RESTAURANT REVIEW : Old World Home Cooking in the New World at the Corfu

Back in the ‘40s, the little Lebanese village had quartered Greeks displaced by World War II. Twenty years later the villagers remembered their guests vividly.

They’d point out to me where the Greeks had lived, and hem and haw for a while. Then their eyes would widen, and they’d lower their voices and tell The Story: “When they first came, the Greeks were like this,” they’d say: hands over face, hunched over in suicidal depression. “But then they opened a coffee shop and played music and danced, and they were like this!” and the villagers would do a madcap leap of joy. The Lebanese farmers would spread their arms and goggle at me as if to say, Greeks--how do you figure them?

What I figured was that I wanted to stop off in Greece on my way home. I had a great time, too, only now I wish I’d included a visit to the island of Corfu, which gives its name to the Corfu Restaurant, because life must be sweet there. Only the most violent nostalgia could be responsible for the paintings on this restaurant’s walls, in which the Mediterranean Sea is a lurid, Day-Glo shade of turquoise.

Like the other Greek restaurants around (which are surprisingly few in Los Angeles), Corfu is a place for home cooking, robustly flavored with onion, lemon and oregano. It may have a rather large Greek wine list (eight wines), but the most restaurantish deal is an appetizer of flaming cheese--not bad, actually, like fried mozzarella with lemon juice in place of tomato sauce.

Among the appetizers, there are wonderful cinnamony meatballs and meaty grape leaves with bechamel sauce. The calamari fried in bread crumbs (they lose in crispness but gain in flavor) are excellent, though the grilled octopus tends to be a little mushy.

In the entree department, you’re in luck if you like lamb. There are little grilled lamb chops (payidakia), admirably moist and tender shish kebab (souvlakia) and a dish of tender, lemony baked lamb called kleftiko, supposedly a recipe originally cooked by Greek outlaws in the days of the Sultan. There’s moussaka too, of course, layers of eggplant and potato with a mild, faintly sweet meaty filling of beef and lamb, topped with a simple layer of bechamel sauce. Arni saute is a sort of soup of lamb and artichoke hearts, and it helps if you really like both lamb and artichoke. Lamb haters are more or less limited to chicken souvlakia or a lemony roast chicken.

The only weakness in this kitchen seems to be that the filo pastry is often overdone and has a distracting taste of browned flour. Among the appetizers the spinach-stuffed spanakopita and the cheese-filled tiropita have this trouble. So does an entree called exohiko, otherwise a pleasant mixture of lamb and vegetables with a yogurt topping.

And so does the baklava, of course, though it has a thick filling of walnuts and tastes good and fresh. As a rarity, there is a sort of baklava with a custard filling, galaktobouriko. The best dessert I’ve had here, though, is ekmek, which turns out to be kataif, that peculiar Near Eastern dessert of fried vermicelli, topped with thickened cream.

Oh, yeah. There’s a tiny stage and a microphone, and on weekends they also serve madcap leaps of joy.

Corfu Greek Restaurant, 1383 Westwood Blvd., (213) 479-8892. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Beer and wine. Street parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $36 to $46.