RESTAURANT REVIEW : Ravel: A Few Potholes on Memory Lane

Figueroa Street is memory lane for me. Ravel, the little jewel box dining room in the Sheraton Grande, was among the first of the new generation of hotel restaurants that did any sort of California cuisinie, and I still remember how magical it seemed that the presence of a bell captain did not somehow ruin the food. Recently, I felt like taking a sort of sentimental journey back there.

I quickly found out that some journeys shouldn’t be taken.

Ravel still offers many attractions, like stylish etched-glass partitions and the plush feeling of a muffled, sunken room. You are given a box of matches stamped with your name, there’s a bit of foie gras on the table to sustain you through the ordeal of ordering, and the house Cabernet is Trefethen--not bad. At lunch, if you order from the daily special menu, you’ll be able to eat in an hour.

But the food hasn’t weathered the years very well. It’s still a mixture of Continental and cooking-school creative, and the inspirations are not always top drawer. What’s the point of making soup out of snow peas if you can’t tell the result from ordinary split pea? Or filling won tons with meat and jalapenos and serving them in creme fraiche if they’re tough? Or coating baby vegetables in a sauce deafeningly flavored (and positively bitter) with saffron?

The entrees are more Continental and more likable than the appetizers, on the whole. There’s a great seared duck breast with mixed fruits, and I’ve had a good pepper steak with morels and sweet little peeled crayfish in excellent cream-enriched meat glaze. The rare venison (the waiter asks whether you might want it well-done, in case you’re no more Californian than you ought to be) comes in a remarkably thick sauce of Cabernet and concentrated meat glaze.

Loin of lamb with cassis, garlic and mint is the most cooking-school/California cuisine name on the menu, and the theory must go like this: The best wine for lamb is Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Sauvignon is said to have an aroma of black currants and cassis is a liqueur made from black currants. Mostly it’s the meat glaze that saves this dish, because something about lamb is hostile to sweet sauces.

The most interesting dessert I had was apple Linzer torte, thin sheets of rich pastry filled with a little cherry jam and topped with a hash of cooked apples and apricot glaze. There was a choice of two sauces, passion fruit-yogurt (intoxicatingly aromatic, if weird) or the somewhat shocking alternative of chocolate-almond. I’ve also had a black cherry pie (the waiter was in some doubt as to what it was) consisting of a sort of cherry mousse in a stiff crust like a giant cinnamon cookie.

But where did they get the idea for the brown butter tart? It was topped with a nice baked apricot, but brown butter in a dessert? It may be OK for fish and brains and so on, but in a dessert it inevitably tastes as if something went wrong.

The service was always good at Ravel, but even that seems to have slipped. At one meal I was overcharged for dessert--a computer error. The same computer error showed up again at the next meal, when I was also charged for a coffee I didn’t have. The errors were corrected graciously, but they helped make for a pretty bumpy sentimental journey.