RESTAURANT REVIEW : Mark’s: A Chic Melange Cheek by Jowl to L’Orangerie

Here is L’Orangerie: tiny manicured lawns and orange trees, room after room full of mirrors and fountains and 18th-Century paintings. It’s a little bit of Versailles in West Hollywood.

Right next door, here’s Mark’s: a single plain, art gallery-like room decorated with what look like dark abstracts but are actually, so I understand, representational paintings of somebody’s back yard (kind of a dark back yard, if you ask me). There’s also a dining patio.

I’d say it takes a certain amount of guts to open a restaurant cheek by jowl with L’Orangerie, but the gamble seems to have paid off. The crowd that gathers almost every night on the sidewalk may seem to be socializing, but basically everyone is waiting for tables.

And what do folks eat next door to L’Orangerie? A sort of chic melange, mostly garlic-rich Italian dishes, some New Southwest dishes, the odd bow to the Orient and a couple of American dishes, which are unexpectedly good. A spinach salad comes with fresh bacon bits, and a very good hamburger, thick and beefy, extends beyond the bun the way burgers do in photos but rarely in real life. It comes with lettuce, tomato and fresh paper-thin red onion slices, but catsup or mustard (Grey Poupon) only on demand.

Besides these basics, the best things on the menu are on the Italian side. Among the appetizers, the garlicky shrimp wrapped in pancetta and basil are truly irresistible. The pastas are not wildly original, but are all good. Rigatoni in garlic and basil, mixed with both fresh and dried tomatoes and oddly welcome pine nuts is the flamboyant exception; simple angel hair pasta with garlic and good ripe tomatoes is more like the rule. The pizzas are thin-crust models and not quite memorable, though I’m pretty sure I liked the one with shrimp.

I wish the Southwestern stuff was as interesting. Peppery ceviche made with bay scallops seemed ordinary. So did the peppery corn soup (a dish that’s becoming a cliche in record time). The pork chops with pasilla butter are a rather Continental inspiration: smoked pork chops (a la Kasler Rippchen) topped with a pat of beurre compose made with mild chile. I happen to find it a little horrifying to look at a lump of butter melting on meat, but the dish is pleasant enough. Not so the salmon with a blue corn-sage dressing that was pretty stodgy, and did not taste recognizably of sage. The best thing about that dish was the two little corn cakes made of fresh corn that came with it.

The Oriental touches didn’t do much for me either. The spring rolls were said to be stuffed with fish, but I made the mistake of dipping them in the sweet-sour sauce, which is evidently made from catsup, and I cannot in conscience report that I know for sure what they were stuffed with. While I’m saying unkind things, let me add that the entrees tend to come with a good and unusual vegetable garnish: carrots, onions, chayote squash and jicama, all steamed and dosed with cumin. The uniformly dense texture of these vegetables is a treat.

The desserts are rather safe. There is a fine, buttery walnut chocolate pie and a rather conventional fruit tartlet that was better than it sounded, or even looked. The chocolate mousse goes pretty fast--I’ve never been able to taste it--but in the chocolate-splurge category Mark’s sometimes has a chocolate sponge cake roll. For a more sober sort of dessert, there are fresh berries with homemade vanilla ice cream.

Mark’s, 861 N. La Cienega Blvd., (213) 652-5252. Open for lunch Tuesdays-Fridays, for dinner Tuesdays-Sundays and for brunch Sundays. Beer and wine. Valet parking. MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $26 to $39.