RESTAURANTS : Duplex: Serious Food, Neighborly Mood

Duplex, 1930 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 663-2430. Open for lunch Tuesday-Friday; for dinner Tuesday-Sunday; for Sunday brunch. Full bar. Valet parking. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $38-$50.

People keep calling to thank me for telling them about Duplex. “I don’t know why,” grumbled the Reluctant Gourmet the first time this happened. He had taken what I considered an unreasonable dislike to the restaurant. I think this is because, during his first meal there, his chair shattered beneath him, sending him crashing to the floor. Most of the people in the restaurant seemed to think that this was funny; the RG did not.

Still, he claimed that this had nothing to do with his feelings for the place. “I just don’t like toy food,” is how he put it.

Duplex calls itself an “urban roadhouse,” but there is nothing simple or straightforward about the food--at least once you get past the prices. (This must be the most reasonably priced serious restaurant in town.) It has a small and quirky menu whose dishes were not designed to make a person who prefers hamburgers very happy.

The RG devoured the little pot of chicken liver mousse that the waiter brought as soon as we were seated, settled in to read the menu, and groaned. “Apple and sausage pie,” he began, “tea-smoked chicken with noodles, and spinach-and-oyster soup. Don’t they have any ordinary food?” He finally settled, grumpily, on a beet and radicchio salad.

It was a beautiful dish. The beets fanned out in a deep red semicircle, framing a pile of gently shredded radicchio and curly endive. Here and there little bits of broccoli added punctuation. I thought it was the prettiest $3 dish I had ever seen. He thought it was pretty silly. He didn’t like the crab salad either; the mound of crab meat came surrounded by delicate little rounds of cucumbers and pommes parisiennes. “Ladies’ lunch food,” he snorted.

His entree wasn’t much better received. Oh, the salmon in avocado was pretty all right, but all he could say was “more tea-party stuff.” And he refused to even taste my scallop and mock scallop stew. He was not, frankly, missing much; it is my least favorite dish on the menu. While it may be a cute idea to combine scallops with gnocchi that look exactly like scallops, it would work better if the gnocchi actually had some taste. And it would work a lot better, I think, without the caraway seeds.

The RG was somewhat cheered by dessert, which is a definite strong suit at Duplex. He appreciated the buttery lemon tart, but he absolutely devoured the chocolate-espresso cake, which came sitting in a pool of unsweetened whipped cream. “I’ll come back for dessert,” he said, as he stood up, groaning a little from the chair’s attack, “but don’t expect me to come back for dinner.”

I won’t tell you about the deal I had to make to get him back to Duplex; suffice it to say that he agreed--with more than his usual reluctance--to go back for dinner. But this time, as we left a few hours later, he shook his head and said, “I can’t believe how much I liked that meal.”

What changed? The attractive room, its walls painted in various odd hues (one room is yellow and green, the other has a rosy glow, like the inside of a seashell), was just the same. The lighting was still soft, there were still crisp cloths on the tables. Once again the little pot of chicken liver mousse appeared. And as always, the prices were remarkably reasonable.

But this time we ordered completely different dishes--every one of them a winner (and not one of them fish, which is where the restaurant is at its weakest). An appetizer of tea-smoked chicken perched atop a crispy pancake made of noodles was pungent and surprisingly delicious. Spinach-and-oyster soup was an intense puddle of green, and a cold melon soup glowed, as if pastel crayons had been melted into sunrise colors.

Our main courses included filet mignon--a generous, remarkably tender piece of meat--in a citrus sauce containing, among its 11 ingredients, anchovy paste. Chicken was even better. It came sitting on a heap of chicory that had been cooked with shallots and salt pork; the two together were as homey and delicious a dish as you’ll ever want to eat. Scalloped potatoes were the perfect accompaniment. “I’d come back for this anytime,” said the RG.

We finished dinner with a plate of assorted desserts. If there is a better $6 dish of sweets in town, I’d like to know about it. This included a slice of mango pate , a piece of ricotta cheesecake in fruit sauce, a corn parfait surrounded by luminous circles of plum, a very moist hazelnut pudding and a sliver of the wonderful lemon tart.

By the time we left, the RG had mellowed to the point where he was saying that we ought to come back for Sunday dinner (which comprises three courses and costs $20 per person). He was even reassessing his spectacular crash. “I guess it was sort of funny when the chair broke,” he admitted.

Recommended dishes: tea - smoked chicken on noodle pancake, $5; spinach soup, $3; chicken on chicory $12; filet mignon, $15.