RESTAURANT REVIEW : Even a Cowboy Might Eat Shiitake at Roxxi

Not California Cuisine. No, no, no. Roxxi wants to be thought of as Fresh Western. Alas, when you first skim this menu rife with charred ahi and shiitake salad and zucchini-blossom and goat cheese pizza, you might thoughtlessly fail to make the distinction.

I certainly will. Bearing in mind not only the food but the trashy-elegant name and the California-whimsical environment--faintly Art Deco but featuring a couple of Western genre paintings and a set of antlers with a baseball cap hung on them over the display kitchen--I’m just going to say Roxxi’s as California as you can get.

And behold, it’s about the hottest thing in Pasadena today, which shows how far we, and Pasadena, have come. Ten years ago I don’t think you could have dragged these gentlemen in neckties and ladies in middy collars to a place that serves a salad of duck, goat cheese and grilled peaches.

It’s hot because the food is very good indeed, as good as you’d expect from a kitchen full of Caioti and 7th Street Bistro and Parkway Grill alumni. The yam chips are the thinnest, crispest and altogether most successful non-potato chips I’ve had. There are “ranch beans” (OK, that’s Western) featuring an interesting contrast of tiny white beans and pintos in a bit of gruff, smoky sauce. A salad of the usual greens is garnished with some peppery chicken potstickers.

Avant-garde pizzas and pastas abound, of course. The roasted whole shallot and garlic pizza is particularly good, the melted cheese contrasting pleasantly with the shallots, which are apparently pickled. Fettuccine with grilled chicken comes in a peppery cream sauce aromatic with tequila and lime. The best of the pastas, so far as I can tell, is the “open-faced ravioli”: Call it spinach lasagna of a particularly sensuous texture swimming along with spinach and scallops in seafood broth.

There’s a wonderful rack of lamb, remarkably sweet lamb flavored with rosemary and garlic. The crisp-roasted duck comes with an amazingly apt plum sauce enlivened with Zinfandel. The pork tenderloin has an abrupt, medium-hot ancho pepper sauce that can scarcely be said to have been born with pork in mind, but it’s certainly delicious.

Lunch offers some sandwiches--including a buffalo burger, and I’ll grant you that that’s pretty Western. I can report that the flank steak sandwich has good tender meat, a nice herbal secret sauce, and architectural problems. It’s made with thin rye toast, and the moistness of the steak and its grilled tomatoes and onions makes the toast, already pretty brittle, curl away from the meat. Trying to eat this thing with your hands is a race with disaster.

There are a couple of other problems too. Putting tomato concasse on green salad is a waste of time if all you can get are card-boardy tomatoes, and the “campfire chili,” meaty as it is, lacks depth and is as bitter as smoking rubber.

The desserts run to the usual chocolate cakes with raspberries involved somewhere along the line. They’re particularly chocolaty, and tend to be huge, skyscraper-tall. Then there are sorbets, of course, and a candy-like nut cake. The best pastry is a lemon-hazelnut cake: crisp, very thin layers of hazelnut meringue separated by lemon butter cream, incredibly light and good.

Fresh Western. Well, let them call it whatever they want. As long as they’re willing to explain the Westernness of the name “Roxxi” to that cowboy in the painting. Or the Indian chief in the painting on the other wall, for that matter.

Roxxi, 1065 E. Green St., Pasadena. (818) 449-4519. Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner nightly. Beer and wine. Parking in lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $30 to $60.