RESTAURANT REVIEW : At La Cave, You Get Spice With the Food

Technically, it’s Lambada Night, but Spice has been taken over for a Latin beauty pageant. Instead of dancing, people are sitting at tables and drinking in the swimsuit event, the ball gown event and the questions to elicit poise. Instead of music, there are explosions of partisan applause.

That’s OK, because we’re here for the food, not for the Forbidden Dance. Technically, we aren’t even at Spice. However, Spice Night Club and La Cave Restaurant are two sides of a single coin; dinner at La Cave gives admission to the club, and while eating you can preview the Spice action through a window.

Over at the next table, three young women in straw hats are taking advantage of this exact privilege, nibbling on appetizers as they desultorily point out flaws in the beauty contestants. At another table, four people are introducing themselves and saying how amused they are by the fact that they’re all lawyers. A man in a sharp Italian suit approaches a third table, apparently to discuss some business deal involving an embroidered jacket. Welcome to Hollywood, as we say.

OK, so La Cave is in a rock nightclub, and the walls are painted with eerie cracks to suggest a cave, and when there’s no beauty contest the view through the window is basically the usual rock-club vista of people standing around and squinting at lasers. Still, the food is better than you expect for a rock ‘n’ roll setting. It’s not always top-drawer--none of the five set menus are of equal quality all the way through. But there are quite decent things here.

The French Menu, which starts out with a quite ordinary canned tuna salad nicoise, continues with very good duck a l’orange-- the duck good and crisp, the orange sauce not oversweet. The dessert is quite passable: crepes filled with white chocolate in a tiny bit of orange sauce.

The so-called Aphrodisiac Dinner starts better with a concentrated brown lobster bisque but moves on to a low-key main course of fried sweetbreads with the same spaghetti and vegetables that accompany all the entrees. The dessert is an iceberg of whipped egg white floating on a sea of custard sauce, essentially that old-timer Floating Island under the presumably aphrodisiac name “aphrodith.”

The Exotic Dinner might be the best. It starts with a basic multiple-greens salad laced with duck meat and goes on to excellent shrimp curry with fresh pineapple and a curry sauce considerably enriched with coconut milk. The dessert is a somewhat tart passion-fruit ice that is perfectly good in itself, though hard to take if you’ve been sampling any of the other desserts.

The Spa Dinner suffers from a dreary salad in a sort of orange-flavored vinaigrette and a wholesome dessert of fruit that incomprehensibly seems to include canned peaches, but the entree is quite a success: salmon topped with pesto sauce. The Italian dinner is the least interesting with its unimpressive Caesar salad, perfunctory chicken scaloppine with about six caper buds, and bowl of orange slices and pineapple chunks for dessert.

There are also a couple of things you can order a la carte, such as an appetizer of asparagus wrapped in prosciutto with a decent raw tomato salsa, or grilled shrimp with vegetables. The dessert list is fairly long, though essentially short on surprises.

So it’s not exactly Spago or Citrus. Behold and marvel anyway. In these times, even those who party hearty are getting particular about their dining.

La Cave, 7070 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. (213) 460-7070. Open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday, 7 p.m. to midnight. Full bar. Valet parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $38-$55.