Patina: Composer of Fine Picnics

I would wager that Joachim Splichal has never seen “Oklahoma” and its quintessential box-supper scene. (His picnic dinners are named for European composers, not Rogers and H.). Still, he sure knows how to make hampers that sing.

All of Patina’s three and four-course suppers-to-go are handsomely packed and cleverly thought out. The realm of the senses meets the world of practicality. A four-berry tart with raspberry coulis comes wrapped in fine ribbons, sturdy wedding-favor cellophane and a logo-blazed box. Your lobster salad with Sevruga caviar cream will not leak onto your linen clothes.

Best, the dishes know their place in the great outdoors; they’re not carbon copies of the restaurant plats but selections that travel particularly well.

Order the Wagner Menu and you’ll get an amazing four-and-a-half course meal for $46.50. Everything’s packed separately--crisp herbed wafer-thin toasts, fresh wild greens, a luxe lobster and asparagus salad, moist veal medallions with full-bodied grilled baby vegetables, a fan of goat cheeses, and little packages of sauces and dressings with handwritten labels (they look like a science kit of elixirs).

And everything works: the fragrant walnut oil playing off the lobster, the mega-truffles in their little gilt box dancing so slightly between chocolate pudding and brandy. Want to seduce someone? Order this.

Down the price ladder a notch to $34.50 is the succulent Chopin Menu. Thin slices of marinated salmon are deeply rosy, delicate and rich, almost like good toro from a sushi bar. Then there’s a swell layering of the sweetest discs of mango, the crispest French green beans and morsels of lobster showered with the fruitiest olive oil. A luscious raspberry tart with a sweet cookie crust and a little pot of almond sauce (which tastes like melted marshmallows to me) is the finale.

If there’s one caveat it’s this: Patina’s tart’s crusts are tasty but Thatcheresque--i.e. British and unyielding. Plastic ware just won’t work at this density.

The Mozart, Beethoven and Bach menus, respectively $25.50, $27.50 and $29.50 per person, won’t cast quite the same magic but they each have delightful motifs. The integrity of flavors never gets lost, the produce all tastes just-picked and flash-cooked.

The Mozart Menu is roasted chicken and potato salad--but it’s far from your everyday cold chicken and potato salad. The former is particularly moist with a deep roasted flavor, the latter is sweet, smokey and full of peppery scallions and whole mustard seeds. To top it off you get a croissant chocolate pudding, giddy with a creamy Wild Turkey-laced sauce that tastes like something my Great Aunt Rosie used to drink.

The crisply grilled salmon, generous and quite lovely, on the Beethoven Menu is accompanied with what Patina calls “ratatouille.” It’s not really a stew, though it is the sweetest roasted eggplant I’ve consumed. A potent but pristine tomato, shallot and Nicoise olive sauce completes the dish. For dessert, there’s an apricot tart with a bracing citrus compote.

The Bach Menu didn’t conjure the Brandenburg for me, but rather New Orleans. And I’m talking barometer, not flavor. Everything about this meal spells moist . The rhubarb and strawberry pie with vanilla bean sauce was like eating dessert in a dream. The first course, artichoke and vegetable salad, had moist poached garlic cloves and even moister baby turnips. (The aioli, while delicious, was curiously as thick and grainy as a pulverized potato salad.) Whole little onions accompanying the grilled peppered tuna tournedos were as gleaming and juicy as litchis. But that tuna--three fat slabs surrounded by a crunchy black peppercorn shell--was too moist for me, in the netherworld between raw and cooked.

Everything may have been up to date in Kansas City, but Laurie and Curly, Judd Frye and Aunt Eller didn’t know from box suppers like this.

Patina, 5955 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 467-1108. Fax number (213) 467-1924. Wine available at 25% discount from wine list prices. All major credit cards. Street and valet parking. Order boxes at least one day ahead; 24 - hour cancellation notice required for refund. $25.50-$46.50 per person.