HOW DO YOU SAY <i> DINER</i> IN FRENCH?

Hollywood Diner, 945 N. Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood, (213) 655-7051. Open Tuesday-Sunday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Valet parking. Beer and wine. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $15-$60.

If you’ve been wondering why it has taken me so long to get around to reviewing Patrick Terrail’s much-talked-about Hollywood Diner, the answer is easy: I would really rather not.

A diner with a valet in the parking lot, a French chef in the kitchen and caviar on the menu should be wonderfully silly. You can’t help being amused by the idea of a deco diner that takes reservations and credit cards, gives you a wine list and hands out lines like “You are a stranger here but once.” But just as you start to smile, it occurs to you that these people are not in it for the laughs.

Never has a diner been more ardently directed. Terrail himself is omnipresent; come in morning, noon or night and there is the former owner of Ma Maison working the room with his manic energy. “The foodies don’t come here,” he said bitterly one day. “They’re wrong. This is what America is eating.”

And that, of course, is the problem. To Terrail this is not a restaurant but an early clue to a new direction. And Patrick, I am sorry to be the one to have to say so, but this is not what America is eating. It’s not even how America is eating. Not in the morning, not in the evening, not around supper time.

BREAKFAST: 8 a.m. is a little early to have your hand kissed, but here comes Patrick Terrail, natty as can be, and there go the hands, kiss, kiss, kiss. OK, OK, I’m grumpy in the morning, and the sight of three cheerful friends and the sun streaming in is almost more than I can bear.

But my friends, it turns out, are hungry. They order scrambled eggs and eggs over easy and sausages on the side. They order extra sides of potatoes and bacon and baskets filled with toast. The table begins to fill up with food and I finally break down and order pancakes.

All in all, it is fairly respectable diner food. The scrambled eggs are a little tough and the home-fried potatoes are more soggy than crisp. The pancakes, which are topped with sliced walnuts, are small and fluffy and almost totally tasteless. There are pots of jam on the table; they are clearly homemade, but the jam is so bland that if you close your eyes you can’t tell what fruit it is made of. Still, the waitresses do a good job of keeping the coffee cups filled, and there is even espresso if you want it.

It’s not the best diner breakfast I’ve ever had--but it’s far from the worst. The room is calm and sunny. Even the prices are fairly reasonable. But at a time when restaurants all over the country are starting to turn out truly extraordinary morning meals, it’s hard to get very excited about this sort of stuff.

LUNCH: “The chili dog was the problem,” said my friend as we were leaving. “I could have been happy if not for that chili dog.”

I had certainly been pleased with my chicken soup, which arrived in a dear little brown covered dish, a wrapped saltine sitting quietly on the side. The soup was perfect Jewish penicillin--a not-too-rich broth packed with carrots and celery and heaps of cubed chicken. But my companion was clearly disgruntled with his basket of calamari and onion rings. I could hardly blame him: the calamari were rubbery little rings and the onions so heavily encased in a remarkably resilient (OK, tough) batter that you couldn’t even taste them.

Then the chili dog arrived. It was a big bruiser of a dog buried in chili and sitting on a little bitty bun. My friend circled the thing with his fingers, tried to pick it up only to watch it slither from the bread. “How are you supposed to eat this?” he growled to Terrail, who was hovering in the dining room. “With a knife and fork!” said the Frenchman cheerfully. My friend groaned. “That’s the trouble with this place,” he said. “How can you trust a diner that expects you to eat a chili dog with a fork?”

The woman next to us was eating the turkey burger. “How is it?” I asked. “Bland,boring--but better for you than beef,” she replied.

I had opted for the tuna melt with avocado on rye. My friend had been dubious from the start. “You’ll be sorry,” he warned. “That avocado is not a good sign.” As it turned out, he was right. By itself, the tuna was tasty, but by the time cheese and capers and tomato and avocado--not to mention the caraway seeds in the bread--had been added to the mix, what I ended up with was fairly strange-tasting. So was the cole slaw, which contained honey and dill. The French fries, however, were reassuringly ordinary.

We gamely followed these gargantuan dishes (the portions are on the far side of large) with dessert. I had the strawberry cheese cake, a round little thing in a pool of strawberry puree surrounded by fresh strawberry slices. It looked like a bit of fluff that would be served in a lady’s tearoom, and it tasted mostly like graham crackers. My friend did better with the espresso milkshake. It was wonderful. “Hey,” he said, “this is the best thing I’ve had all day. Maybe I should have another!”

But then he caught a glimpse of the bill. With two bottles of Perrier and two bottles of Evian, it was $37.50. By the time I had left a tip and paid for parking, I had spent $45 for lunch. “For a chili dog and a milkshake!” said my friend, shaking his head.

America may be eating this food, but they aren’t doing it with a fork--or paying these prices.

DINNER: “Thank God they’ve finally got their wine and beer license,” said my friend, pushing his crab-and-carrot soup away and consoling himself with a swig of beer. “This stuff tastes neither like crab nor carrots.” It was true; the pale coral soup was as innocuous as baby food.

My fellow diner didn’t think much of his sausages and mashed potatoes, either. This may have had something to do with the size of the sausages (small), their flavor (hardly homemade), or the fact that the spuds had been piped out of a pastry tube. “Looks like a damn dessert,” he groused, “instead of a pile of potatoes.”

I, however, was happily eating one of the diner’s hefty hamburgers. It was a good big one made with tasty meat and cooked, as they say, to perfection. The ratatouille that came with it, while not exactly what I think of as the hamburger’s natural partner, would have been pleasant had the eggplant only been cooked a little longer. As it was, it was slightly squeaky.

Our waitress urgently recommended warm apple cobbler for dessert. This turned out to be more cobbler than apple; it was very dry, with a little bit of filo sitting on the top where the crust should have been. Only the soft curls of whipped cream rescued the dish. There was nothing, alas, to rescue the heavy, sweet creme caramel . “I knew we should have had the espresso milkshake,” I found myself muttering.

There are other dishes at the Hollywood Diner. To tell the truth, my favorites have been the fine fresh oysters and the generously served steamed mussels. But looking around as you eat these classy dishes, you can’t help wondering what you are doing in a diner. Unfortunately eating most of the diner food makes you wonder what you are doing in such a classy place. Terrail might think he hears America munching--but his restaurant is slightly out of tune.