RESTAURANT REVIEW : At Orleans, Traditional Cajun-Creole and Surprises Too

We’ve got Louisiana restaurants and we’ve got Louisiana Restaurants.

The first kind is where people reminisce about the Pelican State and the Crescent City, and the sound track is wall-to-wall “Don’t Mess with My Toot-Toot.” You can always trust the gumbo in these places, though not necessarily the jambalaya, for some reason.

Orleans is the other kind. It looks Louisianian enough on the inside--rather like a fine old antebellum home, in fact--and there are primitive paintings on the walls eerily evocative of voodoo and mangrove swamp weirdness. I wouldn’t even swear that I’ve never heard “Toot-Toot” on the sound track, either. The difference is that Orleans is essentially a Westside restaurant working in a Creole-Cajun mode.

Traditional Louisiana cooking, you understand, is emphatically traditional, with the virtues and limitations that follow: firm standards of excellence and a relatively unchanging style. For many, that business about lack of change is a problem. Orleans agrees; its menu actually changes once in a while, and by now only partially resembles the Paul Prudhomme menu it started out with.

This may be why it has retained a loyal clientele, and a rather upscale one too. The place is full of business suits at lunch, even though the corner of National and Bundy is hardly in the middle of business lunch territory. Orleans understands that for these people, you can’t get by without providing little surprises every so often.

Take, for instance, a recent special appetizer, Creole lamb curry. Now, Louisiana is not what you call curry country. Prudhomme’s is one of the few Louisiana cookbooks that even provides a curry, and his version is basically the usual European idea of a curry (that is, one with apples and raisins in it), plus pecans and more hot peppers. Orleans does much the same, but also adds smoky Louisiana sausage. And there’s a pleasing and unexpected logic to the combination.

Or take the fact that Orleans has a pasta of the day. New Orleans doesn’t seem to have made much of the possibilities of pasta until Prudhomme, but the Westside does need its pasta of the day. It might be spinach fettuccine with shrimp and crayfish in a cream sauce mixed with Creole whole-seed mustard, extremely rich and only slightly mustardy.

There are still a lot of unreconstructed Prudhommisms on the menu. Cajun popcorn, of course. Here it’s the Cajun popcorn of the day, meaning one day it might be deep-fried shrimp or crayfish, but another day it might be alligator.

There’s blackened fish, of course, though Orleans sometimes goes off on its own tangent. They’ll blacken salmon, of all unexpected fish, and top it with a “pesto” sauce that is actually another intensely rich Louisiana cream sauce. It is quite good, but about 180 degrees away from what most people expect a blackened fish to be.

One of Orleans’ triumphs is pirogue. Prudhomme himself makes these as little canoes of eggplant with a filling riding on top. But Orleans contrives a sort of mug carved out of an eggplant, a sort of vegetable tower, filled with meat and swimming in a damningly rich reduced cream sauce.

Of course there’s a gumbo of the day, always with a properly swampy brown roux sauce, soupy rather than stew-like, and usually a bit hotter than it seems at first bite. Of course there’s jambalaya, with a dark-red peppery sauce. For that matter, the pasta of the day is often a jambalaya with fettuccine in place of rice, inevitably named “pastalaya.”

One of the latest additions to the menu happens to be a Louisiana specialty of quite ancient origins. Maquechoux (pronounced “mock shoe”) is said to be a dish the Cajuns learned from the Choctaw Indians. It is a sort of stew made from chicken breast and corn in a peppery cream sauce. At Orleans it is served as a rich appetizer.

Louisiana cooking offers a lot, but also demands a lot, and after one of these meals it can be a little hard to face dessert. Still, the deed must be done. A couple of chocolate cakes are usually to be found, rather on the sweet side, and maybe a sweet potato pecan pie cooked dark and luscious. The best of them is usually the unusually moist bread pudding, which has pecans and of course a lot of whipped cream on top.

There are Louisiana restaurants and there are Louisiana Restaurants. Orleans is the latter, and about the best of its kind.

Recommended dishes: pirogue, $7; maquechoux, $6; pastalaya, $16; bread pudding, $2.95.

Orleans, 11705 National Blvd., West Los Angeles (213) 479-4187. Open for lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Saturday, for dinner daily from 5:30 to 10:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. All major cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $42 to $63.