THE LOOK, THE FEEL . . . OH YES, AND THE FOOD

Rebecca’s , 2025 Pacific Ave., Venice , (213) 306-6266. Open for dinner every night. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$70.

This is Bruce Marder talking about his new restaurant: “It’s like the difference between California and French wine. California wine has oak, acid, tannin and fruit; you can taste them all individually, but they’re not balanced. In French wines, all those things are there, but they just have one taste. In this restaurant, all the different parts work as one thing. They’re balanced.”

He is not, you understand, talking about the food. (Nobody talks about the food.) He is talking about the way Rebecca’s looks. (Everybody is talking about the way the restaurant looks.) Designed by architect Frank Gehry (“It was pretty gutty,” says Marder. “I just let him do whatever he wanted.”), the place cost a cool million and a half dollars. And, as Marder says, “It’s so weird-looking.”

People love it; people hate it. But people come and see it. Most nights, the traffic in front of the restaurant is so dense, it takes a long time to even get near the door. And it will get worse. “60 Minutes” filmed a benefit there, and three national magazines plan to feature the restaurant in their August issues. What we have here is a new phenomenon: the restaurant as media event.

And an event it is; forget the way the restaurant looks for a minute, and take a look at the crowd. These are gorgeous people, a sort of fantasy L.A. where everybody is healthy and nobody ever gets old. The women all have fabulous legs and beautifully browned bodies and the men are all dressed casually, to kill. Is everybody happy? You bet they are.

And, of course, what goes into those bodies beautiful is nothing but the best. Says Marder: “It’s healthy food. You can go every night and eat it. There are no sauces. There is very little butter, very little dairy products. It’s really clean food. I think people were expecting nouvelle Mexican, but what we are doing is really simple.”

Simple, expensive--and surprisingly good. People aren’t talking about the food, but they should be. This is Mexican food made with lots of love and lots of money, and it tastes just wonderful. Imagine those Mexican seafood cocktails made with fresh tomato juice and just-shucked clams and oysters, ceviche that owes a debt to sashimi, and taquitos made with prime beef. Imagine lime-sprinkled grilled chicken made with tiny flavorful birds and quesadillas made with not only cheese but also epazote and zucchini blossoms. Imagine bowls of freshly made tortilla chips that are rushed, still warm, to your table. With the homemade salsas, they are irresistible. (Asked for his favorite dishes on the menu, Marder said without hesitation, “Chips and salsa and guacamole.”)

To my mind, the best dishes among the first courses are the seafood cocktails and ceviche, the tamales and the rellenos. There is one chile relleno that is filled with a mixture of stewed pork, onions, garlic, raisins, cinnamon and almonds before being deep-fried and topped with walnut sauce. It is a rich and seductive dish, an interpretation of the classic chile en nogada ; it is almost like eating dessert before dinner. I find the taquitos dry and very fried, and the fundido, that Mexican fondue, rather bland. But the banana leaf-wrapped tamales, which are filled with either pork picadillo or chili Colorado, are a treat.

There is also a wonderful sort of pot au feu made of chicken and vegetables with oregano, chile, and lime to sprinkle on top. “But $12 for chicken soup!” exclaimed one of my friends. People do tend to feel that Rebecca’s is too expensive. The very same people who pay the tariff at Primi or Spago or the Ivy without a murmur.

“But this is Mexican food,” they insist, as if the fact of putting salsa on a piece of chicken in place of beurre blanc automatically reduced the price by half. (This attitude may be responsible for our lack of more really fine Mexican restaurants.) Personally, I found some of the dishes at Rebecca’s a relative bargain.

The leg of lamb adobada, for instance, a veritable heap of rosy, rotisserie-roasted lamb, the slices pink and so tender you hardly need a knife. Served with salsa on the side, wedges of lime and really fine French fries, the dish costs $16; I can’t think of another restaurant of this quality serving so much lamb for so little.

The lobster, on the other hand, is expensive. I paid $24 for a tiny little creature with mushy flesh. (I did like the pink grapefruit salsa served with it.) I wasn’t very impressed by the seafood stew either, with its giant New Zealand mussels waving their shells in the air. And I wish that the wood-charred chicken were bigger; the half bird, served with refried black beans, is so delicious--and so tiny--you end up longing for more.

The grilled shrimp, however, are generously served. Bright orange from the achiote oil with which they are grilled, they have a delicate and elusive flavor; just as you think you’ve identified the taste of chile, or garlic, the achiote takes over. The carnitas are good too, although they bear absolutely no relationship to the dry deep-fried pork that usually goes by that name. These are juicy chunks of rotisserie-grilled pork served with warm tortillas to wrap them up in. The carne asada is another good piece of meat; it is nothing more than slices of superbly tender grilled New York steak.

If all this food seems like an elegant version of the familiar, then the desserts will come as a total surprise. I don’t think I’ve ever had a better flan; this one is so good it makes grown adults act like greedy children. The sorbets are refreshing, and the pastries are inventive. One, a little chocolate box filled with a sort of trifle looks like an homage to the onyx-walled private dining room that floats over the bar.

“You call this stuff healthy?” I asked Marder.

“Oh, desserts,” he replied, “they’re different. They’re like little prizes you get after you eat.”

Service is very friendly and, once the food arrives, very fast. A little too fast for my taste; one night I had to cling to my plates to keep them from being whisked off the table. I know they were trying to clear the table for the next wave of eaters, but I felt I was being rushed out the door.

Getting people to leave has obviously become a problem. Diners not only want to eat, they want to roam about the restaurant examining the aqua booths and the tuck and roll aqua walls and the horrible octopus suspended from the ceiling. They want to get up under the crocodiles and see if they’re real. They want to peer at the long black velvet painting to see if it’s for real. “Do you think Gehry seriously meant to collect all these icons of terrible taste?” one woman was asking her partner as she strolled past our booth. “Who knows?” he shrugged. Who knows indeed?

Even Marder admits to being puzzled by Rebecca’s.

“It scares me,” he says. “I’m not sure why people are here. This is the antithesis of my other restaurant, the West Beach Cafe (which is across the street). There’s really no restaurant there; it’s just food and wine and people. Here, there’s a lot of restaurant. You’ve got this architecture . . . but I’ve got to know that people are coming here for another reason. I don’t want it to be just another pretty face.”