Take-Out Treats From Trumps

Refinement doesn’t come cheap. But what’s 20 bucks for a plate full of crackling tender Chinese roast duck and pickled pumpkin that will knock your socks off? An $8 Caesar salad with a thick dressing as garlicky as the devil? Or a $6 slab of celestial bread pudding?

This is the stuff of the take-out wing of Michael Roberts’ restaurant, Trumps. It may be a little-known sideline of the restaurant’s but it’s no afterthought. Witness the printed gummed labels and stylish plastic bags. What comes in those bags is also well considered. Roberts and his staff balance sauces, juxtapose ingredients and layer flavors with complex finesse and wit.

Only one of the dishes I tried--an inscrutable papaya, avocado and grapefruit salad--remained an intellectual exercise. And some of the dishes are best eaten right at the restaurant: The ping-ponging tastes of the Brie-and-grape quesadilla with sweet pea guacamole, nice as they are, often don’t survive the drive home. And Trump’s plantains--pounded thin like scaloppine and topped with caviar, sour cream and black beans--really need to jump right from frying pan onto the plate.

But even a slightly pooped take-out dish from Trumps can be delicious: The crisp-crusted pasta pancake, for instance, might get un peu congealed en route, but it comes with juicy swordfish and an intensely wonderful olive-and-tomato sauce.

The best dishes to try are those that Roberts made famous--that aforementioned duck, for example, is a perfectly orchestrated little meal at home. And Roberts’ signature tamales, packed with pimento and fresh corn, are so full-bodied they actually taste ripe .

Some of the offerings are more clear-cut standards. Try the $12 grilled-vegetable plate with fennel, turnips, squash, onions, peppers and reed-thin eggplant. Mixed greens with a Chinese mustard vinaigrette is refreshing. There’s also a good salad of white beans, mache, blue cheese and pancetta. Soups change daily.

An appetizer of grilled garlic shrimp, available at dinner, comes with a velvety eggy lemon brew. Warm scallop salad, available at lunch, comes with loads of sweet scallops, toro, shiitake mushrooms, pungent greens and a flash of darkly Oriental bacon vinaigrette.

A pressed chicken, bacon, Brie and sweet onion sandwich, the whole melted and enclosed within a grilled baguette shell, is served with a thick honey-Chinese mustard dressing and flint-crisp match-stick potatoes. Twelve dollars--and what a lunch.

A mass of tender chicken, juicy fish steaks and sweet baby clams arrives with a pile of the classiest corn cakes you’ve seen, the whole wrapped with a delicate thin saffron cream sauce. Available at dinner for $23, it’s as succulent and gleaming yellow as a Bonnard.

To end your meal, there’s mango tarte tatin , an airy, puff-paste variant that’s as large as a child’s baseball glove. But I’d head straight for the bread-and-butter pudding, a double decker vanilla cream custard-French toasty concoction shot through with drunken prunes. After all, what’s $6 for dessert heaven?

Trumps to Go!, 8764 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (213) 855-1480. Open seven days. Major credit cards accepted. Valet parking.