RESTAURANT REVIEW : Storming La Bastille for Dinner

There are actual French people sitting down to dinner at La Bastille, chatting in French and looking pleased. Here’s what they’re seeing:

A Disneyesque medieval castle built in the early ‘50s as somebody’s dream home, mostly out of cement. The battlements and machicolations are charming and even sort of realistic, though the ceiling is full of scrawny 2x12s rather than impressive beams, and the roof is ordinary composition shingles.

Outside there’s a medieval dining patio and what must be a medieval goldfish pond, or possibly a medieval wading pool, painted green on the bottom. You can get to the dining room by a main route that winds up a cement-coated hillside or a side path that goes through what looks like a miniature golf windmill hazard.

The French people enjoy it immensely. C’est outrageux, mon dude, they seem to be telling each other. C’est la vraie Californie.

If that’s what they’re saying, they’re right.

There’s certainly nothing more traditional around these parts than a theme restaurant, and La Bastille is in the classic mode, from the wobbliness of the theme itself (Middle Ages or French Revolution?) to the fact that the menu has nothing to do with the theme apart from the names of the dishes.

The food itself is a sort of nouvelle -Continental mix. On the up-to-date side are such appetizers as duck ravioli in a tangy cheese-flavored sauce, carpaccio ( le carpaccio , as the menu has it) and a very good duck and goat cheese salad (there are only slivers of duck, but they’re flavorful) with baby lettuces.

On the other hand--the Continental hand--there is a very old-fashioned lobster feuilletee with French-type cream curry sauce, really not at all bad. The menu lists also a standard-issue onion soup, a rather forceful Caesar salad with Roquefort in the dressing, and crepes stuffed with cold smoked salmon and avocado. The last one is a little like a doughy California roll.

The entrees, however, are systematically Continental. The veal piccata comes from the school of cookery where it’s considered a good idea to swathe veal with with a rich port and Roquefort sauce; that could be bologna under the sauce for all you can tell.

And so it goes. Salmon topped with caviar. Chicken breast stuffed and in practice drenched with goat cheese. Le steak Bastille , served on a tasty bed of softened onions (call it onions smothered with steak) “with three mustards,” which turn out to be: Dijon, whole-seed and . . . American hot-dog mustard.

Altogether the meal seems to go downhill after the appetizers. The chocolate mousse is no mousse but a sort of dense, very chocolatey pudding, a little heavy on the sugar and orange extract. The charlotte is more or less a fresh fruit jellyroll.

Well, come on. You don’t go to a theme restaurant to be impressed with the food--you go for cheerful, mindless entertainment. People have a good time here.

In fact, I think I hear one of the tables full of French people saying as much. Oui, je l’aime, they seem to be saying. C’est tres , tres fun.

La Bastille, 4857 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 962-3455. Dinner 6:30-10:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 6:30-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Beer and wine. Valet parking. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only: $42-$71.