RESTAURANT REVIEW : Roger’s Marina Cafe Goes Totally California Cuisine

It must be tough to be a French chef in California just now. Not long ago a French restaurant was a big deal, a unique passport to a world of food elegant beyond the American experience. Now, though, so many of our own chefs have learned French techniques that French food has started to seem a bit . . . well, a bit vieux chapeau.

These somber thoughts ran through my mind a couple of months ago at a place called Roger’s Marina Cafe. It was a perfectly nice French restaurant, the kind I’d have been grateful to know of 10 years ago. I had some kind of veal stew, I think, and I remember liking it, but a voice in my head automatically asked why I was eating this relic of the past.

Culinarily speaking, this is quite unfair. A good dish is a good dish even if it’s been done a million times. However, French chefs stationed abroad have managed to adapt the rawest local cuisines. How much easier it ought to be for a French chef to cook California.

I’ve just been back, and sure enough, Roger’s has gone totally California Cuisine, complete with blackened ahi, cilantro pesto, the whole thing. By coincidence, I found myself sitting next to a couple of tables of French people, all talking French and staring wall-eyed at a menu that was bursting with sun-dried tomatoes, Anaheim peppers and black bean/papaya relish.

The good news is that chef Marcel Darouet does an excellent job at this. Take the crab cakes. They have corn kernels and bits of tomato in them, but keeping all these things together hasn’t made them soggy or stodgy. Or take the eggplant terrine, that instant standby, where paper-thin eggplant slices surround a delicious filling of sweet onions. This dish changed the mind of a woman who had hated eggplant all her life.

The most exotic thing I’ve found on the menu, and I was certainly looking, was pork loin topped with sausage, cooked pears and a little red pepper. It’s rich and aromatic, and fortunately not quite as heavy as it sounds. As a Californian questing for marvels and mysteries, I made a point of ordering grilled shrimp with “red bee potatoes” without asking what they were. They turn out to be small red new potatoes, sliced and grilled--not bad.

There are lots of pastas, of course--are we Californians or what? Among the most intriguing is spinach fettuccine with scallops, corn, olive oil, basil and a magical whiff of roasted garlic. It might be even better as an appetizer than an entree. The French background shows up most clearly in the use of reduced veal stock in various entrees, including one of the pastas, but even the fettuccine with veal gets a dose of roasted garlic and a fleck of red pepper.

The desserts are a lot more French than anything else. There’s an old-fashioned tarte tatin with the apples baked good and brown, a mousse-like pear and chocolate charlotte and a very creamy creme brulee with a somewhat thick glazed crust. A layered frozen mousse cake, more or less a superior version of spumoni, would seem to be what they put a candle in for birthdays . . . which is, incidentally, one of the times you know you really are in a French restaurant, because the waitresses sing “Happy Birthday” with French accents.

Roger’s Marina Cafe, 822 Washington Blvd., Marina del Rey, (213) 822-7221. Open for lunch and dinner daily; brunch, Saturdays and Sundays. Full bar. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $33 to $54.