RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Minimalist Place With a Showy Chef

C’est Fan-Fan is a Franco-Chinese miniature, a miniature version of Chinois on Main, to be exact. Strip Chinois down to the counter seating with the view of the chefs, and then pare down the staff to one chef and a waiter/assistant, and you have C’est Fan-Fan.

There’s no decor but a flower arrangement and some calligraphic Oriental paintings. Fortunately the very young chef, a former Chinois cook named Hajime Kaki, is a show: furiously absorbed in his work, chopping and frying and sprinkling like all get-out, abruptly discarding an imperfect radicchio leaf as if it offended him personally.

The wine list is minuscule (two choices) and the menu is pretty tiny itself. Miniaturization has its advantages, though, because this is a menu where it’s almost impossible to go wrong--at least if you like radicchio, endive and butter as well as you like garlic, ginger and soy.

Probably the best thing on it is the calamari salad. It’s full of endive and radicchio, of course, but the bits of squid are deepfried until they’re positively puffy, like squid-flavored croutons. With its sharp, vinegary peanut sauce, this is an impossibly fresh, light salad you could eat by the bucket. The chicken salad is the same substituting chicken for calamari, but less exciting, or perhaps just less crunchy.

There are lots of surprises, as we’d expect in the Franco-Chinese style. In the sea bass appetizer, raw fish is mixed with cashews and chunks of Peking duck and duck skin, making something rather meaty. “Chinese bread” is not the sticky white globe you might find in a Chinese restaurant but puffy “tortillas” of steamed bread, filled taco-fashion with ground meat in a sweet-tart sauce, heavy on the ginger. The crab crepes have two surprises: the cheese enriching the crab, and the instant raspberry puree joining the papaya mousse on top (pureed with rapid knife strokes on the cutting board).

The winner among the entrees is the Peking duck, which is served with green onion pancakes in a delicious sauce, garlicky and sweet with plum sauce, as if this were some exotic kind of mu shu dish enriched with butter. A similar sauce comes with the lobster, which is excellently prepared, barely cooked and remarkably moist and tender. (When you order lobster, Kaki brings it out to show you and then decapitates it right on his chopping board. Those who aren’t ready for this experience had better sit closer to the door, out of view of the work area, or pray that nobody orders lobster.) Sometimes on special there is crab done the same way, and the crab legs (all of them) are thoughtfully split with a knife for easy eating.

Chicken Genghiskhan is not quite so interesting, in its sauce of meat juices faintly flavored with cheese. However, the only thing on this menu that doesn’t really make it, for me, anyway, is the shrimp entree. It comes with wonderful banana fritters, but the sauce has an earthy, even dirty flavor whose attraction I can’t fathom.

Dessert consists of nothing but ice cream, but the chef makes his own, and there is a personal touch to it. The chocolate is rather cocoa-like, the raspberry topped with another of his instant raspberry purees, and the pure- flavored peach ice cream, that rarity outside backyard ice cream making sessions, contains some pieces of fresh peach as well.

Small is beautiful. Miniature is very pretty.

C’est Fan-Fan, 3360 W. First St., Los Angeles. (213) 487-7330. Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner Monday through Saturday. Beer and wine. Parking in lot. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $38 to $56.