MEAT, LOTS OF IT, IS IDEA AT METROPOLITAN GRILL

The In Crowd, that’s what the Metropolitan Grill wants. It’s a clubby joint with caricatures of Orange County big shots on the walls, and the location is exclusive.

Exclusive at this hour of night, at any rate. On the other side of Von Karman Avenue, brightly lit crowds are thronging to Prego, Players, Remick’s and the Irvine Marriott. On this side . . . well, these darkened office canyons do not exactly resound with footsteps. If you’re over here, you’ve got to be coming to the Metropolitan Grill. Welcome to the club.

The “metropolitan” part of the name refers to its ancestry. It’s a reproduction of the Palm in West Hollywood, itself sprung from an original Palm in New York. The style is definitely Manhattanish: a swaggering, rackety, wooden-floored place in black and white and hunter green, where food is presented in a brusque, businesslike way.

Meat--and lots of it--is the idea here: big chops, huge steaks, monster lobsters. They simply do not know from California Cuisine. Entrees usually consist of meat alone, perhaps accompanied by three crisp breaded zucchini slices and a limp frond of broccoli.

You want anything else, it’s a side order. That can be any of the following: spinach, stringbeans, mushrooms, asparagus, potatoes or onion rings, period. There are exactly five salads, three of them being variations on the idea of tomatoes and onions.

It wouldn’t work if these weren’t very good steaks, vigorously lively lobsters they bring out to waggle at you, and so on. Great bread, too; not so much the dark brown bread with raisins but the Italian bread and the soft, cake-like sheepherder’s bread.

The wine list is tiny but surprisingly interesting, a neat selection of reasonably priced French wines and Californians.

But meat. Meat’s what it’s about. Though the menu emphasizes steaks, I was equally impressed with the prime rib, a caveman portion you could repel a mugger with. The grilled entrees can be prepared “Cajun style,” the only concession of this menu to current fashion and certainly one that does the tradition no great harm. The prime rib I had Cajunized was excellent, with crisp shreds of fat and a mellow red pepper and cumin flavor.

Alas, the lobster I had was just a four-pound model--the six- and seven-pounders having gone off the market while I was weighing my options--but it was certainly sweet and fresh. The steaks are thick, tender and beefy, and these guys know what you mean when you try to explain the exact degree of doneness you want.

Speaking of the steaks, there is a so-called “hamburger” available at lunch that is not to be despised. It belongs to the same family as the “chopped steak” at dinner. This is a huge patty of quite freshly ground beef, probably more than five inches across and well over an inch thick. It comes without a bun, even when it’s called a burger at lunch (though they will grill some cheese on it, grill it brown in fact). You do get onion and tomato, though: sweet Maui onion and beefsteak tomato, the only appropriate size for this pillow-burger.

As for the rest of lunch, it’s a reduced version of the dinner menu with the addition of corned beef hash, a couple of egg dishes and a club sandwich. The distinction from dinner is arbitrary, though. You can always order from the dinner menu as well.

About half the meat entrees are familiar Italian veal and chicken dishes. There’s a lively tomato sauce on the veal or chicken piccata, though the veal marsala strikes me as insipid and overloaded with mushrooms. It’s in the Italian dishes that this place is likely to take chances--say, lamb chops piccata on the blackboard menu (which stays mounted on the wall by the kitchen, by the way). There are also just two pasta dishes: linguine with clam sauce and linguine with fresh tomato sauce.

As far as vegetables go, the hash browns are a sort of Americanized version of potatoes Anna, a whole panful of chopped potatoes cooked quite brown on the bottom and then flipped over and browned on top. The “cottage fries” are not what you might expect, viz. anything like hash browns. They are fresh potato chips, still hot.

The best of the salads is the sliced beefsteak tomato and onion, though the string beans and onion is a combination that works eerily well: sweet raw onions and very fresh beans served cold in vinaigrette. The creamed spinach is a lot better than the dull plain spinach (same price; go figure it).

The Palm in L.A. is famous for its cheesecake, but I found this one stodgy and dull. However, there was a terrific candy-like chocolate mousse pie, neatly trimmed fresh strawberries and the usual multicolored, single-flavored spumoni.

At lunch entrees run $5.50 to $12. At dinner appetizers are $2.50 to $8.50, vegetable side dishes (serving two, according to the menu) $3.50 to $6.50 and entrees $11 to $21.75. Desserts are $2.50 to $5 at all meals.

METROPOLITAN GRILL 18201 Von Karman Ave., Irvine

(714) 474-3060

Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner daily. All major credit cards accepted.