CULINARY BROWNOUT IN N.Y.

It’s springtime, but the whole city is turning brown. The color is everywhere. Walk into any new restaurant in town and what do you see? Brown. On the walls, on the chairs, on the people. While Los Angeles restaurants get increasingly casual, Gotham is being swamped by a wave of conservatism. Jackets are back. Ties are back. Dresses are back. Los Angeles restaurants are becoming almost absurdly futuristic, but New York is taking a turn to the past.

Consider Le Bernardin, New York’s hottest new restaurant. There is money in the air here. This restaurant would have been comfortable in the last decade--or the last century. The luxurious room (brown) is filled with soft wood, softer chairs, dark paintings on the walls. It looks like a very exclusive men’s club. Waiters speak in hushed tones. It’s all extremely conservative--but then radicals could hardly afford these prices. The prix fixe menu is $55; add a salad and the tab goes up to $62.

Run by an astonishingly handsome brother-sister team (who own one of Paris’ most famous fish restaurants), Le Bernardin is totally focused on fish. When the market has nothing that pleases the chef, the restaurant simply closes. Bernardin opened with a bang (within months of opening it had received a four-star rating from the New York Times) and reservations are almost impossible to get.

You can peer into a gorgeous glassed-in kitchen that is the envy of every chef who sees it, but tasting what comes out of that efficient laboratory is vaguely disappointing. While all the food is properly prepared and made with good ingredients, virtually everything we ordered came drenched in beurre blanc . Even a charmingly served sea urchin soup, cradled in four large shells, was about 50% butter. After an evening of eating these light little fish, you could easily gain 5 or 10 pounds.

Pompano sauteed in butter and parsley arrived in a pool of beurre blanc . So did roasted monkfish with cabbage. Both were perfectly fresh and perfectly cooked. I can’t say the same for the haricots verts , which were decidedly brown, and the salad had a dressing so acidic that, while it did a good job of cutting through the butter, it was a bit hard to eat. Desserts were fabulous, and the service was a joy. But with one bottle of wine, this meal cost over $200.

Le Bernardin, 155 West 52nd St., New York, (212) 489-1515.

The best part of this particular evening was the finale next door at Palio. Walk into the bar--instant color! The square room is dominated by extravagant murals painted by Italian artist Sandro Chia. Dramatically lit and painted in bold bright tones, the horses of Siena’s famous race come thundering down on you. You’ll never have a more interesting drink.

But go upstairs to the dining room--as I did a few days later--and suddenly you are back to brown. The walls are paneled in oak. The chairs are large and imposing. The menus are covered in leather and hoverage is high. The menu is impressive. So, for that matter, is the wine list, which has a great many reasonably priced bottles.

But on the plate, the Italian food was simply not very memorable. An appetizer of asparagus was totally overwhelmed by the lemon horseradish sauce with which it was served. A plate of kidneys and spinach was workmanlike, no more. Raw fillet of beef with artichokes came drowned in olive oil, pasta with eggplant, capers and tomatoes came drowned in sauce. It wasn’t a bad meal, but it was more in tune with the general brownness of the dining room than with the verve of the colorful murals downstairs.

Palio, 151 West 55th St., New York, (212) 245-4850.

Over on the East Side, designer Milton Glaser has managed to create an even browner restaurant. Aurora, owned by legendary restaurant consultant Joe Baum, is--you guessed it--paneled in wood. The clublike atmosphere is emphasized by padded brown chairs that move with you, swiveling when you turn. The chairs are comfortable, but your body can’t help feeling that it’s sitting in a car.

Seats are widely spaced. The air is quiet. The service is impeccable. The wine list is excellent, and very well priced. The food? Le tout New York loves it--but I thought it was merely pretty good French food. In a meal that included rillettes of salmon, a spring vegetable tart with sauce fines herbs (the tart was warm, the sauce was warm, but some of the vegetables were straight out of the ice box), mixed salad, grilled salmon and asparagus with warm mint vinaigrette, a platter of baby lamb cuts and a flourless chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, the only memorable dishes were the salad (the olive oil was superb) and the dessert.

And when you’re paying more than $30 for an entree, you ought to do better.

Aurora, 60 East 49th St., New York, (212) 692-9292.

Still, that meal was far better than what we were served at the outrageous Harry Cipriani, a restaurant so packed that a herd of people with 1:30 reservations stood pressed against the revolving door for a good half hour waiting for their tables.

When Harry’s Bar (the real one, the one in Venice) decided to open a New York branch, they must have decided that Americans were so dumb they’d eat anything--and pay anything. How else to explain an appetizer of carpaccio-- paper-thin slices of raw beef on a plate with a dab of mustard on the top--for $23.50? A few spoonfuls of terrible vegetable risotto for $19? A bowl of leek soup that is mainly potatoes for $7? Tired pieces of battered pan-fried chicken with even more tired vegetables, similarly dressed? Even an $8 piece of chocolate cake tasted heavily of commercial coffee extract. And need you ask the color scheme? Of course not.

Harry’s Cipriani, 783 5th Ave., New York, (212) 759-9047.

These brown restaurants have all opened in the past few months and they have generated a great deal of excitement. I found that people here greeted me by asking, “Where have you eaten?” I couldn’t help thinking that a better question would have been, “What have you spent?” But while I was not overwhelmed by these pricey brown places, I did eat delicious food in some bright, white, less expensive restaurants that are setting some New York trends of their own.

Arizona 206 is feeding Gotham’s new-found interest in spicy food. This is a small, crowded friendly place filled with people happily eating nouvelle Southwestern dishes like ravioli with goat cheese, roast pepper and sun-dried tomatoes or chili-rubbed free-range chicken or warm salad made of sweetbreads, mustard greens and salsa. Everything I tasted here was inventive, tasty and fine.

Arizona 206, 206 East 60th St., New York, (212) 838-0440.

The just-opened Hulot’s is one of a number of new places serving typical French bistro food. Owned by California transplant Jonathan Waxman, the cozy restaurant (named for the Jacques Tati character) has an open kitchen where you can watch chefs cooking comforting food like roast chicken with mashed potatoes, soupe au pistou, a fine frisee aux lardons. The portions are large, the flavors straightforward, the prices reasonable. After a few days in New York, the sheer unseriousness of the place is a delight.

Hulot’s, 1007 Lexington Ave., New York, (212) 794-9800.

Mezzaluna was my favorite of the ever-increasing number of gourmet pizza joints. The small restaurant has a wood-burning oven and limits the menu to pasta, pizza--and four kinds of carpaccio . I especially liked the raw beef served on a bed of arugula and covered with thick shavings of Parmesan cheese. (Most prices are in the $10 range.) This is a raucous restaurant, filled with young Italians eating, arguing and drinking endless bottles of wine.

Mezzaluna, 1295 3rd Ave., New York, (212) 535-9600.

But the best meal I ate in New York was not in a big brown restaurant nor a small white one. It was the benefit dinner held on James Beard’s birthday at An American Place.

This is a small restaurant of quiet elegance that was among the first in the nation to champion home-grown products. The meal began with fabulous breads, including a lemon pepper brioche that I could have gone on eating forever. Then there was grilled duck sausage with spoonbread griddle cakes, followed by a clear herby broth of wild mushrooms. Planked Northwest salmon came next, a perfectly splendid piece of fish served with a tomato hollandaise.

The next course was rack of lamb that had been steamed over rosemary until the flesh absorbed the fragrant steam; it shared the plate with creamed hash browns and small buttery pods of sweet sugar peas. The meal ended with Sunday supper plates of shortcake covered with billows of country cream and really flavorful berries. The meal was supremely simple and utterly delicious; eating it, you couldn’t help thinking how pleased James Beard would have been.

His doctor was seated at the next table. As he finished his shortcake he said: “You know, chef Larry Forgione and I were the last ones to see Jim Beard. He was sauteing frog’s legs in his head. We got the last recipe.”

As he said this, I wondered what Beard would have thought about New York’s sudden infatuation with European foods--and the browning of his chosen home.

An American Place, 969 Lexington Ave., New York, (212) 517-7600.