RESTAURANT REVIEW : At Its Best, It’s Decadently Good Health Food

Health food chefs, listen up:

First learn how to cook, OK? Then subtract whatever evil ingredients your theories tell you to. But not before you know what you’re doing. The other way--deciding on the OK ingredients and then throwing them together in different ways, is why health food restaurants serve such a stunted, disfigured sort of cuisine.

It’s not as if you had to invent health food cooking from scratch. Vegetarianism, for instance, has been practiced for centuries by many Hindus and Buddhists. They made most of their gastronomic mistakes a long time ago.

Go then and learn from them. Go to the Fragrant Vegetable Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant in Monterey Park.

Or go to the new Fragrant Vegetable on the Westside, which, like the original, has a color scheme of peaceful green but is more luxurious and restaurant-like. Instead of simple Buddhist devotional art, there are fine wooden sculptures of the Eight Drunken Immortals of Chinese folklore.

Anyhow, behold what can be done with vegetables. Instead of slovenly soyburgers or nutburgers, the Fragrant Vegetable makes vegetarian “meats” from tofu or wheat gluten that match the consistency of meat almost perfectly. Often the flavor is fairly close, but even when it’s not, it’s at least pleasant.

-- --

In the plate of cold appetizers, the lemon chicken is uncannily like chicken skin, the roast pork could almost be pork, and the spicy beef (heavy on the star anise) at least tastes good.

Meat, and sometimes fish, is mimicked in even stranger ways. “Mashed taro fish” is taro mashed with some other pureed vegetables and arranged in the shape of a fish. Scales are drawn on; a pea represents the eye. The effect is a lot like deep-fried mashed potatoes with a less floury texture. And “Peking ribs” do not, in truth, taste or even look a whole lot like sweet and sour spareribs, but they are very good: pecans (“Peking” is a pun, see) in sweet and sour sauce with pineapple chunks.

Even better than the mock meats are the mushroom dishes and wilder non-animal edibles. For instance, the centerpiece of Buddha’s cushions, a dish that includes mushrooms and spinach, is made up of the cushions themselves: thin sheets of tofu wrapped around a substance called black moss. It has an unforgettable rich, loamy aroma, not blamelessly vegetable-like at all but like some strange, long-stewed meat.

And for my money, the best dessert on the menu is white fungus and coconut soup, which the kitchen will prepare for four or more people. This is slightly sweet coconut milk--actually a soup, served hot--with a noble white fungus floating in the middle like a Spanish caravel. The stuff looks like a disembodied brain from outer space, but it has a pleasant, extremely delicate flavor and a wonderful texture, crunchy without being crisp.

-- --

There are, however, dishes that could be served in any Chinese restaurant and be worthy of notice. I’m thinking of things like string beans in hot bean sauce, actually Sichuan beans, I’d say. Even apart from the entertaining idea of beans served in bean sauce, they’re perfectly delicious; the black bean sauce is hot, sour and garlicky--unless, of course, you ask that garlic be omitted.

Incidentally, the Fragrant Vegetable serves fixed-price lunches, not only the sort of dishes found on its regular menu but also vegetarian versions of conventional Chinese dishes like twice-cooked pork (better for texture than taste) and a variety of noodle dishes. I’ve tried the fried broad rice noodle Malaysian style and found it had a nice curry sauce, plus bell pepper, sprouts, green onion and vegetarian “pork” in it.

It also had bits of egg, and so does the fried rice, because people expect egg in such dishes; those who don’t eat eggs should ask that they be omitted.

Recommended dishes: cold appetizers, $5.25; Buddha’s cushions, $8.95; string beans with hot sauce, $6.95; white fungus and coconut soup, $5.50.

Fragrant Vegetable Restaurant, 11859 Wilshire Blvd., West Los Angeles. (213) 312-1442. Open for lunch and dinner daily, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wine and beer. Validated parking at lot on Westgate Avenue. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $29 to $47.