RESTAURANT REVIEW : Goa Fish Grill Goes for Gusto With Lobsterama, Frenzy and Jumping Jax

Uh-oh. The radar is blinking and bells are going off. This place has all the signs of being either uncomfortably hip or pretty bogus. Or both, of course.

But no, there’s an explanation. Before it became Goa Fish Grill, this was a restaurant with an early-’60s coffeehouse shtick. That’s why the lights look as if they were rescued from a trash compactor, and maybe a couple of seconds too late. That’s why the specials are chalked on an angular sheet of metal bolted to the wall.

A hasty glance at the menu might make you want to cut and run anyway. Goa, the former Portuguese colony in India, is pretty well-known for its fish cookery, but there’s nothing recognizably Goanese here--no prawns and peanuts in coconut sauce or anything of the sort. On the contrary, there are a number of dishes with names that sound like Happy Hour snacks: Frenzy, Jumping Jax, Lobsterama.

Let’s be fair. Maybe the reason for the name, with its suggestions of mysterious Portuguese influence, is to explain Goa Fish Grill’s occasional eclecticism. Instead of chutney or yogurt to dip your bread into, you are brought a little pot of olive oil and chopped garlic. There’s a positively French quantity of butter around too, and even some fried won ton.

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Actually, the food is quite good, even semi-dazzling. All the seafood is fresh, and the culinary ideas make remarkable sense, starting with the appetizers--of which you could easily make a meal. Take the seafood salad: shrimp and crab with lettuce and fried won tons, all in a smooth and aromatic vinaigrette of olive oil with the unexpected but wonderful addition of tamarind juice and cilantro.

Despite their Italian name, the calamari are very Indian. The chunks of squid are fried quite chewy in a batter of three flours (mostly, I’d say, chickpea). They’re served with something resembling the usual Indian coriander chutney, but made without the usual Indian dose of the sulfurous spice asafetida. It’s more like a cilantro pesto, and very good.

There’s also a fascinating appetizer of mussels in garlicky lemon butter sauce with a little bit of curry in it. The soup of the day is likely to be a big bowl of thick vegetable puree (e.g., broccoli) with curry spices, heavy on the cardamom.

At lunch once I had a simple, rough stew of fish with tomato and onion and whole spices, pretty much what you’d expect of a fish curry, but the regular menu entrees are really more interesting.

Peri-peri (the menu spelling of piri-piri , the name of a colonial Portuguese hot sauce) is a snappy dish of tomato sauce with lots of cumin in it, well-balanced and definitely a little hot. It can be ordered with a choice of three kinds of seafood, and the rice that accompanies it is deliciously speckled with whole fried cumin seed.

Tavira and Frenzy are two rather similar dishes that can be ordered with a choice of various seafood. They seem somewhat European, topped as they are with an appetizing hash of shallots and vinegar, and with rice, broccoli and snow peas on the side. The difference between the two dishes is that there’s a tiny bit of horseradish with the Tavira, while the Frenzy includes a peculiar mushy potato pancake. I’ll take Tavira.

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The most distinctive thing on the menu is the Arabian seafood biriyani , a mixture of shrimp, crab and fish with rice. It sounds pretty simple-minded, and it’s a little hard to pin down its charm, but my table mates thought it was the best thing we ordered.

The best thing on the menu might be the frog legs (the Jumping Jax of the menu). They’re fried simply with a little ginger, tender and tasty. There are a lot of them too, looking like a whole plate of leg mannequins for a blue jeans commercial. After unusual items like these, the Lobsterama is not quite the star of the feast, but it’s pretty good--a whole split lobster covered with a layer of garlic and minced cilantro.

Goa Fish Grill obligingly offers a European pastry every night (say, mille-feuille topped with a pear or a Black Forest cake), but dessert doesn’t particularly go with this sort of food, and you can do perfectly well without.

We can do without that flashing radar and those damned alarm bells too. We’re perfectly safe in here, apart from the name and the decor.

Suggested dishes: calamari, $5.95; seafood salad tamarindo , $7.95; frogs legs, $15; red snapper peri-peri , $9; Arabian sea biriyani , $21.50 (for two).

Goa Fish Grill, 361 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 659-8180. Open for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday to Friday; dinner nightly from 6 to 10:30 p.m. No alcoholic beverages. Parking in back. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, appetizers and entrees only, $23 to $46.