A Bit of New Orleans in a Mini-Mall

Ole’s Louisiana Oyster Loaf, 1111 W. Pacific Coast Highway, Harbor City. (213) 539-7591. Open for lunch Monday through Saturday, for dinner until 9 Friday and Saturday. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. No credit cards accepted.

Cosmopolitan Harbor City. There’s a phrase you rarely hear on the Westside, where the very name Harbor City is liable to draw a big blank.

But if Westsiders got down around Torrance and Lomita more, they’d notice a store for fans of Brazilian soccer teams and close by, right up Pacific Coast Highway from it, they’d find Ole’s Oyster Loaf, a little bit of New Orleans in a mini-mall. (Rather, a little bit of St. Augustine High, to judge from all the displaced St. Aug homeboys who hang out there.)

Lunch is mostly sandwiches, such as the oyster loaf of the name: fried oysters on a toasted French roll with pickles. Even better is the shrimp loaf made with fresh breaded shrimp. At dinner there’s a lot of fried seafood, above all the Super Combo, which is snapper, catfish, shrimp and oysters, served with dirty rice (hot link sausage and green onion in it), a jambalaya that’s a lot like red beans and rice and those terrific fried cornmeal balls called hush puppies.

And then there’s gumbo, a thin, astringent broth filled with chicken, crab and two kinds of link sausage. It’s somebody’s oddball personal version, because there’s neither okra nor sassafras leaf in it, but it has the true Louisiana aroma. For that matter, the barbecued shrimp are a little unusual, too: actually grilled and dipped in barbecue sauce rather than sauteed in butter, which is the usual way.

They have pound cake and homemade praline candies for sale, but the essential dessert is the brick-like bread pudding, a dense cube practically three inches on a side that seems to weigh a full pound, heavy with butter and full of lemon and vanilla. Another essential thing is iced tea, which you apparently have to be born Southern to do right.

So I ask you: What does a burg have to do around here to get considered cosmopolitan?

Recommended dishes: hush puppies, $1.60; shrimp loaf, $4.95; BBQ shrimp, $10.50; bread pudding, $1.50.