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Soul Mates and Saucy Salads at Votre Sante

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My friend Gracie peruses the personals the way I scan menus. She knows all the clues. And restaurants, she says, are working their way into the pay-by-the-word paragraphs.

“One SJM mentioned Gorky’s,” she told me, “but that didn’t do it for me. I really liked the ad of this Athletic New to L.A. Writer who said he frequents A Votre Sante.”

I said I knew the type. Sante, as we locals call it, serves clean cuisine at the western edge of Brentwood. “I guess he’s into ginger and garlic,” I said.

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Ginger and garlic, tahini and tofu, chicken and cruciferous vegetables are prominent on Sante’s menu. No-dairy/no-oil types, macrobiotic mavens, vegetarians and raw-food diners all find lots to eat here. So can those of us for whom alfalfa sprouts are a rude enigma and tempeh a mystery.

While I stood at the counter ordering dinner-to-go, Gracie was casing the always-crowded joint to figure out if the guy who wrote the ad was there. Would he be eating the eggless artichoke noodles? The hummus quesadilla? The key-lime tofu cake?

Once home, we ate a lemony tahini-less terrific baba ganoosh appetizer ($3.50) dashed with green onions and mint, and a Mediterranean opener ($7.95) that included, among other things, a very green, very fresh tabbouleh and a rich hummus strong on the garlic and chick peas. There was a soul warming creamy corn chowder with tarragon ($3.25 for a large serving) made without dairy products that was the best soup I’ve tasted there. Others--a joyless, no-frills potato and cabbage soup; a zucchini soup heavy on the celery, and a grim broccoli affair--were not welcoming ways to begin.

The Sante garden salad ($5.95) and the house salad ($2.25 and $3.25) are great hills of healthy things. There are several different salad dressings to choose from. (The tahini -parsley sauce has a way of showing up with dish after dish after dish. And the “Italian dressing” turns out to be based on the ubiquitous ginger and soy.) Chicken salad and Mediterranean tuna salad (both $5.95) add sizable portions of protein to the basic vigorously shredded vegetables.

When Sante works best, at least for me, it’s because, simple enough, the food tastes good. Take the chicken asparagus ($8.50): moist, fatless, skinless chicken shared the platter with six fat stalks of asparagus, the whole thing nestled in Sante’s stuffing-like oniony ginger-soy brown rice. The Sante garden pasta ($7.95) works too: wide firm noodles and sprightly vegetables florets and crossties are bathed in a light chile-tinged carrot sauce.

One can always count on Sante for credible, freshly prepared, stir-fried or steamed vegetables that rarely come overcooked. Chicken, tofu or tempeh are added to these dishes on request, for a small extra fee. There’s also a fresh fish of the day. The salmon ($12.95) comes with brown rice, steamed vegetables and choice of salad or soup. It was undoubtably fresh but, unlike the vegetables, it was overcooked.

Lentil croquettes are a wet mass of hippy glump, and the small football of a chicken burrito, for all its mass of rice, beans, chicken and too many sprouts, had the taste of a flannel sheet. “T and T”--a tofu and vegetarian tamale cooked in a carrot/herb sauce--only looked terrible. (Had it dive-bombed into the plate?) It actually had a bracing, peppery flavor and came with a nifty fresh salsa.

Gracie and I shared a couple of those non-dairy, sugar-free desserts. Key-lime tofu pie was a frothy, tender, no-tofu-taste pudding, and pumpkin pie looked authentic but tasted like a weird lemon curd.

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“You know,” Gracie said, “I’m thinking of putting in ad: ‘Seeking steak-and-potatoes man. . . .’ ”

A Votre Sante, 13016 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood. (213) 451-1813. Open Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-10 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m.-10 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m.-9 p.m. All major credit cards accepted. Street parking.

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