RESTAURANT REVIEW : The Promising Beaux Tie Grill Still Hasn’t Come of Age

Last summer, the Beaux Tie Grill was one of my favorite restaurants. I have fond memories of hot, dusty, planetary evenings, when driving up Lankershim was like driving through Midwestern or Central Valley towns, one after another, only without the break of milo, soybeans or cornfields. The mercury vapor lights had deep purple halos, the stoplights were preternaturally bright.

We always felt as if we were on a long car trip, getting farther and farther from home. And then there was the little red awning of the Beaux Tie, the staff that greated us as old friends, and the spicy, Caribbean-inspired food. The Beaux Tie was just the kind of unique, inexpensive, out-of-the-way restaurant we always hoped to find when driving across the country, and rarely, if ever, did.

A recent heat wave stirred these memories, so I rounded up a pack of lively friends and drove on over for dinner. We found the same familiar faces and cool grey rooms; we also found a few new touches. Rave restaurant reviews have been framed and hung on the walls. The once-empty front room, its black and white checkerboard tiles always a dancefloor-about-to-happen, now has tables in it--the direct result, I’m sure of all those good notices.

But a certain weariness has descended on the Beaux Tie. The big front window is grimy now, and our waiter, John, recites the specials with forced enthusiasm; his eyes are glazed as if he’s been doing it every day and night since our last visit in August. And he probably has; except for rotating specials, the menu hasn’t changed a lick. “The Jamaican sauce is pretty spicy; it’s made with fruit juice and coconut. Pili pili is a Jamaican chile relish made with five different chiles. The chef adds wine and cream to it and. . . .”

In a recent article in Valley Magazine, chef-owner Jardin Kazaar said he knew 85-90% of his customers and considered them friends. Jardin’s affectionate attitude is still very present in the Beaux Tie. The room rings with lively conversations. There’s often a Jag or Mercedes parked out front, but this is such a casual crowd that its owner isn’t obvious. And the ambiance is so warm and relaxing that there are always a number of men and women dining alone.

We are a little surprised to get the same old store-bought onion roll in the bread basket; certainly, this was one area that the restaurant, as it matured, might have improved. But we’re delighted to get our chicken wings and broiled shrimp appetizers--we’d been thinking about that Jamaican sauce all winter.

We never did get quite as much of it as we wanted. We’d always cleaned our plates and found ourselves yearning for just a little more, and we do the same thing this time, too. It is a delight to discover all over again that the dollop of dressing that comes with the crispy catfish strips and calamari isn’t the sad Thousand Island dressing it resembles but a delicious tartar sauce spiked with ground red pepper. That sauce is hot and lemony and very tasty. The fried zucchini and mozzarella, however, is simply a big, soggy dish.

Only after we get our salads do we remember that we’d learned to avoid them in the past. Still, we were curious to see whether they’d improved. They hadn’t. The grilled chicken salad--a breast and fruit on tough, rather old romaine lettuce--is dressed with a honey-based fruity liquid that is too watery to coat the greens. The chef’s salad is guaranteed to be different, surprising and crazy every day. Tonight it’s sliced pears, melon, and pineapple on romaine with a strawberry vinaigrette. But the vinaigrette tastes like bottled French dressing osterized with strawberries and the whole salad is like something an 8-year-old boy would concoct in the kitchen.

In the past year, when recommending the Beaux Tie, I’ve always said, “You gotta taste that guy’s sauces.” I’ll say it again now. Each entree is a sauced meat--the filet mignon and the shrimp come with Jamaican sauce, the catfish and salmon special with the creamy, slow-burning pili, the quail with a wonderful apricot-enriched reduction. Jardin offers new inventions daily on the specials. But a meal, or a restaurant, cannot rely on sauce alone. And while we all would’ve liked to take buckets of each sauce home, nobody made much of a dent in the bland, steamed vegetables or minor mountain of undercooked yellow rice that filled the lion’s share of each plate. That’s not to say anybody went home hungry, although for a while, it looked like one of us might have to: his steak was undercooked and he couldn’t get Waiter John’s attention. The restaurant has gotten too busy for one waiter--especially in a friendly place where customers expect conversation as well as service. We watched and waved and watched some more as John, in between trips to the kitchen, visited table to table. By the time the steak finally went away and came back, the rest of us had finished eating.

Food Fantasies?

After this dinner--and lunch a few days later--I found myself questioning my memory. Was the Beaux Tie’s food always this average? Did the restaurant’s friendliness somehow, in retrospect, magnify the quality of the food? I can’t say. I could’ve sworn that the jambalaya I had last summer was one of the best I’d ever eaten, and that the shrimp, hot Louisiana sausage, okra, corn, tomato and lima beans had been cooked into the rice. But maybe I was wrong, and it really was the same jambalaya I ate at lunch--a thick, overcooked red sauce of the above ingredients spooned over still more of the persistently undercooked yellow rice. And while the peach cobbler filling is still dark and tangy with cinnamon and utterly delicious, I remembered the crust as a thick, crunchy, cookie-like substance, something like a big gingersnap, and not as the slightly soggy biscuit crust of recent meals. The pecan pie was still wonderful, but the cheesecake, besides being the smallest piece I’ve ever seen served in any restaurant, ever, tasted like it came from a boxed mix.

That’s not to say we had bad times at the Beaux Tie. Quite the contrary. That night at dinner, the five of us relaxed and had long conversations filled with laughter. We left happy and full and nobody balked at the bill, which came to about $23 apiece. When I returned for lunch with a friend and her seven-week-old baby, we couldn’t have been more welcomed or fussed over by staff and fellow diners.

But we had come hoping to find a maturing restaurant, its youthful kinks ironed out. What we found was a restaurant already growing tired of itself, which is a pity when there’s really so much talent and enthusiasm in the kitchen.

The Beaux Tie Grille, 7458 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, 818-765-5965. Open for lunch Tuesday-Friday, noon to 3 p.m., dinner Tuesday-Saturday, 6 to 10 p.m. No liquor. All major credit cards except Diner’s Club. Dinner for two, food only: $35-$55.