RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Bittersweet Tangerine: Prices Rise as Night Falls

Tangerine is an arty place. For one thing, it’s a block east of the Los Angeles County Art Museum. And the first thing one encounters upon entering the restaurant is art . . . very big art.

The first time I went to Tangerine it was lunchtime. Almost all the tables were filled, mostly with people from nearby offices, shops and museums. I found my friend, Tom, already seated in his plastic chair. He greeted me with a deep look and a single word: “Ando.” It was clearly a clue.

I looked around the very large, rectangular dining room. Hanging on Tangerine’s very high white walls, under its black ceiling and exposed ducts and girders, there were big paintings. Some were of cartoony faces in bright colors, but these were overshadowed by some really huge abstract paintings. One was in a pointy, swirly shape; one was in the shape of a gargantuan bow-tie; and one was conventionally rectangular and big as a billboard.

They were very loud. All the abstractions were made with a lot of paint, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of paint, most of which was metallic. There was, in fact, so much paint that the canvas surfaces had cracked in places to look like metallic mud flats, acres of them. I couldn’t help but think it’s a good thing paintings can’t literally jump off the walls at people because here at Tangerine, one wouldn’t survive the incident.

“Ando” was still a mystery, so I checked out the menu. On it were a lot of eclectic Pacific Rim dishes--pastas, satays, salsas, teriyakis and a Caesar salad.

We started with some vegetable rolls, finger-sized, deep-fried packets that looked pretty unimpressive, but tasted quite good. They got even better when dipped in the plum and pink peppercorn sauce that came with them. We also had some juicy and tasty chicken satay with a rich peanut sauce. Tom had the Thai salad special, spicy sliced steak on a bed of great varied greens, and I had the special ravioli, large plump pillows of pasta stuffed with a pleasantly bland ground chicken in a lovely soft tomato sauce. When we ordered coffee, the waiter did such a good selling job we ended up getting two desserts--and an additional $11 on our bill. The raspberry cheesecake was light and creamy in an unexpectedly pleasurable manner. The apple tart in caramel sauce was just OK. Our bill, with tip, for this larger-than-average lunch, came to just under $50. Still, no “Ando.”

A few days later, I returned to Tangerine for dinner, after calling well in advance for reservations. As it turned out, reservations weren’t all that necessary. Tangerine was much quieter than it had been for lunch.

At lunch, Tangerine’s food was imaginative and fun, if a bit high-priced. At dinner, the prices went higher. Frankly, they were too high for the casual kind of place Tangerine aspires to be. (“Jeans are encouraged,” I was told on the phone, after a friend insisted I ask about the dress code at dinner.) A New York steak at lunch was $14.50; at dinner it was $19. And it wasn’t $4.50 better, either. The creme brulee we had for dessert was worth $5.50. But this kind of pricing puts Tangerine smack in the ranks of Los Angeles’ moderate-to-expensive restaurants. Tangerine’s day customers would probably be shocked to know their casual lunch spot turns into an expensive restaurant at night. But our dinner, with tip, came to just over $90 without any alcoholic beverages--a steep price for food served on plastic plates.

As I was leaving Tangerine, I took one last look around the room. That’s when I spotted it. In the lower right hand corner of Tangerine’s big rectangular painting was a word written backwards in red graffiti. If mirrored the word would read “Ando.”

“Ah,” I said. “The artist.”

Tangerine, 5767 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 933-3838. Open Monday-Saturday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. All major credit cards accepted. Beer and wine. Dinner for two, food only, $35 to $65.