangerine beef was clumsy, and braised bean curd stuffed with meat was entirely undistinguished.

Yuan Mei had another saying: “A great cook cannot with the utmost application produce more than four great dishes a day.” This is not always the case, but it seems to apply to the Abacus chef. And yet what he does well, he does so well, and in such a charming setting, that the restaurant is worth a visit. I know a couple of people who are still dreaming of that eggplant, and by the time they go back to get it, the parking situation will probably be straightened out.