RESTAURANT REVIEW : Driven to Oscar’s Melting Pot of Cuisines

What a view from this parking lot: a sprawling sea of light, the Hollywood Freeway spilling into the Valley. Walk indoors and the entrance to Oscar’s Restaurant is gleaming too, a triumphal alcove of brass and glass.

Great, all great. The question is, would you or I drive all the way up here?

Ordinarily we probably wouldn’t. Oscar’s is the restaurant in the Registry Hotel in Universal City and must be all things to all palates, while we who live in L.A. can target a specific cuisine when we go out to eat.

However, if it happened that we couldn’t decide between Californian, Southwestern, East Asian or Continental, or if we wanted to dine near the Universal Amphitheatre, Oscar’s would be a good bet. It does have some very good things, like a wonderful appetizer of shrimp fettuccine in a hot and sour cream sauce or a tortilla soup that is like a tiny bit of enchilada in a whole lot of gritty, mild brown enchilada sauce.

When it’s being a California place, its appetizers have the usual problem of bitter baby vegetables, particularly the eggplant. On the other hand, the California entrees are about the best. The roast duck is flavorful and its passion fruit sauce makes surprising sense. An excellent roast veal chop with cherry tomatoes and sweet sliced onions becomes a wacky salad in a dashing sauce that is more or less a whole-seed mustard vinaigrette.

A number of entrees are Southwestern, whether they sound so from the menu description or not. You expect something Southwestern of grilled swordfish in orange tequila sauce, with its tortilla chips and three caviars, but the steamed salmon in rice paper is unexpectedly topped with creamy black bean sauce and cilantro. And the New York steak, sliced into little rounds Nouvelle Cuisine style, comes with a tortilla shell full of salsa and both white and black beans. When some of the black beans escape into the Cabernet sauce, the effect is of a particularly sophisticated carne asada .

In short, there’s a broad range here, from an appetizer of grilled chicken pieces rolled up in wilted romaine with no sauce, like a half-hearted compromise between Southeast Asian and Nouvelle, to an unimaginative but excellent entree of cold shellfish with an herb sauce and a mild, tomato cocktail sauce.

Desserts are things like a plate of fresh fruit arranged in pretty patterns on the plate in champagne sabayon sauce or a rather stiff box of delicious bitter chocolate filled with raspberry mousse. The best is the seemingly least promising, a crisp pastry shell with a couple of balls of white chocolate ice cream on a plate coated with what at first seems to be an afterthought of raspberry jelly, but the wonderful jelly is really the whole point.

There are a lot of nice touches here. When you order fish, they give you a proper fish knife and fork. A lot of chocolate-dipped strawberries show up along with the check. And when you order an espresso, they bring you a full-sized coffee cup of it. If I wanted a fancy sit-down meal in the neighborhood of the Universal Studio Tour’s white shark, this is where I’d go.

Oscar’s, Registry Hotel, 555 Universal Terrace Parkway, Universal City. (818) 506-2500. Open for dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Validated valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $62 to $101.