FRENCH-INDIAN CUISINE CREATED AT GITANJALI

What better way to start the new year than with a whole new cuisine (or at least the intimations of one)?

That seems to be the theory at Gitanjali, the attractive and accessible veteran Indian restaurant on North La Cienega--where owner Prem Chadda and his new wife, the French-born Solange Diter, have recently introduced a supplementary menu featuring (hold on to your toques!) French-Indian cooking. This translates to such dishes as chapati champignon (a sort of mushroom crepe rolled in flat chapati bread), chicken liver pate with cumin and other typical Indian spices, Provencal-style salad in “Indian vinaigrette,” salmon in curried bearnaise sauce, lobster “thermidor style” with saffron and Indian herbs, and homemade saffron ice cream.

Well, why not? Haven’t French chefs been using curry powder to flavor shellfish dishes for years? ( Mouclade , mussels in curry sauce, has been served for so long in the Cognac region that it’s considered a traditional local specialty.) And weren’t the French an influential, if never exactly major, power in India itself as early as 1683? And hasn’t every other conceivable combination of French cuisine with some other culinary idiom already been essayed? And didn’t Chadda, as it turns out, have a very practical reason for developing his new dishes? “We wanted to have some items that were flavorful without being ‘hot,’ ” he reveals. “My wife, you see, doesn’t like spicy food.”

VEGGING OUT: Last year, so to speak, an ovo-lactarian (i.e., a vegetarian who eats eggs and milk products but no meat, fish, or fowl) named Barbara Wong wrote to me complaining that she couldn’t find good, interesting food to fulfill her dietary wishes in most of the restaurants she went to. I told her what I thought of her problem, and then plenty of vegetarian readers told me what they thought of me (and of meat).

What I probably should have done, if I had remembered it at the time, was simply to refer Wong back to the Nov. 4, 1984, issue of this very publication, wherein one Baba S. Khalsa, a longtime vegetarian and member of a Houston restaurant family, offered an article about how easy it was to find good, interesting vegetarian food in many of our area’s finest restaurants. As Khalsa himself has recently reminded me, these establishments--staffed, he wrote at the time, by a “growing band of fine young chefs (who) do not need meat to make a meal”--include Michael’s, Valentino, Spago, 385 North, Trumps, Orlando-Orsini, St. Estephe, La Toque, the West Beach Cafe, the City Cafe, Hugo’s, Marrakesh, as well as the strictly vegetarian Golden Temple, Fragrant Vegetable, Paru’s and Meyera. These are not places where special ordering is required, Khalsa noted at the time, but restaurants whose regular menus are practically rife with all-vegetable dishes.

SOMETHING TO CHEW ON: Patout’s Cajun Restaurant in West L.A. has decreed the celebration of a crawfish festival, now through the end of crawfish season (somewhere between March and May). Fresh crawfish, brought daily from Louisiana, will be served in several preparations--best of all, just simply boiled and heaped onto a plate (at $6 per order). . . . The El Torito Grill is new in Newport Center, Newport Beach, with an El Trendito menu of Southwestern and contemporary Cal-Mex dishes (plus the ever-popular blue margaritas). . . . Emilio’s in Hollywood has instituted weekly prix-fixe menus through the end of January spotlighting the food of different regions of Italy--including, it says here, that of “Emilio’s own hometown, Abruzzi,” and of Piedmont, “near Milan . . . on the west coast.” (The cooking here is presumably better than the geography.) . . . El Cholo in midtown Los Angeles celebrates its 60th anniversary Tuesday with a $75-per-person benefit dinner featuring dishes from the Original Sonora Cafe (downtown, and under the same ownership). Baseball great Nolan Ryan will be guest of honor, and proceeds will go to the Alvin Community College Fund. . . . Harry’s Bar & American Grill in Century City (and also now in San Francisco) has announced the 1987 edition of its annual International Imitation Hemingway Competition. Entry blanks, rules, etc., may be had at Harry’s or by mail from the restaurant at 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles 90067. . . . Restaurant business consultant Ira Spilky offers fast-food restaurant seminars at UCLA Extension on eight Wednesday evenings (beginning the 7th of this month), and on Jan. 20 and Feb. 24 at Pacific Coast College. Call (213) 826-7179 for information on any or all.

FOUR BITES OF THE APPLE: The 1987 edition of what is not only one of the smallest restaurant guides in the country (measuring about 3-by-5 inches and no thicker than a mid-January issue of the New Yorker) but also one of the most trustworthy and useful (at least to the easternbound) has just made its appearance. “Passport to New York Restaurants” by John F. Mariani and Peter D. Meltzer offers capsule reviews and ratings of more than 300 restaurants in its 60 little pages, and may be had for $2.95 a copy plus 55 cents postage and handling from Passport, 967 Lexington Ave., Suite 115, New York 10021. Bulk discounts are available. . . . The New York version of our own Ritz Cafe has been bought by the Ark restaurant group (owner of Gotham’s Metro Cafe and Albuquerque Eats, among other places), which plans to downplay Cajun-Creole dishes in the future. . . . The legendary Joseph Baum, who brought such institutions as the Four Seasons, Windows on the World and (lest we forget) Zum-Zum into being, and who now runs his own Euro-stylish Aurora in midtown Manhattan, has been awarded the operation contract at the Rainbow Room, high atop Rockefeller Center. . . . And I need a little lesson in geography myself: When Kenji Seki sets up shop later this year on the ground floor of New York’s CBS Building, that structure will be on Avenue of the Americas between 52nd and 53rd, where it has always been, and not at 48th Street where I reported it to be. Sorry. Something to do with the shake-up at CBS News, probably.