PRETTY GOOD TREES TAKES ROOT
Trees, 440 Heliotrope, Corona del Mar, (714) 673-0910. Open seven days, dinner only, 5:30 “until the last guest is served.” Parking lot. Dinner for two (food only): $50-$65.
So OK, you’ve had a real ugly week. It happens to the worst of us.
A little beauty, though, goes a long way toward clearing the psychic palate.
Pick a pretty day, any pretty day. God knows there are enough of those to go around. Drive down to pretty Corona del Mar. (Granted, you’ll have to go through Long Beach, but put on some pretty radio music and be glad you’re not in Yonkers.) Spend a pretty afternoon at one of the prettiest beaches this side of La Jolla.
Come dinner time, sashay into Trees, the prettiest restaurant around--all rose, peach and pink, soothing as a brook in a brush fire.
Pick a dish, any dish. Gaze before gorging. Pretty, pretty food, the kind you see in those glossy magazines. Those dishes took about six hours just to set up for some finicky, overpaid photographer with bangs. At Trees, they serve them as a matter of courses.
It would be fun to report that dinner will cost you a pretty penny, fun but not entirely accurate. Let’s just say an attractive penny (and in the case of the $12.50 prix fixe , one of the summer’s best buys).
As for the taste of the food--sooner or later you’re going to have to grab your fork and muck up that gorgeous arrangement--it follows the pattern. The food is pretty good.
Sometimes it’s damned good and sometimes it’s bland--a pity, because somebody has gone to great pains with the menu.
Case in point: a red-pepper rotolo rolled in spinach with Pernod-orange cream sauce and a garnish of fettuccine. Visually, a modern masterwork: alternating swirls of bright orange and dark green, with pointillist dots that prove to be pistachio nuts. Gustatorily, though, you know you’re in a little trouble when the tastiest component of this montage is the little tomato bits festooning the fettuccine.
Similarly, a cucumber salad suggests Venus rising from a half-shell of artistically arrayed lettuce. The raisons d’etre , though, are wading in cream, plain cream, which is hardly calculated to add character to your cuke.
Fortunes fluctuate, though, in this prettiest of places. Veal with chanterelles is splendidly enhanced by a mustard sauce that has just enough personality for its own voice but not too much to mute the delicate veal. A neat trick.
Ditto with the hint of garlic gracing a lamb en croute --a dish that totally disarmed a diner heretofore convinced that anything savory in a pie crust should be shipped to the starving Scots. (Tiptoeing about the plate, too, was a subtle Madeira sauce that knew its place and stayed in it.) Squash on the side was a wonder, passed through so many sieves it virtually floated. They do things like that at Trees.
A Chinese chicken salad is a considerate addition as main course on a warm evening. The usual elements: noodles, sweetish sesame taste, bits and piece of green and red--but a dish piqued by enough impish sprigs of cilantro to thumb their nose at languor.
Best bets at Trees, however, may be the specials. Samaki-- smoked yellowfin tuna--was a rumbustious appetizer one night, sushi with an asterisk. So personable was the samaki that it was repeated in an angel-hair pasta al olio , along with mussels, baby octopus, salmon, mushrooms, peppers. . . . Once one stopped fooling around (“What’s this bit? Oh, wow!”), the temptation to smush it all up together was irresistible, the byproduct voluptuous.
The mussels, in turn--fat, sweet, swinging--were repeated in the best soup of the summer, and if a subsequent grilled salmon was burned at the stake, there was always the dessert to look forward to.
They call it “apricot mousse,” which is like calling the Taj Mahal a headstone. It comes on a plate embossed with a wavy red-and-white pattern, which turns out to be not a pattern at all but a design of raspberry and cream, a web spun by a spider who studied under Picasso. Atop the “plate,” a mousse nestled on a sable richer than a Saudi sheik. It’s a dessert that can jolt you out of your hard-won pretty state of mind, so linger for espresso and take in the decor again, a decor designed to simultaneously appease and appeal.
From the table gazanias to the Bauer chairs to the saltcellars to the Don Bowman paper sculptures to the earthenware wine coolers, each detail blends as if poured from the same magic bottle--coordinated, but not self-consciously so.
Pretty rare.
