RESTAURANT REVIEW : Singing a Song of Praise for for Bernadette’s

La Cuisine de Bernadette is not a sequel to “The Song of Bernadette,” the ‘40s film classic starring Jennifer Jones. That Bernadette was into singing. This Bernadette loves to cook.

Her full name is Bernadette Millet, and La Cuisine de Bernadette has been open one year this week. Millet was born in Lyon and studied cooking with the legendary Jean Troisgros, so her credentials are pretty solid. In fact, her peers have just elected her president of Club Culinaire of Southern California, an organization for local French chefs. Impressive, n’est-ce pas?

This chef’s food--country French and bistro fare--is pretty impressive as well. She works hard at her craft, extruding pastas, choosing fish for the bouillabaisse and experimenting with sausages for her sumptuous cassoulet.

She doesn’t experiment with much more than sausages, though. Most of Bernadette’s cooking is tried and true. Minceur and Oriental, two schools that influence celebrity chefs from the Latin Quarter to Melrose Avenue, are absent from this kitchen. Is avant-garde style your thing? You’ll find it about 20 miles down the freeway.

Meanwhile, turn onto a citified stretch of Calabasas Road and prepare yourself for a restaurant that I would call comfortably not glamorous.

It’s almost exactly what you’d imagine a suburban (or exurban) French restaurant to be: white stucco walls, floral print tablecloths, country-style bistro chairs with wooden backs and upholstered cushions, an antique buffet centerpiece. With its airy, slightly staid elegance, it’s exactly the type of room you’d choose to unwind in after a long commute from the heart of the city. (Unless Piaf, who warbles softly in the background all evening long, gets you all weepy and stuff.)

Unwind just enough to open the menu, and you’ll probably notice its almost magnetic allure. Somehow, most of these simple dishes look remarkably appetizing in print. Talky waiters will come by and recite a long list of daily specials, but you may not be listening. The menu has your rapt attention.

All the soups at the top of the page make delightful starters. Soupe de carottes, a full-bodied, carroty-orange broth, has a scent as natural as a farmer’s field. Vichyssoise, served cold, is a smooth, complex stock flavored with a sensible amount of cream, skillfully counterpointed by leek and potato. There’s also a hearty onion soup and a soup of the day.

Hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, integral elements of a country French dinner, are well-chosen and well-prepared. Escargots a la Bourguignonne, despite the hard-to-manage plastic snail shells (I had to dig at them mercilessly with my cocktail fork), are terrific here: buttery, garlicky and full of chopped parsley. Salade de fromage de chevre, the familiar warm goat cheese salad, gets a fresh treatment with a bed of greens bathed in a subtle tarragon vinaigrette, and big, soft rounds of cheese melting into crisp toasts.

But the star dish is terrine maison, a pate that competes with any I’ve eaten anywhere. It’s a rich, grainy mixture of pork and a little duck liver mingled with heaps of chopped pistachio, molded en gelee into an artful mound. The aspic is so good my table fought over it.

Salads and pastas should be treated as main courses here. Warm chicken salad is just huge; fresh, tender chicken with tomato, basil, capers and a three-vinegar sauce. The pastas are made fresh daily and served bistro-style on large platters, though of course they are French in spirit only. Pistou, a Provencal version of pesto, is thick with pine nuts and positively dripping with pine-green olive oil.

Pasta a la Bernadette is fettucine with smoked and fresh salmon, avocado, tomato and a light cream sauce. This is about the closest this menu comes to nouvelle cuisine.

There are several standard entrees ranging from lotte Casablanca to monkfish with couscous to filet au poivre, a New York steak in the classic black peppercorn sauce. But the real draws among the entrees are the four dishes labeled “les specialites de Bernadette.” They are really hard to resist.

Lovers of cassoulet, the heavy white bean casserole of France’s bountiful Southwest, will not be let down by this interpretation. Millet serves a rather soupy cassoulet in an enormous earthenware bowl, chock full of confit de canard, stewed lamb and a wonderful, spicy sausage that she gets from San Francisco. She swears the sausage tastes exactly like her favorite one from Toulouse.

For her bouillabaisse, she prepares a thick seafood stock and then adds monkfish, snapper, sea bass, mussels and clams, making it one of the Los Angeles area’s most uncompromisingly authentic. When she can get it fresh, she even puts in rockfish. The other specialties, raspberry duck and truffled sweetbreads, look every bit as wonderful.

Bernadette is not a patissiere , but she does prepare a few good desserts. There is tarte tatin (naturellement), the well-known caramelized apple pie, and a chocolate-enrobed chocolate mousse, and crepes with fresh fruit and whipped cream.

Bravo, Bernadette. You may not have your own song, but that won’t stop anyone from singing your praises.

Recommended dishes: soupe de carottes, $3.95; terrine maison de pistaches, $5.95; salade tiede de poulet, $10.95; cassoulet, $17.95; bouillabaisse, $18.95.