In the Family Way : Champagne in Los Angeles, Rockenwagner in Venice are redefining the term ‘family restaurant’

Champagne, 10506 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 470-8446. Open for lunch Tuesday-Friday; for dinner Tuesday-Sunday. (This week, the restaurant will be closed through Friday.) Beer and wine. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $55-$120.

Rockenwagner, 1023 W. Washington Blvd., Venice. (213) 399-6504. Open for dinner Tuesday-Sunday. Beer and wine. Valet parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $50-$70.

Family restaurants used to be dreadful places where all the dishes came with lumpy mashed potatoes and the placemats had games on them to keep the kids amused. Family-run Ma-and-Pa places were much the same. But times have changed. The new baby boom means that both the customers and the proprietors are having children, and as we move out of the Me Decade and into the Us Decade we are pioneering a whole new way of eating out.

In the forefront of the movement is a new breed of Los Angeles restaurateur--young, sophisticated and family-oriented--who is redefining the term family restaurant .

Consider the city’s glitziest restaurant, Spago, run by the team of Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Lazaroff. It is not unusual to find the proprietors’ visiting nieces and nephews whooping it up around the room.

The new Duplex is run by the husband-and-wife team of Mark and Stephanie Carter, who have instituted Sunday dinners to really make you feel at home.

When Joachim Splichal opens his restaurant next spring (on the site of the former Le St. Germain), his wife, Christine, will be running the front of the house.

And the about-to-open Campanile on La Brea Avenue is not only owned by Mark Peel and his wife, Nancy Silverton (who at one time contemplated calling the place Silverpeel’s), but has various other members of the family pitching in.

Having the family on hand changes a restaurant. It gives it a quirky, personal quality that you don’t find anywhere else. It’s not quite like going to Grandma’s to eat dinner--but it’s not like dining at a corporate table either. Family restaurants invariably have a lot of personality. Like the two below.

If you walk into Champagne at midday, you are likely to walk past a table surrounded by toys where a very polite little boy sits eating lunch with his parents. If you are there late at night you will see his parents sitting down to dinner by themselves. This table is a little apart from the other tables in the room; going past it is like entering an oasis of calm. From this vantage point Sophie and Patrick Healy survey their domain with a certain satisfaction.

And no wonder. Starting on a shoestring a little over a year ago, they have built their restaurant into one of the city’s most consistently satisfying places to eat. Healy, who worked at Le St. Germain and then Colette, seems happiest here, and his cooking, excellent when the restaurant opened, is becoming increasingly assured.

Sophie also seems far more at ease; the service, which was rocky when the restaurant opened, has smoothed out. Together they have created that rare commodity in Los Angeles: a grown-up restaurant with state-of-the-art food and an unstuffy quality. Unlike most of the restaurants in Los Angeles where younger chefs hold sway, this is one that would probably make your parents happy.

The menu is divided into four sections: contemporary California dishes, rustic French, spa cuisine and a long list of daily specials. (There is also a lengthy gastronomic menu at $60 a person.) Healy does well with all of them, although you can’t help feeling that his creative heart is in the contemporary California side of the menu.

That is where you’ll find the roasted shiitake mushroom “sandwich,” filled with lobster and risotto and served with a saffron-scented coulis of tomato. It looks like a fat little mushroom bomb--a round little brown bundle that gets more delightful with every bite. I’ve never had anything quite like it before, but I can’t wait to taste it again.

The roasted eggplant soup--from the spa menu and only 150 calories per bowl--is a wonder. It has more flavor per calorie than anything I’ve ever eaten. All of Healy’s soups are special, and he does a very good job with terrines, pates and foie gras.

You might, in fact, be tempted to make a meal out of first courses. But then you’d be missing the game (there is sometimes truly gamy wild duck), pheasant served with a wonderful little custard made out of fresh corn, or the satisfying simplicity of a roasted veal chop in Madeira sauce sitting on a bed of diced mushrooms, spinach and braised endive. And these winter days you might want to try Healy’s homey pot au feu or a cassoulet , so generous that you can take it home and eat it for lunch the following day.

Desserts are generally good and interesting, although it would be a mistake to believe the menu when it says that the pan-baked apricot souffle feeds two (it would easily feed four).

The wine list has improved dramatically as the restaurant has aged (which may explain the outrageous $15-per-bottle corkage fee, although it does not excuse it). The cheese cart is the best in the city, but at $12 a serving it is seriously expensive. But then everything about Champagne is serious.

This is the perfect place to think of on that day when you look around your own house, see the dishes piled in the sink and somebody sticking leftovers into the microwave for dinner. The Healys are the perfect family to adopt when you wish that for once somebody in the house would just be serious about food.

Hans and Mary Rockenwagner share a lot of qualities with the Healys. Hans is a classically trained chef in the French manner; Mary has lots of experience running restaurants. They too opened their restaurant on a shoestring. And when you walk into the room early in the evening, you are very likely to find their baby, Gina, sitting with her parents eating dinner.

But for all the similarities, Rockenwagner is very different from Champagne. In place of the staid tapestry chairs and white tablecloths of Champagne you find bare marble tables and a tiny, architecturally interesting space. This small Venice restaurant manages to take itself and its food seriously while maintaining a young and light-hearted quality. You probably wouldn’t take a child to Champagne (unless he or she was very well behaved); you wouldn’t think twice about taking a child along to Rockenwagner.

In fact Hans Rockenwagner is now considering cooking food for children. He says that the new restaurant he and Mary plan to open next spring in Santa Monica will offer children’s dishes. “So many of our customers have kids now,” he says, “and a lot of them like to bring them along when they go out to eat.”

Lucky kids. Imagine being 4 or 5 (or even 40) years old and sitting down to the rich and irresistible brioche that begins every meal here. Would a 5-year-old like the crab souffle served with sliced papaya and lobster-butter sauce that has become Rockenwagner’s signature dish? Why not? This post-adolescent critic did.

The salad of wild mushrooms and endive served with ricotta-filled ravioli may be a little outre for a child, but I can’t imagine any kid not delighting in the flavor contrasts of the chef’s most interesting appetizer; it is a sweetbread salad, the sweetbreads sauteed into crisp little bits, plunked on a bed of baby lettuces and topped with a sweetly tangy, icy tomato sorbet. The range of flavors is so intense and interesting that almost anybody would love it.

And what kid could resist the chef’s newest appetizer? The waiter appears bearing a plate that looks a lot like a spaceship coming in for a landing. It is a white-on-white arrangement: thin slices of scallop topped with a potato puree and crowned with an upside-down eggshell. As he puts the plate down the waiter picks up the eggshell and out spills a curry sauce dotted with caviar. It’s fun to watch, but even more important, the flavors all work well together, and it’s fun to eat.

Rockenwagner’s food is filled with flashes of humor, but the dishes are never silly. When he tops pork tenderloin with pepper and goat cheese, it is not because the cheese is trendy but because the combination is uncommonly good. His wild boar stew is strictly traditional, but it comes with an up-to-date accompaniment of red cabbage neatly packaged in a green cabbage leaf.

There is humor too in the dessert sampler. It’s like a big surprise package that arrives sitting on a hand-crafted lazy susan. “Hans made the tray himself,” says the waiter putting down this pretty piece of woodwork. The desserts on the tray are all good--an “apple pizza,” puff pastry topped with almond paste and raspberries, a nougat gratin and a lovely little chocolate sandwich filled with mocha cream. There is even a little wooden box filled with cookies.

Eating at Rockenwagner is always fun. But it is more than that. When you walk in the door you feel that you are being welcomed into the heart of a young and happy family--a feeling that is especially welcome this time of the year.