POPOLOS: RIDICULOUS TO THE SUBLIME

Decor can make or break a place. Take Chez Helene, for instance, on Beverly Drive. The food’s OK, nothing spectacular, and the desserts are not worth the calories. But I go there again and again and recommend the place to friends because the rooms themselves are so gracious and celebratory, charming as a French country inn, and, to be fair, the chicken rosemary and lamb aren’t bad either.

But if the decor is tasteless, can the food possibly taste good?

Enter Popolos, a new Northern Italian restaurant on Melrose Avenue. Anywhere else--Akron, maybe, or the Yukon or Beverly Hills circa 1957--this place would seem elegant with its colonial wallpaper, bank-lobby carpeting, Barker Brothers ambiance. But what’s it doing here, on Melrose Avenue of all places?

The three responsible for this passe scene are its owners, Tony Massa and Steve McClintock, who, Popolos press materials report, are “developers who have been very instrumental in revitalizing the Melrose Avenue shopping area,” and Chef Juan Carlos (Rudy) Riveiro, former executive chef of La Famiglia and one of only five L.A. chefs among 50 brought from around the world to help prepare President Reagan’s inauguration dinner.

For a good meal, I’d endure any room, even this gloomy mausoleum. But unfortunately meals there proved to be strangely schizophrenic--some things great, others awful. It was as if there were two chefs in the kitchen, one who cooked for Presidents, the other an impostor who had never once tasted food.

The impostor, no doubt, made the complimentary garlic toast rounds that got progressively soggy and tough as they cooled, and was also responsible for selecting the bread. The real chef made the salad a la Popolos with nice fresh arugula, watercress et al., in a light and nutty olive-oil dressing. The real chef also conceived the agnolotti verdi con porri e piselli (pasta stuffed with leeks and peas) and made the delicate green pasta himself. Unfortunately, however, he allowed the impostor to make the stuffing. How else could peas and leeks produce such a flavorless mush? The dish was saved only by a last-minute at-the-table sprinkling of tasty parmesan cheese.

There’s no question who made the veal with artichokes and wild mushrooms (it would have been such a bargain at $13.50 had it been edible). When my friend Michelle took her first bite, her eyes widened with surprise, then horror. It tasted like no meat she’d had before, she said, like boiled kangaroo. To Popolos’ credit, our very attentive waiter whisked the plate away (did he know something?) and brought a replacement--whitefish with butter-lemon-caper sauce that had unfortunately also been prepared by the impostor.

The veal chop, too, was a tough, bony little number, not the big, fat, meaty fellow you imagine when you order a veal chop. And then there were the accompanying vegetables, sauteed long beans and carrots julienned into such thin strips that they kept falling between the tines of Popolos’ oversize, weighty forks.

Then--surprise!--in stepped the real chef with the special fish of the day, the plumpest, whitest, most perfectly poached chunk of halibut you ever saw, standing out amid the other dishes like a beautiful swan among a bunch of ragged ducks. The salmon special was very nice, too, and though there was a clash of color between pink fish and tomato-red basil caper sauce, the taste combination was very pleasing.

After dinner proper, a miracle occurred. It was as if the real chef had discovered the impostor and shooed him out of the kitchen (but not before he had brewed some awful coffee). The creme caramel-- custardy, dense and light at the same time--was declared the best in town by the expert at my table. The wedge of apricot tart had a good crust and an amazing density of apricots, as if a million apricots had been pressed into a single pie, relying only on the sweetness of the fruit for the sweetness of the tart. Best of all, however, was the cake-- Sacrapantina, the waiter called it, and sacred cake it was--a simple yellow cake, moist with custard, one edge of the bottom soaked in rum, a small treasure of blackberry jam inside, a crumbly crumb top. This was cake you dream about, cake you crave, cake you talk about the next day, cake, quite possibly, worth returning to Popolos for.

Popolos, 8115 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. (213-651-5966). Lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., Mondays-Fridays; dinner, 5:30 p.m.-11:30 p.m., Mondays-Saturdays. Closed Sundays. Valet parking. Beer and wine only. Visa, MasterCard, American Express. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$60.