RESTAURANT REVIEW : Food Is Inconsistent, but Young Vintage Needs Chance to Improve With Age

I am at dinner with my friend Kirk at Vintage, a glossy new upscale restaurant in Sherman Oaks. We’ve eaten our appetizers, split a pasta. We’re not in any particular hurry.

Then, as we relax and look around the room from our comfortable green banquettes--at the honeycombs of wine racks and at our fellow diners basking in a penumbra of flattering light--I see it.

It’s there on a tray being carried out of the kitchen, and now set down on a jack several yards from where we’re sitting. Two plates of food are on the tray. Suddenly, I’m struck with fear.

“Uh-oh,” I say. “I think I’m about to get something embarrassing to eat.”

I point. On one of the two plates of food is a large brown rectangle, about the size of a shoe box that’s been halved lengthwise. It rises up off the plate several inches, and its corners exceed the plate’s rim.

“Did you order that?” Kirk asks.

“I don’t know!” I cry. I’d ordered a special of medallions of beef with porcini mushrooms. There wasn’t any mention on the menu of a cubit of excelsior.

I flinch when the waiter sets my plate down.

“It’s OK,” he says. “They’re potatoes.”

On closer inspection, I see that the rectangle is really a tangle of hash browns--hash browns that look as if they’ve been trapped in a big wire cage.

Kirk has mahi-mahi topped with a sauce of sun-dried tomatoes. Framed in the brilliant green of blanched broccoli and pea pods, it’s a pretty and colorful plate of food that looks like an abstract color study. But still, his is, well, a modest plate of food. It’s in no way out of the ordinary. It does not call attention to itself. It does not look like a giant luffa on a dinner plate.

I should mention that my beef medallions, dwarfed as they appear in relation to the potato box, are perfectly cooked and in a good sauce full of bosky, haunting porcinis that remind me of a deep, loamy forest on a rainy day. Still, there are these potatoes to deal with.

They shatter at the touch of my fork. The shards fall through my tines as I try to lift them to my mouth. They are the color of, and taste like, those darker, overcooked potato chips that show up one or two to the bag. I’ve always sort of liked those potato chips, but only as rarities. Having a nearly unlimited amount on my plate, I grow weary. As I prod them into smithereens on my plate, I see another brick of them sail by on a tray toward another unsuspecting soul; that brick, however, is far lighter golden brown than mine. I wonder if the potato box is easier to eat when it’s not overcooked.

Vintage is a very young restaurant--a little more than two months old and working very hard to become what it sets out to be: an ambitious, upscale, exciting new restaurant.

As hard as the staff is trying, the food is often characterized by over-ambition and/or inconsistency. On one visit, I ordered the loin of lamb, a virtuosic, showy entree, in which an excellent, tender lamb loin comes wrapped in a clever web of spinach and pine nuts. My plate had four generous slices of the lamb. My neighbor, who was served half an hour later, received two slices only, the identical size of my slices. “How come you get two and I got four?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But this is a little nouvelle for me.”

A few minutes later I was jealous of him . We’d ordered the same dessert, a dreamy chocolate mousse in raspberry and vanilla sauces. His came with fresh raspberries; mine was sadly bald.

There’s no doubt that the kitchen has an ambitious predilection for complication. Sometimes, the chef hits home. I enjoyed an appetizer of charred tuna in ginger with a smidgen of garlicky potatoes and wild mushrooms. Another appetizer, grilled shrimp with a disc of polenta topped with Gorgonzola and a miniature ratatouille, was rather built , but fun. And there was a great ahi tuna in ginger sauce one night. All the desserts I tried were heavenly: a creme brulee , a chocolate creme brulee , chocolate mousse.

Sometimes, however, the kitchen doesn’t fulfill its own ambitions. When this happens, I find the food both disappointing (because I wanted something better) and irritating (because I’m paying top dollar for it).

At lunch one day, I ordered one of my favorite appetizers: marinated eggplant filled with goat cheese. But the Vintage version of this classic was doctored up with sun-dried tomatoes, which completely overwhelmed all the other flavors. And instead of the promised goat cheese (normally a good, creamy contrast to the eggplant), there was salty, chalky feta.

At dinner one night, the lettuce that came in a salad with hearts of palm and artichoke hearts was limp and actually turning brown.

It would seem at times that the kitchen’s focus is sorely misplaced, that the chef seems more interested in the complications of his constructions than in maintaining a high quality of ingredients and a consistency of presentation.

The service staff is good-natured and trying hard. Bus persons hover. Still, details elude. Cutlery isn’t always replaced when cleared. Sometimes the second--or the third--courses show up before the previous course is consumed. But these are symptoms of a still-young restaurant trying to adjust its own timing and process. With time, and some redirected vigilance in the kitchen, Vintage will settle down into the lovely, comfortable restaurant it aspires to be.

Vintage

15025 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; (818) 995-6575.

Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday to Friday; dinner 5:30 to 11 p.m. Monday to Saturday. Beer and wine. American Express, MasterCard, Visa accepted. Valet parking. Patio dining. Dinner for two, food only, $40 to $65.

Suggested dishes: charred tuna appetizer, $7.50; ahi tuna in ginger sauce, $16.50; desserts, $5.50.