RESTAURANT REVIEW

Is there still anybody out there planning to open any more diners? If so, pay attention to the Daily Grill’s recipe.

First, make your place as old-fashioned as you please, but be sure it’s easy to take. You can do without garish soda pop collectibles. You can do very, very well without a jukebox. Above all, put some effort into your traditional dishes. They’re food, not a design motif.

In short, if you’re going to serve old-fashioned American food, it’s ridiculous to tart it up as the latest thing. You should act as if this kind of cooking is always going to be around, which it probably is, and then really do it. The Diner Revival was the latest thing for a little while and then ran out of wind, but the Daily Grill has survived in fine style. In fact, there’s now a second Daily Grill, across the street from the Beverly Center.

Granted, both Daily Grills are technically more like traditional businessmen’s lunch places than diners.

The first Daily Grill, on San Vicente in Brentwood, seemed a scaled-down version of the owners’ Grill on the Alley, which had opened in Beverly Hills about 10 years ago as a consciously old-fashioned steak and chop house in the face of the madness of those times: the little things in beurre blanc sauce.

The new Daily Grill, which is actually larger than the first one, also has a solid, old-fashioned look: wooden booths, Venetian blinds, black and white floor tiles, huge ceiling lamps. The menu is a plain, dense list with no italicized explanations of anything, and the whole enterprise has a no-nonsense air of shoving out food at a snappy urban rate.

And so it’s packed. The Daily Grill doesn’t even take reservations, except for one private room. If you go, expect to stand around a short while.

It’s mostly traditional stuff, for sure: short ribs, liver with bacon and onions, steaks and chops and so on. You can even get Joe’s special, that traditional San Francisco dish of ground beef, spinach and eggs. This dish is not exactly a Mt. Everest of culinary thinking, perhaps, but the Daily Grill lavishes very good ground beef on it, better than what you usually find in San Francisco restaurants. The same beef shows up, of course, in the Daily Grill’s thick hamburgers.

On the other hand, tradition is stretched a bit here and there. With your burger they give you Grey Poupon mustard. For a quarter extra, you can get your broiled chicken with garlic, or even extra garlic, and the dose of garlic in the garlic cheese bread is probably too much for quite a few people. The skirt steak is said to have experienced a nontraditional marinade of soy sauce, rice vinegar and pineapple. It’s certainly tender and has a very rich flavor.

The only hash on the menu is made with chicken, but it is not the anemic health-conscious dish you might imagine. The pieces of chicken breast, potato and onion have the sweetness and powerful aroma that come of being fried very, very brown. This is a chicken hash for tough guys, and one of the best dishes on the menu.

The salads are utterly conventional: Cobb, Caesar, hearts of romaine or iceberg lettuce, tomato and onion. The Caesar is the best, and has one of the most robust Caesar dressings around (though pretty easy on the anchovies). The only flaw in it is the tiny, very tough, croutons.

Vegetables take the traditional back seat. Any vegetable except the tree-sized chunk of broccoli that accompanies most entrees is a side dish. About half the vegetables are potatoes of one style or another. The fresh shoestring potatoes (a slight misnomer; they’re really more like sandal thongs) are better than the French fries, especially if you ask for them extra crisp.

The fried onions are very good, the sort that are simply sprinkled with flour rather than done with batter. This makes it all the odder that delicate fish such as sand dabs get a crude covering of batter. The sand dabs are the one real disappointment on this menu.

Among the desserts, the most elegant is tapioca pie with a cheesecake-type sour cream frosting. Several things come with a thick, faintly butterscotch-like fudge sauce. You can get a huge cheesecake buried under a lava flow of fudge, a slightly depraved but irresistible choice. The fudge brownie is perhaps excessively traditional: a low-rise chocolate cookie, rather dry. Put enough fudge sauce on it, though, and it will seem like dessert.

I hope the diner crowd has been taking notes.

Suggested dishes: small Caesar salad, $5.50; chicken hash, $7.75; skirt steak, $13.75; tapioca pie, $4; hot fudge cheesecake, $5.50.

Daily Grill, 100 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 659-3100 (no reservations except for private room). Open for lunch and dinner daily from 11 a.m. (10 a.m. Sundays); weekend brunch. Beer and wine. Validated parking in the Beverly Connection lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $17.50 to $61.