THE PEELS PART COMPANY WITH N.Y.

As of last Sunday, L.A.’s Mark Peel and Nancy (Mrs. Peel) Silverton, who added such strength to Spago during their long stay there and then went off to take over the kitchen at Maxwell’s Plum in New York City last October, are out of a job. The pair parted company with the restaurant over--guess what?--”creative differences,” returning briefly last Thursday to cook a long-planned special Christian Brothers Winery luncheon there with San Francisco Chinese-food wizard Ken Hom. They then flew west for a brief stay here and in San Francisco.

What will Peel and Silverton do next? First order of business, says Peel, is for his wife to OK galleys for her new book, “Desserts by Nancy Silverton,” due out in September for Harper & Row. Then, he adds, “we are going to take some time and go to Europe--see what other people are doing, recharge the batteries.”

And will they eventually move back to L.A.? Neither is sure. “We like New York,” Peel says, “but we have more connections in Los Angeles, and it would probably be easier to do something here.”

Locally, meanwhile, chef Claude Segal has left Bistango on La Cienega and is working for the next few months as a consultant for Wave in Santa Monica, redoing the menu, reorganizing the kitchen and such.

Over delicious oysters on the half shell at the Grill in Beverly Hills the other day, the subject of the salubriousness of said mollusks came up. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it seems, identified a total of 1,017 cases of gastrointestinal illness linked with the consumption of raw clams or oysters on the East Coast in an eight-month period in 1982. Based on this report, and on other similar studies, health officials in New York State and elsewhere have recently been quoted widely as discouraging the eating of any raw shellfish, even in the finest of restaurants. Steam clams and oysters for at least a minute before eating, one New York official has recommended; cook the suckers for three or four, says another.

But what do the guardians of our own California-style well-being have to say about all this? Ralph Lounsbury, director of the state Department of Health Services in Los Angeles, told me that his office has no official position on the matter--but he did allow as how steaming mollusks before eating them was “a very good idea.” Dr. Ronald Roberto, deputy chief of the department’s Infectious Disease Branch in Berkeley, offered a bit more detail: “You have to be careful when you eat any raw animal product,” he said, “whether it’s oysters, sushi, beef tartare, or whatever. There are simply no absolute guarantees that it will be safe. In California, though, so far we haven’t had any outbreaks of gastrointestinal disease or hepatitis-A--the other thing you have to worry about with shellfish--that can be linked to clams or oysters. This kind of thing tends to be more of a problem on the East Coast, because of the population density and resulting fecal contamination along the coastline. Our biggest problem is with paralytic shellfish poisoning associated with mussels from our waters--which is why they’re quarantined from May 1 to October 31 each year. Anyway, we have a very small shellfish industry here--and we hope that anything that gets brought in from the East comes from areas that are very closely monitored.”

Yes, but does Roberto himself ever eat raw shellfish? “Sure,” he says, “but I’ve mostly eaten it in France, or in New England, where I could see where it was gathered from. I know I’m taking a chance every time I do it--and it’s a chance I choose to take.”

SPECIALTIES: Lissa Doumani, pastry chef at 385 North, offers pastry classes on May 25 and June 29 at $35 each. . . . La Societie de Bacchus et Epicurus, founded 24 years ago by the late Albert Gans and his wife Harriet and now under the direction of Geni Charlesworth, holds two Scandinavian dinners at the Tivoli Garden in Encino on May 18 and 19. For membership information (there are no fees), call (213) 656-2742. . . . Le Cafe Market in Sherman Oaks now sells nine different box lunches and picnic baskets for picnic evenings at the Hollywood Bowl and such, priced from $8.50 to $15 for two. . . . The Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel has introduced a new, extensive Sunday brunch menu, with three courses (including six kinds of eggs Benedict, for heaven’s sake) at $14.50 to $18, plus a positively huge a la carte selection of real food. . . . The New Otani Hotel, downtown, continues its Sunday Cultural Programs with a “continental gourmet” cooking demonstration May 18, a calligraphy demonstration June 8 and a Japanese cooking demonstration June 29 (and in case you’re thinking of going to Tokyo in the near future instead of getting your culture right here in L.A., you might be interested to learn that a recent study of international prices and earnings has found that the Japanese capital averages the highest per-capita dinner checks in the world--$42 per, as opposed to $8 in Rio de Janeiro, $15 in London, and $23 here in the City of the Angels). . . . And for those of you who find yourselves just simply too busy to drop everything and go out and get some fish eggs for yourself, Geoffrey’s restaurant, in Malibu, now offers “Caviar by Courier,” starting at $75 per delivery.

INSTITUTIONAL FEEDING: Franklin P. Conlan has been named new head of the American Institute of Wine & Food, replacing George Trescher. Conlan is a veteran of the Memorex Corp. and the First Cabin Corp. (specializing in incentive and motivational programs) and now has his own executive search and recruitment company. His father was in the hotel business, which is apparently the extent of his professional association with matters gastronomic.

MISCELLANY: Imagine my surprise, at the Original Sonora Cafe not long ago, to find that, among the items listed on the computerized check presented to my party, were “Choc mse 2 female,” “lob tost 2 female,” and “blu crnb 2 female.” Do females get special treatment from the kitchen here? Or is this some way of helping hapless servers remember who gets what (which they ought hardly to need, since the “2” clearly refers to the seating position of the orderer of the dishes in question)? . . . And imagine my further surprise to learn that the San Diego branch of Trader Vic’s, which I referred to in passing in my column a while back, does not in fact exist.