To Each His Own: Delivery From Room Service Express

Brucie, the next-door neighbor of my youth, had a mom who cooked separate dishes for everyone in the family six nights a week. On the seventh night they would eat “take out Italian”--lasagna, baked ziti and garlic bread--or “take out Chinese”--lo mein, spare ribs and won ton soup.

The menu of Room Service Express, a catering company that delivers meals throughout East Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, takes off on this separate-meals-for-everyone idea. In this case the different cuisines are American, Italian, “California Oriental” and “New York Chinese.” You can have Cobb salad and eggplant parmesan while your significant other orders mozzarella marina and meat loaf or potstickers and southern fried chicken and chocolate suicide cake.

Room Service Express makes everything to order in its own kitchen. The meals are uniformly fresh and impeccably packed in ready-to-reheat domed packages. If I worked in its service area and wanted a simple, generously portioned lunch, I’d make a list of a few of the best things and ring them up. The Chinese cold lo mein noodle and chicken salad ($4.95) is particularly appealing, with plenty of green onions and bean sprouts and a cocky little peanut ginger sauce. A mixed green salad studded with broccoli, carrots and zucchini is absolutely plain yet to the point--and surprisingly hard to find, especially at $2.95.

Room Service’s Caesar salad, which it notes is “without anchovies” is also without the egg. Mix the creamy garlic vinaigrette and grated parmesan yourself and toss it, in the big bubble top, over the romaine. Minestrone soup, $2.95 for a heaping homemade bowlful, is a rich broth packed with pasta shells and several kinds of beans.

Roast chicken, $6.95, on the American list, is crisp brown and really tasty, served with a wet, pan-ethnic grated ginger salsa. White lasagna, $6.95, is a pizza-alternative that easily serves two. Filled with spinach and a creamy parmesan sauce, it’s about three times as rich as any pizza I’ve had.

Except for the terrific sweet, crunchy onion strings and the order of shu mai ($3.95 for five) which are some of the plumpest, lightest, tastiest pork dumplings I’ve had in a long time, everything else I tried was disappointing. Thank goodness we’d ordered those shu mai. Their ginger-soy sauce enlivened several other things: the juicy but unforgivingly tasteless large cold shrimp, the bland yang chow, the fried rice with everything but taste.

Baby back ribs ($9.95) were so forgettable you couldn’t remember their flavor while they were still in your mouth. Baked beans functioned as complex carbs with sauce, and the shrimp with black bean sauce ($8.95) was exactly the kind of generic Americanized Chinese food my neighbor Brucie ate in 1963.

The curried pastry, two rather amiable domes of puff pastry supposed to be filled with curried chicken, were slicked with a doll’s thimble of sweet curry taste. Baked potatoes lacked crusty crust. The Oriental chicken salad had a great red crushed ginger dressing which woke up those ribs.

Brucie has now grown up to be an accountant named Bruce who would probably find Room Service’s dishes modestly priced. I know he’d gobble up the fine New York style cheesecake and glossy, first-rate, not-too-sweet, chocolate suicide cake. He might even order some of those other dishes again: one man’s dismal shrimp with black bean sauce is another man’s madeleine.

Room Service Express, (213) 655-3000. Fax number: 655-9456. Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 4 p.m.-10 p.m. American Express and Visa accepted. Minimum order: $12. Free delivery in most parts of West Hollywood, East Beverly Hills and Park La Brea. Delivery to other areas available, at a small surcharge, based on driver availability.