RESTAURANTS : For $1.95 Here’s an All-American Chicken Pie That Is Awfully Hard to Beat

Chicken pie is one of the great American dishes. A lot of chefs add vegetables like potatoes, onions, carrots and peas to the mixture of chicken and gravy, but not Otto Hasselbarth. He likes to stick to basics.

Hasselbarth owns La Palma Chicken Pie Shop and Restaurant, a modest coffeeshop/bakery with a large, loyal following. The pie shop has been in business nearly 35 years. Still, the place is easy to miss: I drove by it three times before finally spotting it.

The owner is a native of Germany, but his recipes are definitely all-American (he has operated the restaurant for almost 20 years). I rate this as one of the best local places to eat meat loaf, pan-fried chicken or liver and onions. Hasselbarth’s chicken pie, incidentally --a buttery, flying saucer-shaped disc crammed with shredded chicken--costs precisely $1.95.

You enter La Palma though the pleasant, unglamorous bakery section, where racks of cookies and trays of layer cakes line a large glass display case. Look straight back to the work area and you see them: two huge, yellowish mounds of dough, Hasselbarth’s secret concoction.

Why are the mounds so yellow? The chef says he adds “egg shade” food coloring to “make the dough a more appetizing color.” This dough is used for all the shop’s pies--from chicken to rhubarb. Despite its strange color, it bakes up flaky and crusty.

The coffee shop is a simple, rather darkish room with a ‘30s-style counter and vinyl booths with Formica table tops. Don’t expect anything more than coffee shop service here: The servers barely have time to look you in the eye as they swoop the food over to your table.

It’s the chicken pie that everybody comes for anyway. Hasselbarth says people go wild for it because each pie is “over 80% filling.” The pie weighs about nine ounces and comes on a plate completely covered with a bright yellow gravy. I personally think all this yellow is unappetizing, but the pie tastes great. You’ll probably eat it all.

Dinners come with both soup and salad. They are brought together, and make for an imposing start. Soups are invariably the thick, stick-to-the-ribs sort--barley bean, vegetable beef and the ever present chicken noodle, which is more like a casserole: the broth makes up less than 20% of the bowl’s contents. Salads, served on ordinary plastic plates, come with dressings (blue cheese, French and thousand island) that are all homemade and that taste it. Garlic croutons top the salads, unless you ask to have them left off.

I had heard that the best dinner the restaurant serves is pan-fried chicken, which is slow-cooked in an iron skillet in the late afternoon. (It is not available at lunch.) I saw the chicken being eaten at several tables, but that’s as close as I got. On two occasions, the waitress informed me that the chicken had just sold out for the evening--it was shortly after 6 p.m. I can report that the half chicken looks moist and golden brown. But if you want to try it yourself, plan on an early, early dinner.

Luckily, I was able to console myself with lightly floured chicken-fried steak (without breading) in a super rich cream gravy. Another time I had the baked meat loaf--a wonderful, grainy, crumbly version blanketed in a good brown gravy. Hasselbarth says he got his meat loaf recipe from an Army cookbook, but I doubt that meat loaf ever tasted this good on any base. “The secret,” Hasselbarth says, “is just good meat and fresh vegetables.”

There were disappointments, however. The special dinner steak (at $6.50, the most expensive thing on the menu) definitely could have been better. The meat was a flavorful but stringy New York cut which had been griddled--one of the lesser ways to bring flavor out of beef. The combination fish plate with breaded scallops, sole and cod was just plain awful. The fish were woefully overcooked and only the scallops tasted like they should. A good baked potato with a trencherman cheese sauce accompanies all dinners.

There’s good news when you get to dessert. They’re included with all dinners, for one thing. Second, almost all of them are good. (This is a bakery, remember.) Fruit pies (apple, rhubarb, and peach) are all appealing, but I liked the cakes best. Burnt almond cake would be my No. 1 choice: It’s a light white cake with a creamy frosting made of pulverized nuts in a butter cream base.

The house cheesecake, untopped, comes in individual tart-sized pans with a graham cracker crust. It’s nearly faultless. And an excellent, springy chocolate cake has a fudgy frosting and a slight, baking powder aftertaste that I really like. Take one home. A whole cake is only $3.

La Palma Chicken Pie Shop and Restaurant is inexpensive. Lunches are $2.75 to $4.55. Dinners are $3.75 to $6.50.

LA PALMA CHICKEN PIE SHOP AND RESTAURANT

928 N. Euclid St., Anaheim

(714) 533-2021

Open Monday through Saturday 10:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Bakery opens at 9 a.m.

Cash or personal checks only