Honest Fare for Modest Prices at L.A. Eats

As I bit into a thickly sliced Cajun meat loaf sandwich the other day, I found myself flashing back to a little, homely, and now-defunct, restaurant in New York. Upper Madison Avenue was loaded with splendid and expensive places to lunch, but day after day the neighborhood cognoscenti--Leo Castelli, Joseph Hirschorn and the French cultural attache who worked around the block--walked down this restaurant’s dark stairs into a basement and waited in line for chicken soup, pot roast, baked apples and carp.

Now lunch at Atran (the basement place) could not be confused with lunch at Les Pliades, one of the upscale French restaurants a stone’s throw away, yet it was a satisfying meal. I ate there several times a week and developed what I call the boxing ring theory of restaurants: Know the difference between bantams and heavyweights before you go in.

The meat loaf I had last week, made by L.A. Eats, a little Venice takeout shop and cafe, could not be mistaken for pate at restaurant-champ Rockenwagner’s down the block--but it was very fresh, subtly flavored and served on good homemade basil bread. For $5.25, it came with a zesty, fresh, red cabbage slaw.

But, unless you ask for a sample before you take things home, be prepared for dishes that may not knock you out. Except for a bold, coarse mustard-laced potato salad, a nubby red onion wild rice salad and the aforementioned slaw, the salad corner needs perking up. Cold broccoli salad tasted greasy, shaved carrots could have been balsa filings, the Armenian salad was 90% parsley, the other 10% ineffectual.

On the other hand, I loved the turkey-pinto bean burrito, fat as a welterweight’s forearm, and vibrant with cilantro and scallions. The enormous home-cured Sicilian olives are terrific too. And it’s wonderful to find a shop that makes homemade rolls and bread. (If you want a whole loaf, call 24 hours ahead.) L.A. Eats has husky, solid loaves of whole-wheat onion, basil and crusty molasses-scented anadama bread. It also has neat miniature muffins (corn, zucchini-basil, orange-poppy and banana-chocolate chip) which are $3 a dozen (or 25 cents each) and sweet enough for dessert.

Mild jambalaya-stuffed peppers made a welcome lunch, and barbecued chicken was juicy and crisp-skinned. Poached chicken with tomatillo sauce, on the other hand, was subtle to the point of invisibility. Another chicken breast (which didn’t have much taste of its own), stuffed with an unctuous mix of ricotta and spinach and dashed with a brown sauce, was too bland, too salty and too rich.

We did better one evening when we started off with a fine creamy beet-and-dill soup and proceeded to a first-rate plate of juicy, lean corned beef and cabbage with wonderful apple rings. The pot roast dinner was also a winner, lean and succulent and served with terrific crisp roast potatoes and sweet slabs of carrots with home-grown carrot taste.

The reed-thin asparagus came with a stellar olive butter. The Caesar salad was dotted with giant-sized croutons made from the restaurant’s homemade bread, and the wild greens had a swell balsamic dressing--too bad the dressings came on the salad and not on the side; the greens were turning soggy by the time we got them home.

Desserts are homemade and tend toward the sweet-toothed kind. (There’s a fine and generous fruit salad too.) Besides a delightful fresh raspberry-laced pound cake and an assertive espresso mocha cheesecake, there are extraordinarily rich blondies and Jack Daniels brownies and a lemon mousse that tastes like Bonomo’s taffy to me. (My friend the dessert king took one spoonful and uttered, “I could marry this.”)

I don’t know about marriage, but at the very least--if you live in the neighborhood--L.A. Eats is the kind of place you can have an ongoing friendship with. Even if it’s not the Muhammad Ali of the takeout world.

L.A. Eats, 1009 W. Washington Blvd., Venice. (213) 396-5914. Mondays-Saturdays: 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Sundays: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. (Dinner served 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Mondays-Saturday, Sunday brunch 11 a.m.-2 p.m.)