Restaurant Review : <i> Mere et Pere </i> Cooking Goes Down Well at Bev Center’s La Rotisserie

Outside La Rotisserie stands a statue of a generic French chef holding the menu of the day. It’s the same statue of a plump generic chef (I think of him as Jean-Paul-Pierre) you often see in France, mostly in front of cornball restaurants you wouldn’t go into. But that’s France, and this is the Beverly Center, and you may very well want to eat at La Rotisserie, statue and all.

It’s a mall restaurant, of course, a bright little place in peach and aqua with plenty of mirrors and flowers, and of course a prominent rotisserie at the back. It’s right next to the elevator on the Beverly Center’s top floor, convenient to the multiplex theater. What you’d expect for some quick shopping food, in short.

La Rotisserie’s food may be light enough for shopping expedition purposes, but it’s actually pretty unusual for our part of the world. We’ve got plenty of French haute cuisine in Los Angeles, mixed in varying degrees with nouvelle cuisine; we’ve got Franco-Californian, Franco-Japanese and Franco-Mexican restaurants. What’s hard to find around here is simple French cooking done well, because a lot of our little mom-and-pop French restaurants are surprisingly dreary.

Take, for instance, La Rotisserie’s roast chicken. It’s nicely cooked, though most little French places can manage that. The sauce that comes with it, though, is worlds removed from the clumsy sauces at a lot of mere et pere places. It’s not watery or awkwardly flavored, just a rich, slightly tart sauce of reduced cream and meat juices, usually flavored with green peppercorns, and it has the true French note of offhandedly elegant sensuality.

The rotisseried duck has an orange sauce that is a bit austere by our Chinese-influenced standards, more tart than sweet. The other things cooked on the rotisserie, though, have cream sauces much like the chicken. The beef and lamb are cooked rather rare, and the meat tends to be the same light pink color all the way through and to have a mild and sweet flavor, rather than a browned flavor.

Not everything is rotisseried. Not the fish of the day, for instance. It’s sauteed and usually served with a cream sauce (there’s a good chance of more green peppercorns) and topped with a hash of fried leeks. There’s even a grilled steak, an entrecote marchand de vins , to be precise. You can get the sauce marchand de vins on the side if you prefer: butter, shallots and young red wine cooked down to a tart, aromatic, purplish mush.

The soups are particularly good here. The soup of the day is likely to be a little more unusual, or maybe just lighter, than it sounds. For instance, the lentil soup is not the usual dense lentil porridge but a medium-thin soup tasting largely of tomato. Beef barley is a real winner, with lots of cream in it, meaty and creamy and soft.

The appetizers include sliced cantaloupe in port wine and a light and smooth liver pate , but the standout is escargots. Several snails are mixed with sliced mushrooms, but instead of garlic and butter, they come in garlic and olive oil.

Apart from the attractions of olive oil from a health standpoint, there’s nothing gastronomically odd about that. With all their garlic, escargots a la bourguignonne really seem more like Provencal than Burgundian cooking and work fine with olive oil. In fact, the current theory among food historians is that butter originally entered the recipe primarily as a preservative--once a batch of snails was cooked they could be stuffed back in their shells and neatly sealed with garlic butter. This was an important consideration for restaurants before the refrigerator, but we don’t have to be bound by it now.

In a tiny operation like this it’s not surprising that there are only a few desserts. There’s a cocoa-flavored chocolate mousse ; there are crepes Suzette , with a chaste, orange-liqueur sauce a little reminiscent of the duck sauce. Best of all, there’s an excellent tarte tatin, made, as the menu notes, by the chef’s wife. This is the real thing, the apples cooked until they’re caramelized and as soft as butter.

Not everything is exactly the real thing, I must say. At lunch, chicken, beef and lamb are available not only as platters a la francaise , with fried potatoes, but as that old Los Angeles tradition, “French dip” sandwiches. But hey, why not? You want a French dip, try the sign of Chef Jean-Paul-Pierre.

Recommended dishes: escargots, $5.95; quarter rotisseried chicken, $6.95; entrecote marchand de vins, $13.95; tarte tatin, $4.95.

La Rotisserie, the Beverly Center, at Third Street and La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles. (213) 657-0404. Open daily for lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Parking available. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $28 to $56.