RESTAURANT REVIEW : Manhattan West: It Looks Like There but Tastes Like Here

Manhattan West, it says here, is “modeled after New York’s famed SoHo loft district but retains all the flair and ambiance unique to Los Angeles.” I’m certainly glad of that. Nobody in L.A. cares to lose the old flair and ambiance. According to its literature, Manhattan West was “created to service the needs of the entertainment world.”

I know when I’m out of my league, so I recruited a gang of entertainment worlders, including a couple of certified New Yorkers, to inspect the place for me. I waved my arm at the cavernous, warehouse-like room; the exposed ducts and beams in the ceiling; the gritty, pessimistic, unframed paintings tacked directly onto walls of white-painted brick. Is this like SoHo, I wanted to know?

“No way,” said the most emphatic of the New Yorkers, “There’s so much space. No, it feels Western to me. It feels San Francisco.”

About the food, there was no question. Apart from an egg cream, the menu has an unrelenting California aspect: radicchio, endive, multiple lettuces in the salads, lots of grilled meats, duck-breast pizza. At first glance, anyway, it looks like many a California menu. Look closer, though, and you do see an alien style: minimalism.

Grilled vegetables, perhaps zucchini, endive and radicchio, come with no sauce of any kind. They’re nothing but dryish, thin-sliced vegetables with vivid brown grill marks. The steamed vegetables, at least, get a little dab of butter. Crab cakes--not bad ones, by the way, with frivolous carrot slivers in them--come with nothing but half a lemon.

The mixed grill, which is actually your choice of a mixture of fish or a mixture of meats, is just various fish or meats, sliced thin and grilled rather dry (with the exception of a very juicy lamb chop). There’s no sauce to accompany them, nothing but plain and rather tasty spinach that might have a drop of olive oil in it. I have sometimes suspected the food at Manhattan West of being like the free salted peanuts in a bar: a way of promoting thirst.

Once in a while, an entree might come with some steamed chunks of carrot and zucchini, as do the grilled tuna with lime (that’s it: grilled lime-marinated tuna) and the veal with three mushrooms. The veal, however, does have a cream sauce and a tall mound of mushrooms on top of it, though they taste mostly like ordinary supermarket mushrooms.

At least the pizzas and pastas always seem to work, the former having decent, medium-thick crusts--is that New York?--and good mozzarella, the latter pleasant, comforting sauces. The tomato-and-onion sauce on the seafood pasta is actually relatively lively. Tuna with spaghetti is moistened with a tiny bit of what seems a more typical soothing tomato sauce. One of my entertainment industry guests enjoyed his fettuccine with bresaola thoroughly until I thoughtlessly remarked its similarity to creamed chipped beef. He hasn’t forgiven me and I may never work in this town again.

The minimalism reaches its peak, in a way, at dessert time: Just about everything is chocolate. Chocolate cake with chocolate filling, chocolate cake with strawberry filling, some other chocolate cake I forget, white chocolate cheesecake with ladyfinger crust. No chocolate in the fruit tart, though.

I don’t claim to know the needs of the entertainment world, but judging from my guests’ reactions, minimalism is not among them. I’d say Manhattan West might set its sights on the art-student world. It might better service their ideas of flair and ambiance.

Manhattan West, 826 N. La Cienega Blvd.; (213) 652-8800. Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner seven nights. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $38 - $72.