RESTAURANT REVIEW : Palette Cafe: Torrance’s Buried Treasure

There are still bargains around--some of them are just buried. At the bottom of a Torrance mini-mall, past a furniture store and a Radio Shack and right next to a big bowling alley, you can unearth a little treasure called Palette Cafe.

The nondescript name belongs to a sophisticated Franco-Japanese restaurant. Inside it’s a pretty-looking place, a bit larger than you’d expect from the plain exterior, and with the full Franco-Japanese ambience. There are paintings on the walls, a color scheme of black and white with pink accents, the whole precise and geometrical feeling.

The printed menu, which looks at first glance like something from a lunch counter with handwritten additions, lists nothing but salmon, a chicken dish and a steak, augmented with pasta salads at lunch and a short changing list of appetizers and entrees at dinner. In the evening you have the choice of ordering a la carte or taking a prix fixe dinner (spelled “pre fixe”) that includes soup or salad, appetizer, entree and dessert. Let’s talk bargain. That dinner is $18.50, and there’s even a reduced version without appetizer and dessert for $12.50. Top that at a Franco-Japanese restaurant.

You do have to persevere a little, because the appetizers are the least interesting part of the meal. The best I’ve had was “soft smoked salmon,” smoked on the premises. Served over julienne daikon radish and sprinkled with onions and capers, it was indeed soft and had an elegantly mild smoke flavor. It was considerably more interesting than the rather plain marinated salmon, served on the same sort of radish bed but topped with a wisp of sour cream.

To be sure, the appetizers are nothing to get entirely depressed about. A tomato and goat cheese salad is made with a thoroughly ripe peeled tomato; the melange salad is full of the fashionable lettuces. Once there was a very gentle, practically placid, scallop terrine.

But the soups are either subtle as all get-out or just plain austere. I’ve had pumpkin soup with a faint but true pumpkin flavor, but the leek and potato is like half and half sprinkled with chives. The endive and walnut salad is positively severe: endive leaves, a couple of walnuts, chopped tomato, some slices of leek and apparently no dressing.

The real reason to come is the entrees. One night there was a stunning roast lamb with tarragon tomato olive oil sauce. The plate was pretty to look at, as Franco-Japanese plates tend to be, but not in the usual cool, Zen manner. It was full of primary colors, naive and eager, like a Stuart Davis abstraction from the ‘30s.

The chunks of lamb rested on a coyly hidden bed of diced potato. Surrounding them was a pool of meaty sauce with an understated flavor of tarragon and olive oil, and spraying out in various directions were bright green long beans, cauliflower florets in a bit of cream sauce and some mounds of fried sweet peppers and onions. Next to the roasted whole garlic clove was an exquisite little luxury: half a dozen peeled, sweet, lightly poached fava beans.

Another night there was beautiful grilled salmon resting on three long, skinny, partially peeled asparagus spears. Odds and ends of squashes, peppers and carrots were scattered around, and the sauce was a tarragon beurre blanc. I’ve also tried a very tender New York steak with a little bit of sherry sauce with a similar scattering of vegetables, and yellowtail dotted with a hash of sweet pepper and zucchini diced small--one of the many quasi-ratatouilles floating around these days.

The yellowtail was a tiny bit dry, and while another special of sweetbreads and chicken livers in white wine sauce was pleasant, the sweetbreads were not perfectly tender. Basically, though, at these prices you’d never complain.

There are only about four desserts, but they include a wonderful espresso “cheesecake” with the exotically light texture of a mousse. A chocolate mousse cake, by contrast, actually has a cake texture, and it’s plenty chocolatey. The characteristic pastry of this kitchen is a mixed fruit tart (say, blueberries and mangoes or blueberries and apricots) in tender yellow aspic. The apple pie, densely filled with apple slices and practically unsweetened, is for baked apple lovers, not apple pie lovers.

The treasure hunt goes on, but as far as the corner of Hawthorne and Sepulveda is concerned, we’ve already struck pay dirt.

Palette Cafe, 22549 Hawthorne Blvd . , Torrance, (213) 373-7055. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, dinner 5:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Beer and wine. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$52.