RESTAURANT REVIEW : Puran’s: Westside Italian at Bargain Prices

It’s quiet at this corner of Gateway Avenue. Once mighty Santa Monica Boulevard is about to end in Sunset and seems to dawdle for the last couple of blocks, dusty and forgotten, tempted to wax philosophical but then thinking better of it since nobody’s listening. Often you can watch the street for minutes at a time and not see a single thing move.

In other words, this is a pretty odd sort of place for sidewalk dining, but a comfortable one. Puran’s does have a little dining patio complete with some struggling plants at its entrance, the narrow end of a wedge-shaped building. As you study your menu, or perhaps watch the street for moving cars, you may find that you’re resting your head against the water meter.

Inside, the decor is Silver Lake-raffish, mostly framed movie-star publicity shots of varying degrees of antiquity (a little heavy on Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman). At night, Puran’s is a pool of Bohemian murk, with maybe only one of the five or six green-shaded ceiling lamps on; most of the light comes from the neon sign in the window.

Puran’s is an oddball place, in other words, and it serves an oddball sort of Italian food, mostly. Some of it may be like up-to-date Westside Italian, only bargain priced: a dinner salad with julienne-cut squash in an Italian dressing loud with olive oil; a thin slice of eggplant topped with a tomato slice spread with goat cheese and sprinkled with cracked bitter olives; “chicken ravioli,” more precisely ricotta-filled ravioli mixed with shreds of chicken in a very creditable cream sauce with porcini mushrooms.

At the same time, the hamburger is unexpectedly good, with the sweet taste of very freshly ground beef. The spinach salad is loaded with bacon in a powerful, mustardy olive oil dressing. And some of the specials are sort of hard to place, such as a grilled chicken with a slight ginger flavor--basically a particularly good grilled chicken, the meat magically moist.

But not all the oddness is magical, no way. The place tends to have a rather heavy hand with salt; the stracciatelle soup is salty enough to start blood pounding in your temples. The veal boscaiola , which is tiny, rare squares of veal in one of Puran’s good porcini sauces, is pretty skimpy altogether, even at these rock-bottom prices. The spaghetti puttanesca , actually a rich and flavorful one, for some reason does not use strongly flavored bitter olives but bland California jumbos.

The calamari have a rather soft and oily breading that falls off at the slightest touch. And the dipping sauce for those calamari raises another issue: Puran’s odd tomato sauce. It’s sweet rather than tart, and pink like cream of tomato soup. The same pink, baby-foodish sauce shows up on pastas sometimes too. But hey, the sign out front only proclaims this to be a Pasta Place, not a ruggedly authentic Italian restaurant.

The desserts are limited, so far as I can tell, to a homey, very chocolatey chocolate cake and a slightly mushy blueberry cheesecake with a nice bit of cheese flavor. Instead of a wine list, they have a question for you: What color do you want--red, white or pink?

Clearly, the heavy-hitter restaurants down toward the other end of Santa Monica have nothing to fear from Puran’s. But for all its limitations, it has genuine charm of a sort that is out of the question on the Westside. I’m glad it’s there.

Puran’s, 4114 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles; (213) 660-6267. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Beer and wine. Street parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $28-$52.