RESTAURANT REVIEW : Toluca Lake Cafe Is Good for Omelets and, If You’re a French Scholar, for Laughs

Chez Nous, though closer to an upscale Marie Callender’s than to La Serre, is an oddly formal neighborhood cafe, all flowers and candlelight and bulbous wine glasses in an airy, plant-filled room that is surrounded by leaded windows. A glass deli counter at rear bursts with glistening pastries (Chez Nous doubles as a bakery).

The tiny bar at the end of the counter--not zinc, though you get the feeling it should be--is always occupied by a casually hip couple or two who chat easily over cappuccino or glasses of red wine as soft cha cha versions of Bach preludes burble from speakers overhead.

You plop down into one of the director’s chairs that populate the dining room. You sink nearly to the ground.

At the next table, a well-groomed man in a sweater vest says, “My dentist is in Encino and yours is in Monrovia.” His companions convulse with laughter. Somewhere else, a young woman in a flowing cotton dress is telling a joke about a philandering oboe player. Around you are tables of Tolucans, clean-cut session musicians and the sort of white-collar studio employees who neither write, direct nor produce.

Understated, Somewhat Dull

Like its clientele, Chez Nous is nice, understated and, although nominally creative, a little dull.

The waiter announces the specials of the day as if he were a foreign exchange student given the privilege of reciting the Gettysburg Address at the school assembly. When he finishes, he lowers his head sheepishly, and you feel like applauding, though not necessarily like ordering “pan-fried blackened red snapper, cooked in the manner of the Cajuns.”

The printed menu is rife with comical French misspellings-- “pallard” of chicken, seafood “fuillette. “ At one time, the restaurant featured a strange and wonderful fish called “loup de mere”: Mom’s wolf.

You try to suppress stern thoughts of your high-school French teacher and wolf down the classic Provencal dish she’d never have let you spell “soup de poisson, “ a decent version of the sieved, brick-red fish puree, thick with gobs of the garlic emulsion rouille. Black-bean soup with a float of creme fraiche is pretty but surprisingly bland; the only discernible flavors are salt and pork.

There are good, deep-fried potato skins unaccountably dotted with the lesser subgenuses of fish roe-- lumpfish, salmon, whitefish-- which in any event you will be unable to taste, and there are fresh-enough oysters served on the half-shell with an interesting mignonette made with sherry vinegar. Tender little ringlets of baby calimari are fried not quite crisply, and are served with a sauce that tastes like thinned melted butter.

A Delicious Salad

Better is the delicious frisee au lardons, a warm Gascon salad of curly endive with thick, crouton-like chunks of bacon. An “exotic” green salad isn’t all that exotic. It is a well-balanced mix of little lettuces in a mild vinaigrette.

Sometimes the perfect meal at a cafe, even a laid-back California cafe, revolves around an omelette, and the omelettes here are very good, stuffed with Montrachet goat cheese and herbs one day, with Swiss cheese and bacon the next.

A dry cheeseburger slathered with grainy chili on a tungsten-tough baguette was unappealing one evening, but a chicken sandwich with sun-dried tomatoes and Montrachet wasn’t bad. A chewy marinated New York steak was weirdly spiced and seemed overcooked even as it appeared to be medium-rare, but the rack of lamb was pink and juicy and was fanned over a pungent, entirely appropriate pool of chive butter. (The crisp, overpoweringly fragrant cake of hash browns on the side is manna to those who, like us, love rosemary.)

Pastries, as is usual in restaurants- cum- bakeries, have generally been sitting around too long in the display case. Perhaps you would enjoy the aforementioned seafood “fuillette” as a dessert: Take away the sauteed shrimps and such, and you’ll have a pastry shell drowned in super-sweet raspberry sauce. Or have a demitasse of excellent cappuccino instead.

Chez Nous, 10550 Riverside Blvd., Toluca Lake, (818) 760-0288. Breakfast and lunch daily, dinner Monday-Saturday. Valet parking. Full bar. Takeout and catering. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two (food only) $30-$40