RESTAURANT REVIEW : San Pedro’s Cafe Noir: Food--and Wit and Wisdom Too

Cafe Noir is a clever place, starting with the name--”black coffee” (it’s a coffee-bean shop as well as a cafe). Cunning pyramidal tents, mottled in pink and gray, hang from its ceiling. And the tiny menu is sometimes very, very clever. On occasion, it has offered a choice of green salad or a soup of pureed lettuces.

In what is either the cream of the jest or a reckless gamble, however, it has stuck itself in an isolated shopping mall in San Pedro--the northernmost one of a string of malls that lie in the shadow of Rancho Palos Verdes. The neighborhood had better like Cafe Noir, because the outside world rarely wanders down here.

Physically, Cafe Noir is a spacious place in the traditional gleaming white and black of coffee-bean shops, with a display kitchen along the back wall. The effect is informal and really quite pleasant, though something is going to have to be done about the glare at sunset. And of course you can get good coffee at Cafe Noir, to say nothing of apricot-flavored tea.

The ultra-eclectic menu changes on some unclear basis. The first time I went, the word June was written in one corner; the next time, the dishes had changed very slightly and the menu no longer committed itself to a month. One thing’s sure: This is not shopping-mall stuff.

To start, there are those soup-or-salad greens: The green salad is the classic California mixture of fresh baby lettuces in a tarragon vinaigrette. The mixed-green soup is butter lettuce, iceberg lettuce, romaine and spinach, pureed and mixed with stock; it has a pretty, light-green color flecked with darker green, and a flavor like very mild cream of spinach. The idea is not insane, either--people used to cook lettuces all the time, and a crouton topped with blue cheese handles all the desire for strong flavors you might have.

There is also a sort of carpaccio of cured salmon on the appetizer list, sprinkled with chopped endive and candied lemon zest. I really prefer the scallops with cucumber noodles, though. These are fresh, barely cooked sea scallops in a butter sauce enlivened with salty Chinese fermented black beans. Cucumber noodles means that julienned cucumber is sauteed and mixed with tomato, garlic and Parmesan as if it were pasta; it has a squishy texture and a sweet flavor faintly like squash, and it’s really pretty enjoyable.

The New York steak comes with zucchini noodles, which are similar, and so-called shoestring potatoes, which are really just thinnish French fries, though surprisingly good. The steak itself is fried quite brown on the surface, probably deep-fried, producing a curious effect a little like pork chops. It comes with some meaty veal glaze and an unnecessary pat of herb butter.

This kitchen enjoys undercooking things, which means it does wonders with fish. There is an excellent swordfish, moist and just barely cooked, that is served with mushrooms and zucchini wrapped with Italian unsmoked bacon and grilled on little bamboo skewers (the rich, mild sauce is a sort of mayonnaise). Salmon tournedos is a big round cut of salmon, easily 3 inches high, which has an inexplicably luscious flavor, probably a matter of not drying out in cooking. It comes with a little bit of tomato stewed with fresh ginger and some grilled Japanese eggplant with rich soy sauce.

A double-ribbed pork chop is huge, topped with mixed julienne vegetables and surrounded with an orange peel-flavored sauce. Here the taste for the underdone is Cafe Noir’s undoing, because the sliced potato served with it is provocatively undercooked, so chewy you’d think it was jicama. The texture is novel, but let’s be serious: Underdone potato has scarcely any flavor.

The same nearly raw potatoes make problems for the grilled chicken breast, which has the additional handicap of a tapenade topping (basically an olive puree) that is scarcely tasteable and a tomato coulis sauce that doesn’t amount to much more than an orange color on the plate.

There are a couple of pastas, including a quite good fusion-cuisine model flavored with olive oil, soy sauce, green onions and fried shiitake mushrooms. The pizzette are simple but quite good thin-crust pizzas, topped with either Gorgonzola and prosciutto or a mixture of four loud Italian cheeses.

Dessert has a pleasantly homemade aspect. The almond-coated carrot cake is not the loose-textured, mile-high commercial type, and the chocolate mousse has the cocoa-heavy flavor of many a home mousse. Fresh fruit, however, tends to get some exotic addition like mango puree.

Clever, all devilishly clever. I hope Cafe Noir’s whimsy about where to locate itself doesn’t turn out too clever for its own good.

Cafe Noir, 28098 S. Western Ave., San Pedro, (213) 832-9860. Lunch and dinner, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; lunch 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday-Monday. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, food only: $29-$44.