RESTAURANTS : A Bistro Wanna-be : The founder of the Biltmore’s Bernard’s is back with a place that’s more hotel dining room than breezy bistro

“Why don’t you ever take me to the good places?” My friends say it to me all the time. They are all convinced that I spend most of my evenings in sophisticated splendor, drinking good wine, eating great food and having witty conversations while wonderful waiters hover about, anticipating my every whim.

That isn’t true, but I’ll admit that some of my friends have had spectacularly bad luck with me. Over the course of a couple of months I did manage to take one pair of friends to an eerily silent vegetarian Mexican place in Glendale (everyone was using sign language) that served bland, canned food; a Torrance restaurant where the food was so bad we had to go out for dinner after dinner; and a celebrated Beverly Hills hangout that sent us straight to Siberia and proceeded to ignore us all night. I really couldn’t blame these friends for being slightly dubious about my most recent invitation to dinner.

“This is different,” I promised. “It can’t help being good.” I read them the telegram I had just received. “We’re putting the finishing touches on my vibrant new westside bistro. Lunaria . . . represents a long awaited fulfillment of a dream for me. Chef Dominique Chavanon will create his spontaneous contemporary dishes in an open kitchen and diners will be surrounded by 120 original Impressionist paintings done by my grandfather, Andre Montpellier.”

It was signed, “Bernard Jacoupy.”

“Who’s that?” they wanted to know.

I asked them if they had been to Bernard’s in the Biltmore. They had. I told them he had co-founded it. I asked them if they’d heard of Le Meridien Hotel in Newport Beach. They had. I told them that he had been its manager. More important, he’d brought the chef from Le Meridien’s Antoine to man the stove at his new restaurant. This guy had an even more impressive track record: apprentice at Troisgros, chef at the Connaught, chef to Giscard d’Estaing and chef de partie for Paul Bocuse. My friends were impressed; their time to eat well, they decided, had come.

Still, driving to the restaurant they were suspicious. Not until we walked into a pale, pretty room with art covering all the walls did they visibly relax. “It’s soothing,” said one. “It’s lovely,” said the other. If I thought the place looked a lot like a hotel dining room, I kept the thought to myself; I didn’t want to jinx the dinner.

For the same reason I controlled the impulse to giggle when the waiter walked up in a get-up that made him look like a refugee from Les Miz. He tugged sheepishly at the cap on his head, pulled down on the apron, pushed up his long sleeves. “Don’t blame me,” his smile seemed to say, “I didn’t design this rig.”

We ordered wine. We examined the menu. We tried to talk. The sound had a particularly strange quality. The noise from the other tables was a veritable cacophony, but when we spoke, it seemed as if the words were being snatched out of our mouths and borne off to some other corner of the room. None of us could hear each other. It made for a rather strange conversation. (I should mention that I have noticed this at some tables in the restaurant and not at others. And that at lunch the sound level in the room seems to be quite perfect.)

My friends really didn’t seem to mind; they were having quite a fine time with their food. One was eating a dish of seared scallops and lentils. The scallops themselves were like soft pillows gently resting on a bed of tiny green lentils. Wisps of fried onions decorated the top and the elements were bound together with a bacon-spiked vinaigrette. It was a wonderful dish.

So was the crab and potato pancake, a little dance of textures in which a thin, crisp exterior gave way to mashed potatoes laced with bits of crab and carrot. The chopped mango conserve on the side was an interesting touch, adding a slightly exotic note to a dish that managed to marry East and West and yet retain its own identity.

I liked the beef terrine too--the only thing that remotely seemed to qualify as a bistro dish. And if I didn’t like the crispy duck on caramelized onion tart--it was a leaden piece of pastry topped with dull bits of meat--it seemed like a small complaint after so much good food.

But then the main courses came. We all took a few bites and looked at one another. “It’s Glendale!” cried one friend. “It’s Torrance all over again!” cried the other. The food was--in a word--awful. The worst offender was something called “vanilla-infused roasted breast of chicken served with an apricot-leek fondue”; it tasted like a failed chicken sundae. Peppered T-bone of lamb was a tough, cumin-drenched piece of lamb on a very tired cassoulet. “Filet of veal, Catalonian style,” turned out to be veal dusted with parsley and served with olives in a sweet tomato sauce. The couscous on which it sat had raisins in it, which is traditional in couscous. But the combination of this tomato sauce with the raisins was particularly unattractive.

By dessert time the walls had rolled back revealing a jazz lounge in the next room. My friends were not charmed with the trick; it only made the room louder. “Look,” said one of them as we walked out the door, “next time you decide to have us to dinner, why don’t you just cook?”

Lunaria had been such a disappointment that I couldn’t muster up the enthusiasm to go back for many months. Besides, nobody wanted to come along. But I recently started to hear good reports about the restaurant, and I decided that it was time to try it again.

The place still looks more like a hotel than a bistro to me, more the sort of place you’d take your visiting in-laws than the setting for an inspired conversation. And while the appetizers continue to be, for the most part, quite wonderful, I still find the entrees disappointing. A veal risotto did involve rice, but it was mostly a richly reduced sauce with mushrooms and veal--the rice was just an afterthought in the middle of the plate. It was good for the first few bites--simply too much to take after that. Gratin of sea bass was a fine piece of fish--thick, fresh, gently cooked--but paved with an odd, gravel-like coating of crumbs and doused with a strangely sweet tomato sauce. The lamb cassoulet hadn’t changed.

At lunch one day an interesting sounding dish of ravioli in lemongrass cream sauce turned tiresome after a couple of bites. The ravioli were thick, with no differentiation between the wrapping and the filling, and the sauce itself had only one-note. I liked a duck salad--mixed with bean sprouts--but found everything else vaguely dull.

So were most of the desserts. There is a special that reappears with some regularity called banana linzer torte. It’s not a linzer torte, but it is a gooey delight. But the much-touted (by the waiters) nougat glace is too sweet, I can’t imagine anybody being obsessed with the chocolate obsession, and the vanilla and chocolate creme brulee just isn’t a very good idea.

On my last visit to the restaurant I took along a friend with whom I have had nothing but good meals; I thought he might bring me luck. But as we waited for the valet to bring the car he shrugged and said, “You can’t win them all.”

Lunaria

10351 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 282-8870.

Open for Lunch Tuesday-Friday; dinner Tuesday-Sunday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $48-$70.

Recommended dishes: seared scallops and lentils, $8.50; crab and mashed potato pancake, $8.50; duck salad (lunch) $8.50; banana linzer torte, $5.