RESTAURANT REVIEW : Adventures in Pastel at Cafe Blanc

Cafe Blanc is Cloudland. An appetizer plate comes out with little pastel fragments floating on a pale film of olive oil: quartered raw green squash, tiny carrot strings, daikon sprouts, shreds of dried apricot, three or four red peppercorns. It is as artfully artless as Japanese flower arrangement, with tiny whimsies in the margin. (How did a microscopic curl of carrot wrap itself around a daikon sprout?) Eating this is like entering a dream.

In short, Cafe Blanc is the kind of restaurant that makes you catch your breath, and not least because of its location. It’s in a nondescript neighborhood, a nameless little building (well, OK, you might have eaten there when it housed a place called Ishi’s Grill), which doesn’t even have a liquor license, where against all statistical odds there happens to be a chef turning out delightful inspirations.

As in a dream, things are always changing. On the prix-fixe meal ($22.75) you automatically get an appetizer of sea bass and scallop tartare, just the raw seafood mixed with a little cream and topped with some slivered lemon rind. But I’ve never had it the same way twice. One night there were a few grains of beluga caviar in it and a couple of red peppercorns. Another night it was mixed with a little beluga, some salmon caviar and green peppercorns.

The prix-fixe menu gives you a choice of several entrees, like fried chicken marinated in lime juice. Or three tiny lamb chops, quite rare, the meat cut off the bone and then reassembled; they surround a pile of leek hash in the middle of a pool of basil sauce and to one side there’s a tiny dab of whole-seed mustard just about the size of a blueberry.

Or you can order from a changing a la carte menu, where you may find things like a lobster removed from its shell, dressed in a sauce of lobster coral and replaced, or a halibut with three sauces: cream, lobster and caramel (yes, a light, fresh caramel). The flag-waver is a ravishing duck in orange sauce--a sauce with plenty of orange flavor but not over-sweet, and enlivened with mint--accompanied by little cylinders that turn out to be a crepe wrapped around crisp duck skin. It’s more or less a Peking duck a l’orange.

Lunch is a surpassingly inexpensive meal, running $4.50 all the way up to $7.95, but it is also exquisite. It would be hard to top grilled salmon in a little pool of cream sauce served with pasta marinated in rice wine vinegar with basil and shreds of carrot.

Dessert is generally familiar things done with chef Tomihisa Hasare’s light note of fantasy. It might be cheesecake scattered with candied orange rind and almonds, or more exotically a green tea mousse or a delicious coffee jelly topped with vanilla ice cream.

But the basic thing about this place is the gentle atmosphere of pleasure. One day the sherbets were grapefruit and strawberry. I asked for grapefruit, and the waitress said, “I put in one scoop of strawberry for you too,” so winningly I couldn’t say no. When it came out, topped by lyrical wisps of lemon rind and three red seedless grapes, it was the culmination of a dream.

Cafe Blanc, 3706 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 380-2829. Open for lunch Mondays through Fridays, for dinner Mondays through Saturdays. No alcoholic beverages. Street parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, including tea or coffee, $52 to $62.