A RESTAURANT IN SEARCH OF A STYLE

I was talking about restaurants with a friend not long ago--about what makes them good, what virtues they should perhaps strive for. He offered that what he admired most in a place were consistency and a sense of balance. He preferred smooth sailing, he explained, to that all-too-common alternation of high crests and deep plummets. He liked restaurants that were of a piece--seamless.

My friend wouldn’t have liked Stones one bit. Despite its safe berth in the snug harbor of Marina del Rey, this rather elegant, rather quiet new hotel dining room (at the just-opened Marina Beach Hotel) is something of a choppy ride. It is not, by any means, a bad restaurant. It is easy on the eyes, in celadon and rose, with what might be called Greco-Chinois (Grequoise?) accents. It is professionally run, by Jean-Pierre Omond, formerly of Bernard’s, and the service is earnest (if not always sure-footed) and more or less attentive.

The wine list is small, and unfortunately weighted with a bunch of mediocre Armand Roux Burgundies, but also contains some good bottles at fair prices in both the higher and lower echelons (from 1985 Chateau St. Jean Fume Blanc at $14, say, to 1979 Chateau Cheval-Blanc at $60). And chef Pierre Sauvaget, whom we last saw trying in vain to transform the Theme Room at LAX into a serious restaurant, has composed an imaginative and varied new-American menu, and is clearly talented in the kitchen (especially as a saucier ).

The problems--the seams or the whitecaps, depending on which metaphor you prefer--are two: The menu is too varied, to begin with; it lacks a single strong personality, a constancy of vision. Thus, the subtle is jumbled up with the demonstrative, the nouvelle with the old-hat, the Southwestern and the Japanese with the Creole and the Provencal. It looks like the work of a dozen chefs, not one; it’s an anthology, not a coherent artistic statement.

Second, though, and perhaps less explicable, is the way that the cooking, for all of its potential high quality, too often seems to miss the mark. An appetizer of tender escargots and what is, in effect, warm guacamole served in a deep-fried “nest” of thin tortilla strips (rather like a potato basket), is a fascinating idea; but the tortilla basket comes out chewy (as if the oil it was fried in wasn’t hot enough), and the minced green and red peppers decorating the escargots have bled their bitterness into everything. Creole marinated shrimp was overcooked to toughness one evening and badly salty, and the smoked salmon had that shiny look common to supermarket lox. A duck salad with shredded daikon and carrot might have worked on one occasion, but the duck tasted vaguely stale and the fresh peach with which it was garnished was just plain silly. (A noted Peter Cook and Dudley Moore bit came to mind here.) And speaking of silly, a quite good baby spinach salad with creamy goat cheese and chopped walnuts is habitually dressed up with paper-thin apple slices and a tomato rose--”hotel” touches in the worst possible sense. (Where was the butter swan, the arcing pike carved out of ice?)

That’s the bad news. Enough good comes out of Sauvaget’s kitchen, though, to make me want to keep trying Stones, in hopes that the rough seas will calm. For instance: an excellent Provencal-influenced dish of sliced lamb loin with a scattering of lavender blossoms on a bed of shredded cabbage; a good (if sometimes regrettably overcooked) piece of salmon with a superb, slightly spicy tomatillo cream sauce; a “New Orleans style” rib eye steak, seriously browned (rather than blackened) with a mix of ground spices, with nice sauteed artichoke hearts; “tournedos” that turned out to be a single huge filet, a veritable mesa of meat, with an excellent sake, soy sauce and ginger marinade, surrounded by a delicious mix of red peppers, leeks and shiitake mushrooms; a special one evening of lobster (strangely flavorless, alas) and sweetbreads (full of flavor) in a perfect red bell pepper coulis --all of them dishes I look forward to tasting again.

I must add that Sauvaget relies rather too much, I think, on those boring little well-turned hunks of carrot, zucchini and such as vegetables. And when I asked if the kitchen could rustle us up some spuds one evening to match our steaks (being of the school that believes meat should be eaten to the accompaniment of potatoes whenever possible), out came the saddest imaginable little plate of four baton-shaped morsels of same, steamed into insipidity and about as flavorful as tofu.

Stones is one of those places, incidentally, that gussies up its food and service with little extras like Evian as complimentary drinking water, sorbet between courses (I hate this mindless pretension--but I must admit that Sauvaget’s offering on one occasion, an apple sorbet with bits of carmelized apple and a shot of Calvados, was quite wonderful), and a long-stemmed rose for female diners as they leave. A cognac wagon that was present in the restaurant’s first days is gone, though, and I regret to report that what looks like a nice little humidor on a pedestal in the middle of the room is actually an antique tea chest, for decoration only.

Stones, Marina Beach Hotel, 4100 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey , (213) 301-6868. Open for dinner Monday-Saturday. All major credit cards accepted. Full bar. Valet parking and parking lot. Dinner for two (food only): $50-$75.