RESTAURANT REVIEW : ‘Truly Yours’ Wins Over Diners by Making What Is Ordinary Worth the Price

Truly Yours in Northridge is one of the least pretentious, most affordable and ordinary little restaurants I’ve been to, and people rave about it for exactly those reasons. Located in a shopping center on Reseda Boulevard, it’s a small, attractive space with an almost anachronistic ‘70s charm. The dining room is bedecked with redwood lattice and ferns and visually enlarged with mirrors. There’s the same friendly, proletarian ambiance that’s associated with gazebo bandstands in small-town parks.

Truly Yours is not the least bit trendy: There’s no radicchio, goat cheese or charred rare tuna, and no rock stars lurk upon the premises. Rather, it’s a friendly, all-American upscale coffee shop where best girlfriends meet for a glass of chablis, where parents take Cal State Northridge students out to dinner, and retirees on fixed incomes can get a hamburger steak with two vegetables for $5.95.

The most remarkable thing about Truly Yours is the scope of its menu. There are more than 120 items, from Baja burgers to chamonix (cream of chestnut) crepes, eggs benedict to a Popeye Salad Bowl. There are also 10 varieties of fresh fish that can be served any one of 13 ways, which means that there are an additional 130 options to choose from. This is not a restaurant for the chronically indecisive.

The food itself has a continental/international hotel flair; its preparation draws heavily on dried herbs, butter, breading, melting cheeses. But unlike many similarly inspired restaurants, Truly Yours manages to remove both pretension and priciness from the continental impulse, which somehow makes the cuisine a great deal more palatable.

We start out with potato skins with guacamole and Swiss cheese, and they’re just fine until the cheese cools and congeals into a leathery, unwieldy sheet that wants to come up all in one piece. The stuffed mushrooms Provencal, tangy with garlic, tomato and cheese, are also great--until the cheese cools, etc., over them, too. The ceviche , made with a touch of orange juice, is unusual and refreshing, but a cold artichoke is overcooked, tasteless and strangely waterlogged.

It’s a Tuesday night, the place isn’t full, nobody’s trying to hurry us out, but we get our soups before we’re done with our appetizers. In fact, throughout all the meals we have here, the kitchen sends the food out as it sees fit, and our tables are invariably crowded with plates. I take this to mean that the staff probably isn’t used to people ordering half the menu. At any rate, I thoroughly enjoy the cold watercress soup but find the onion soup pale and weak and 90% broth-expanded bread under more of that remarkable congealing cheese.

Settling on a single fish with a single sauce was difficult, but I finally chose the sea bass grenobloise (diced lemons, capers in butter). When I ordered it, the waitress said, “We saute all our fish; is that all right with you?”

I was a little baffled by this question--was I supposed to disapprove?--and recognize the implicit warning in her words only when the sea bass arrives. It’s been breaded, “sauteed” until crisp and well-done, and topped with diced lemons, capers and butter--in short, a perfectly respectable slab of fresh fish has been transformed into a kind of adult fish stick. Yet it’s perfectly edible; there’s plenty of it, and at $7.75, which includes buttery carrots and broccoli, I’m just not going to complain. And next time, I’ll know to ask that our fish be poached or grilled.

The veal picatta-- layers of veal and zucchini--is also breaded, buttery, lemony and definitely edible. An awesome portion of Long Island duckling is overcooked but comes with a good raspberry sauce. Again, at $10.75, you can’t be too fussy: I’ve paid $5 and $10 more for less and worse-tasting duck. The salad in a shell bowl, a basic shrimp, scallop and crab on iceberg and romaine, is absolutely generic, but considering the portion size and the price ($7.95), it’s a bargain. I’m beginning to understand why people rave about Truly Yours.

The California dessert crepes are truly good; fresh, eggy crepes are filled with a light custard and fresh-frozen raspberries and topped with whipped cream. Other desserts are acceptable if uninspired: The crepe sundae is a chocolate sundae wearing a crepe, and the profiteroles au chocolat are a huge amalgam of custard-filled cream puffs, whipped cream, vanilla ice cream and a pudding-like chocolate sauce.

The service may be a little erratic, the food may be a trifle on the rich side, and the decor may be a little outdated, but everything I ate at Truly Yours was worth the price I paid--which, in my opinion, makes it a truly exceptional restaurant.

Truly Yours, 9725 Reseda Blvd., Northridge. (818) 993-4714. Open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m daily, ( Friday and Saturday until midnight ) , Sunday Brunch 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Beer and Wine. MasterCard and Visa accepted for purchases of more than $10. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$35.