BASKET CASES: GOURMET TO GO FOR HOLLYWOOD BOWL

Picnics are always precarious. They can be overrun with ants, besieged by bees or ruined by the weather. Hollywood picnics, however, are another matter; they are civilized affairs. At our musical picnics under the stars, we sit on seats, eat off china and often ask restaurants to cater the food. Our most pressing picnic problem is supposed to be figuring out which wine to lug along. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty. This may be Hollywood, but as these tales of catered picnics prove, it isn’t exactly the movies.

Le St. Germain, 5955 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 467-1108. Picnic dinners from $14-$26 per person.

“Which dinner would you like, madam?” purred the suave voice on the end of the phone. I wasn’t sure, so the French voice patiently recited Le St. Germain’s three Hollywood Bowl menus.

They all sounded good to me, so I said I’d have one of each. He said fine, I gave him a name, and we agreed that I would pick them up around 6.

Picking them up did not turn out to be an easy matter. I was coming from the west, and the traffic simply stopped as we approached Highland Avenue. By the time I finally got there, I was so late that I ran into the restaurant in a frazzled fashion, grabbed the bag and dashed out the door, only to realize that I had to turn around and go back toward Highland. The traffic was terrible and I made things worse by trying to sneak around it. As I sat trapped on a side street, I ate most of the bread and butter packed in the bag. By the time I finished that, the traffic still wasn’t moving, so I decided to sample the wares.

The $14 dinner contained an excellent artichoke vinaigrette, a salad of little lettuces, walnuts and Belgian endive virtually covered with tender slices of white chicken meat, and a tarte tatin . The restaurant packages the vinaigrette dressing in its own little bottle--a great idea to keep the salad from getting soggy, but a little hard to handle in the traffic.

The $21 dinner was, I thought, as I inched forward, a better bargain. A mild, creamy terrine of lobster was sitting on a bed of mache. Another aluminum container held a saute of lamb, a warm, robust stew that later proved very popular in the cool night air. The bread pudding in vanilla sauce that the restaurant had sent along for dessert was so delicious that I ate most of it before I even crossed Sunset.

The $26 dinner was not nearly so tempting to me. I peeked into a container holding a fancy salad of foie gras, hazelnuts and poached green beans on a bed of very elegant lettuces. I pinched off a corner of filet of veal stuffed with basmati rice and ate the end corner of an insipid lemon tart. I hastily packed the dinner up again and licked my fingers. I was finally approaching the meeting place; I was very late.

“Where have you been?” cried my friends accusingly. “We’ll hardly have time to eat.”

“Oh,” I said offhandedly, “I’ve already eaten.”

MORAL: When ordering food to take to the Hollywood Bowl, be sure to choose a restaurant on your side of town. Bowl traffic is bad enough; facing it twice is sheer madness.

Trumps, 8764 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 855-1480. Picnic dinners from $24-$44 per person. Orders must be guaranteed with a credit card.

When I showed up carrying the big silver box, my friends were very impressed. When I told them the food was from Trumps, they were even more impressed. And as we toted the great shiny hamper to our seats, there was general excitement about the dinner we were about to eat.

When you call Trumps to ask about food for the Bowl, a special employee is called to the phone. She patiently goes over a long, long menu of dishes that the restaurant is preparing specially to go. “For appetizers,” she tells you, “we have smoked salmon, chilled soup, Caesar salad. . . .” The list seems endless.

The woman is very patient. She describes each dish, gently tells you that you probably don’t want chilled poached salmon for a main course since you’ve just ordered salmon as an appetizer, and then repeats, a second time, the choice of salads. “Pasta salad,” she says, slowly, “fruit salad, marinated mushrooms, tomatoes and cucumber. You get two with each entree.”

The appetizers were delightful. I had chosen smoked chicken salad with endive (it still looked lovely after its journey) and lobster pesto on a bed of lettuce. The salad was crunchy and slightly bitter. The lobster had been taken out of its shell and the meat was sweet, but the punchy sauce gave it an intriguing quality.

One thing to keep in mind: If the restaurant packs the food in trays with attached tops, as Trumps does, they tend to take up an awful lot of space. A pair of scissors is remarkably useful.

Next, we looked back in the box for the rest of the meal. We pulled out steak and Chinese duck tacos. Perfect urban picnic fare, these looked delicate, lovely--and small. Fortunately, the looks turned out to be deceptive, for these hefty little numbers with their cargo of black beans, guacamole, sour cream, tomatoes and cilantro were actually quite filling. And a good thing too, for four of us were forced to share two tacos: the box I had been given may have looked enormous, but the restaurant had forgotten to pack half of the food. The fried chicken I had ordered was nowhere to be found, and we also seemed to be lacking all of the salads and most of the desserts.

We divvied up the entrees and then munched politely on the cookies that we discovered in the bottom of the box. It may have been hunger that made those cookies taste so good, for they were absolutely irresistible. “A good thing you ordered cookies,” said my host grumpily, “but I wish you’d ordered more. I’m still starving.”

MORAL: There is nothing worse than a picnic that leaves you hungry, so be sure it’s all there before leaving the restaurant. Once you’ve negotiated the traffic and the parking lots, you are extremely unlikely to go back for forgotten food.

Mary’s Lamb, 13624 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 501-7700. Picnic dinners from $12-$18 per person.

This time, I tried to think of everything. Knowing I would spend the afternoon in the Valley, I chose a Valley restaurant to pack the food. I even called the restaurant 15 minutes before I got there to make sure that the order would be ready. And I ordered so much that, as I picked up the voluminous shopping bag, the woman behind the counter said, “That sure is a lot of food.”

“I wanted to be sure that nobody went hungry,” I replied. The best-laid plans. . . .

Mary’s Lamb is a dear little restaurant and carry-out shop in Sherman Oaks. There are cases filled with fabulous-looking salads and pates, counters covered with cakes, cookies and pies, and very friendly people to serve you. It took me a while to decide among the many, many dishes, but the man who took my order over the phone never seemed impatient. Between us, we finally came up with a meal that sounded rather wonderful: shrimp cocktail, Caesar salad, cold sesame noodles to start with, followed by buttermilk fried chicken, meat loaf with mashed potatoes, and sausage and spinach pie. For dessert, there would be a slice of apple pie, a piece of banana-spice cake, a blueberry lemon torte and an assortment of cookies. “I think you’ll be pleased,” said the man.

And for the most part I was. The food from Mary’s Lamb had a wholesome, homemade quality; everything I tried was good. The shrimp cocktail was perfect picnic fare--these shrimp were huge, juicy and perfectly cooked. The meat loaf was, of course, cold by the time we ate it, but it was savory and satisfying, and the mashed potatoes were the real thing. The fried chicken was an enormous portion: three huge greaseless pieces that tasted like something your Aunt Millie would have packed into a hamper. But the Caesar salad was sad and soggy by the time we got around to eating it. (Trumps also has a Caesar salad on its Bowl menu; it is also pre-tossed, also soggy. Le St. Germain, with its separately packed dressing, has a better idea.)

As for the those beautiful noodles I had seen in the case, and those desserts that looked so deliciously decadent--we never got to eat them. The restaurant, alas, had forgotten to put them in the bag.

MORAL: Don’t order salads unless you’re sure that the dressing will be packed separately. And keep in mind that if you don’t check the order, you too could have a very hungry picnic.

To be fair, though, Mary’s Lamb and Trumps realized their mistakes and graciously offered refunds (Trumps offered an entire meal for free). And, to be realistic, it often makes a lot more sense to pack the picnic up yourself.