What Happens After the Hype? Reality : So much can change after the first reviews are written

If you make a habit of checking out “hot” new restaurants, you may have noticed that each one seems to attract more or less the same people and serve many of the same things. (You’re probably seeing a lot of potato crusts and veal shanks this year.) Whether at a retro-American diner or a fancy West Hollywood trattoria, there they are, the men with carefully wrinkled $800 sports jackets and women with hair as carefully composed as the grilled lamb salad, the BMW cowboys and solemn shoulder-pad people who seem to be receiving the Eucharist where everybody else is eating hot foccacia bread. At Campanile, Patina, Indigo, Tulipe: they’re all here, grazing among the arugula. You may even be among them.

It’s common knowledge: you can’t review a restaurant without altering its nature. Call it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of food criticism. Less attention has been paid to the corollary, which is that hot restaurants are reviewed at the precise instant they are most like all other hot restaurants.

When Fennel opened in Santa Monica, for example, it was perceived as a hot, fussy, overexpensive bistro. Now, of course, with a year’s hindsight, we know it as a commissary for seven-figure studio executives that is exactly expensive enough.

Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills, by dint of its weird, deconstructivist architecture, was considered a major restaurant for a while, before the high-fashion photographers and progressive Italian urban planners gave way to Beverly Hills High School kids out on date night.

Hot restaurants exist to be hyped, much as less-hot restaurants exist to feed people. The cuisine seems fresh at these new places, even shocking (though probably well within the tradition of modern California grill cooking), because the first rush of customers seeks to be thrilled, not nourished--that’s why you see things like sauteed stingrays and nouvelle donut platters that will probably never make it onto the permanent menu. Though there aren’t necessarily a lot of celebrities-- they’re all at Il Giardino, pretending not to notice each other--all the name-dropping you hear makes you feel as if there are. And just as one restaurant is reviewed in The Times, the scene spills over to the next restaurant. The same scene: heat is a subculture of its own.

Take Malibu Adobe. From the beginning, it was easy enough to predict the restaurant’s future as a tastefully decorated Red Onion with TV stars, though it followed the classic recipe for heat--newly deluxe neighborhood (Malibu Civic Center); celebrity investors (Bob Newhart, Tony Danza); superstar consulting chef (Jonathan Waxman) and Important Interior Architecture (designed by Ali McGraw). The Southwestern-surf formula seemed too pat and the weird food--swordfish with banana-pineapple salsa!--never seemed quite good enough to justify a long drive up the coast. (In Malibu, the town where the phrase “Locals Only” was popularized, this may have been intentional.) But the hot-restaurant crowd duly pointed their 520i’s toward Malibu, reservations became impossible to obtain for a while, and Malibu Adobe garnered exactly as many pages of magazine copy as Champagne, the world-class West L.A. French restaurant that had opened the month before.

While the cooking and service have typically not quite jelled in a brand-new place yet--a fine restaurant, like Citrus or Champagne, gets a lot better--the kitchen isn’t yet bored by the menu and the waiters haven’t yet figured out whom to snub. (A mediocre restaurant will only get worse.) If the restaurant is owned by a famous chef, this may be the last chance to taste food he’s actually cooked himself. (Real success will put him on the celebrity circuit and take him out of the kitchen.) Suppliers eager to secure a customer work hard to stock it with better-than-usual meat and vegetables. (Always order the steak in a new restaurant.) And the place will be packed. The hot phase of a restaurant’s life is like the first day of school, and as atypical of the rest of the term.

This is when you see PR guys currying favor with the maitre d’ in case Patina turns out to be permanently hot; professional foodies condescending to the beurre blanc ; fellows who get off on the pumping adrenaline of a restaurant only a few days old--a crowd as indicative of the restaurant’s eventual clientele as the people at a Directors Guild screening are of the audience for a movie.

Early last year, Evan Kleiman, the very first L.A. chef to persuade screenwriters to eat like Tuscan peasants, opened Trattoria Angeli to more hype than any local restaurant since Spago--including an 8,000-word cover story in The Los Angeles Times Magazine. A lot of people didn’t understand the fuss over pizza, pasta and dryish roast chicken, or about architect Michele Saee’s love affair with trendy rusted steel, but Trattoria Angeli brought “hip” to West L.A., and reservations were very hard to get. In the succeeding months, the heat-seekers hopped to Pazzia on La Cienega, and half a dozen cheaper Angeli clones opened. Trattoria Angeli became the sort of buzzy neighborhood cafe more common on New York’s West Side than L.A.’s. Settling in, Kleiman simplified the menu: good crostini , high ceilings and a couple of entrees are now basically all that separate the place from its less formal sister on Melrose Avenue. A whole lot of tables for two lined up like train seats are usually filled with affluent if not particularly stylish young couples (men eating veal chops, women sipping at big bowls of garlicky fish soup) more intent on each other than on a scene.

Food writers are basically culture-beat reporters, and we like to think a hot restaurant is a breaking story in the way the latest Spike Lee movie, or Mapplethorpe show are. If beating the others into print isn’t exactly the first concern--though Los Angeles Magazine seems to review places before they’ve got the bubble wrap off their espresso machines--news-value is. That’s why every slick magazine you picked up this summer had a feature on Campanile, why an ancient Panorama City taqueria will suddenly make the rounds of the L.A. press, and probably why Claude Koeberle or Lydia Shire cooked at half the new restaurants in town last year just long enough to get them a decent buzz. (By the time Gourmet magazine, which mandates a six-month grace period for new restaurants, comes out with something, the review seems irrelevant.)

But although restaurants change far more after their first runs than films or plays, there’s little newsworthy about a hot place losing some heat or a good place getting better. (A remodeled interior, as at Valentino or Trader Vic’s, will get attention--and heat--where the most drastic change of kitchen personnel will not.)

After a time, even a casual observer will be able to tell whether a restaurant is potentially great or a tourist trap. A chef may become less cautious and his gimmicky menu evolve into something glorious and original; he’ll come into his own. Or the bottom line may surface, and gradually the steaks toughen, tumblers of grapefruit juice shrink, terrific bottles of $10 house wine dry up.

Citrus is clearly one of the former. When it opened, it was a hot restaurant like any other--Michel Richard, the chef-proprietor, seemed mostly determined to prove that he was more than the patissier who made wedding cakes for the stars. His take on California nouvelle cuisine tended to the standard mounds of grilled stuff on great big plates rather than to the sort of tricky presentations typical of former pastry chefs. There were intensely colored puddles of scallion purees and such, and great frizzes of things like deep-fried beets, but the cooking seemed to be a variation on a theme established in Los Angeles many years before. And the desserts were (perhaps intentionally) not all that delicious.

Though Citrus service was harried and the food only marginally tastier than at, say, Muse or Chaya Brasserie, the shoulder-pad people stormed it as the Marines did Omaha Beach. But by the time the smoke cleared, Citrus had become one of the two or three best restaurants in town: trademark wisps of lemon zest sparking crisp-skinned sea bass in a fava bean ragout; supernal baked goat-cheese terrine slicked with extra-virgin olive oil. (Perhaps people still underrate the food because the patio is such a nice place to lunch on tuna salad and iced tea.) A recent meal included a terrine of eggplant and perfectly ripe tomato that tasted like some kind of marvelous vegetable fish; a terrific salmon terrine, delicate stripes of fatty belly alternating with lean meat; and a short rib terrine in vinaigrette like a Frenchman’s pot au feu soul food dream. Richard’s team have become masters of textural interplay: crunchy fried potato crust encasing stubs of asparagus that surround a soft chunk of salmon just whitened around the edges. And desserts, particularly a chocolate creme brulee and a chocolate-pear terrine, are tremendous.

In France, the Michelin Guide will typically withhold its second star from a worthy restaurant for half a decade. A restaurant after the hype, like a man after 40, has the face it deserves.

* RELATED STORY: But can you get a table at 8? Page 82.