RESTAURANT REVIEW : Palm Court: A Place for Early Eats

There’s a restaurant here? In the bowels of this office building at Santa Monica and Sepulveda boulevards? Oh, right--that marble-swathed, be-planted place with the palm trees, the Palm Court. It’s been there for years.

The good news is that the Palm Court was recently taken over by Parties Plus, the heavy-hitter catering service. The bad news is that it’s only open for breakfast and lunch.

The breakfast menu reflects our national schizophrenia about this meal. It has a bran side ( muesli cereal, walnut bran muffins with wonderfully sharp marmalade, even oatmeal brulee in a caramelized sugar crust) and one consisting mostly of omelets and eggs Benedict. There’s one compromise: omelets can be made low-cholesterol fashion without yolks.

Honorable though bran may be, the eggs are what’s tempting here. I haven’t had eggs so fresh since my mother used to tell me to go next door to Boulanger’s chicken farm and ask for a dozen that had cooled off. The whites are light and flowery, the yolks red-orange and richly flavored.

You sometimes get these great eggs where you didn’t even ask for them. The pupusa , a rather Westside version of this Salvadoran fried dish of masa- breaded cheese (I suspect goat cheese is involved), comes with fried diced potatoes, fresh salsa and perhaps a couple of small but intensely flavored double-yolked fried eggs. The crab-cake hash, actually a single crab cake made with sweet peppers and Parmesan plus the same diced potatoes, is topped by two large (single-yolked) poached eggs. They’re poached in water rather heavily dosed with vinegar, but the whites are a marvel.

There are also some pancakes with healthful-sounding multiple-grain elements on the menu, but watch out. The brown rice pancakes are topped with a sort of walnut and maple custard: dessert for breakfast.

Lunch is an au courant mix of Italian, Oriental and just plain California. Naturally, you can get a lamb sandwich with a thin grilled slice of eggplant and some pickled garlic cloves lying around. Of course you can get a thick, premium-grade hamburger on a rosemary bun with eccentric toppings such as mozzarella and dark purple Kalamata olives. Ah, but can you get a crisply fried catfish in a garlic and citrus sauce with an avant-garde “ polenta “ that’s actually like a corn tortilla fried rock hard? It goes without question.

Trendiness aside, the main attraction of the Palm Court is extraordinarily good ingredients, which show best in the Italian dishes. The polenta of the day, for instance--real polenta this time, and among the lightest in town, so delicate it actually shakes on the plate like jelly--might come mixed with smoky andouille sausage and very ripe tomatoes stewed with garlic.

Likewise, angel-hair pasta comes with tiny Pacific shrimp that are, for once, crunchy-fresh, as well as sun-dried tomatoes and cilantro. The tri-color salad includes unusually juicy endives along with radicchio and arugula, and toast covered with deliriously light melted mozzarella garnishes a salad of cherry tomatoes and tiny yellow pear tomatoes.

However, the chive ravioli stuffed with chevre is remarkable mostly for a sweetish tomato sauce, exotically flavored with orange peel and probably orange juice as well. The sweetness may be attractive, but it cloys after a while.

The requisite Oriental dishes do not seem so successful. One of the prawns in my plate of ramen noodles was a little mushy. The pan-fried Chinese noodles come with rather fatty braised chicken dumplings, and the oyster sauce is a shade salty--not objectionable at first, but hard on the mouth by the end of a big serving.

The pastries are good, as you’d expect from a place that makes the good whole wheat and olive breads you gobble with olive oil while waiting for the entrees. The huge apple pie, probably five inches tall, has a classic fresh American pie crust and comes with intense chocolate ice cream that can also be ordered by itself.

There are other good pastries. Perfect little custard tartlets the size of a silver dollar, each topped with a different kind of berry. A light lemon cake with an ocean of raspberry sauce and whipped cream. For chocolate addicts, a cake built like an A-frame cottage, with a huge triangular slug of chocolate filling.

If only it were open for dinner. If only Boulanger’s chicken farm were still next door, for that matter.

The Palm Court, 11111 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (213) 479-1400. Breakfast 7:30-10 a.m. Monday-Friday, lunch 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday. Full bar. Validated parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa. Breakfast for one, food only, $3-$8.75; lunch for two, food only, $11-$26.