RESTAURANT REVIEW : Heritage Shows Its Heritage

You can’t drive down Main Street and miss all the work that’s gone into Heritage Square. Some kind of Santa Monica historical museum seems to be involved, but of course the real question is: What about that other building on the square, the handsome old house that used to be the Chronicle?

It’s turned into a heavy dose of the Grand Style, that’s what. Right in the middle of casual Santa Monica, it’s got serious waiters, a magisterial wine list, and an atmosphere of turn-of-the-century elegance. The name of the place is, by no coincidence, the Heritage, and it’s the new home of Rolf Nonnast, formerly of Scandia, La Couronne and Saddle Peak Lodge.

Its heritage, as it were, shows. The kitchen has the same mixture of cautious inventiveness and old fashioned Continental plush of Nonnast’s other homes. If there are modern elements like Japanese mushrooms and charred tuna, there are also plenty of old fashioned cream and butter sauces and even a carpetbag steak stuffed with oysters.

The best things often seem to be the most retrograde, in fact. The appetizer of crab “pancakes” is the old fashioned idea of a seafood-filled crepe in butter sauce, but rich almost beyond description. (The little red line of sweet pepper relish on top of the crepes puts the dish right over the edge.) The lobster lasagna is also stunningly rich, cut by the slight bitterness of saffron in the sauce.

The Caesar salad, mixed table-side (unless you’re in the front room; Caesar’s salad chariot is too wide to enter the door, which means the salad is solemnly prepared just outside the room), does not even offer the option of anchovies, but generally the salads are marked by welcome additions. Spinach and enoki salad has some fleurons of puff pastry hanging around. A field salad of the usual lettuces is spiked with fresh tarragon and dill.

A measure of the Heritage’s standards is the amount of variety in the accompaniments. A lamb loin splashily dosed with tarragon essence comes with an exquisite timbale of zucchini and paper-thin eggplant slices on the side. The culotte steak grilled over bay leaves (which sounds fascinating, though I regret to say the leaves do not add much to the flavor) comes with a mold of thin-sliced potato, a Provencale tomato and some slightly cooked red onions marinated in vinegar.

The burger (available at lunch) might be a concession to the beach town ambiance, except that it’s a tradition-minded post-modern sort of burger, a buffalo-burger with the beefy-gamy flavor of our national bovine. The thing is about an inch and a quarter thick, and comes with fresh potato chips, coleslaw, and silver bowls of Dijon mustard, catsup and wonderful horseradish mayonnaise. It can be a little messy to eat, particularly if you’ve decided to make it a cheese-buffalo-burger topped with (of course) smoked bufala mozzarella.

The pastries are very good with occasional surprises (the unannounced chocolate-marzipan frosting on a chocolate “tart” that is more like a devil’s food cake; the frosting of the banana cake, which consists of white, milk and dark chocolate elements). Nothing, however, beats the flan in fresh strawberry sauce, a flan that shakes like jelly and melts in the mouth like no other.

And of course the place is right next to that Heritage Museum. Must remember to look into the museum sometime.

The Heritage, 2640 Main St., Santa Monica. (213) 392-4956. Open for breakfast, lunch and tea Monday through Friday, for dinner daily. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $55 to $78.