RESTAURANT REVIEW : Mandalay: Everything’s Sugar and Spice

Ho Sai Gai, possibly the most decrepit Cantonese restaurant in California, once occupied this site. What a change. As Mandalay, the room has developed a lot of style: Banner-like drawings of Vietnamese maidens hang from the walls, banana trees are spotted around the room, the chair backs are in the shape of the letter M, for Mandalay, of course.

It has an air that faintly suggests some low-profile, savagely exclusive nightclub. The waitresses in their sophisticated black dresses look like cocktail waitresses--or perhaps like the salty Vietnamese girl in the movie “Diva” who was always wrapped up in cellophane like a sharp-tongued lollipop.

Oddly, despite the nightclubby air, the mirror-backed bar only serves sweet nonalcoholic drinks. And, it turns out, not sophistication but sweetness is what the menu is about.

Mandalay calls itself a Vietnamese French restaurant, but the French quality is a little elusive, apart from the good coffee and the French pastries that real Vietnamese restaurants always have. Actually, Mandalay tends to run out of its pastries by dinner time, so I’m taking the pastries on faith.

Artichoke a la Mandalay does seem tropicalized French, with its two sauces, a thin lime mayonnaise and a sweet-and-sour garlic lime sauce. Legumes a la Mandalay are steamed vegetables--carrots, broccoli, red cabbage and asparagus--with the same lime mayonnaise for dipping purposes.

Otherwise, this is basically Southeast Asian. For instance, most things come with fish sauce, fried garlic and pureed red pepper, rather hot and better than the usual Vietnamese bottled pepper puree. Much of it is very good.

The cha gio , for instance, is Vietnamese egg rolls with a light vegetarian filling of cabbage, sprouts and mushrooms. Goi guan , which is pork, shrimp and rice noodles wrapped up in a Vietnamese ricepaper tortilla and sliced into chop-stickable sections, has a fresher, more elegant flavor than you find at many a restaurant in Orange County’s Little Saigon.

But sweetness is all at Mandalay. The appetizer satays, called brochettes on the menu, are beef or chicken with an exotic sauce of apricot, plum and toasted garlic. The hot-and-sour soup is actually hot, sweet and sour. Among the entrees is an abbreviated version of the Vietnamese meal of beef served in seven separate courses; here it’s down to three satays, one wrapped in grape leaves, one marinated in lemon grass, one made with ground beef. They have exotic marinades . . . and a sweet chutney flavor somewhere on the sidelines.

Poulet d’ail , which is easy to like, is chicken sauteed in a garlicky and sweetish tomato sauce, and curry de poulet has the mellow, mapley flavor of a Chinese or Japanese curry sauce which might drive a lover of real Indian curries to distraction. Ca chim , made with the fish called pomfret, has a similar, rather sweet sauce. Somehow it comes as no surprise that the “garlic, onion, lemon grass, soy” sauce on the barbecue pork chops tastes of honey.

It’s fitting that the chao tom is so good: pureed shrimp barbecued on skewers made out of sugar cane. You can eat shrimp off these sugar cane skewers as if it were corn on the cob, or scrape the shrimp paste off in the Vietnamese manner and mix it up with fresh herbs to roll up in lettuce as a sort of taco. There’s a sweet bean sauce on the side for dipping, and of course you can always chew the sugar cane too.

If you have a taste for sweet food, this will all be fun. But not everything works. In banh hoi tom nuong the sauteed shrimp come on rather soggy rice vermicelli, and the catfish filet with coconut milk, mushrooms, vermicelli and jicama sometimes has the ammoniac flavor of catfish that’s been away from the river a little too long.

The desserts include a decent flan (also a coffee-flavored flan) and a dish of bananas fried in Vietnamese rice paper like a banana chimichanga. Maybe they wouldn’t be sweet enough for you after the entrees. But of course, maybe there will actually be some of those elusive French pastries left from lunch.

Mandalay Vietnamese French Restaurant, 611 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood, (213) 933-0717. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Monday-Friday, dinner 6-11:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. No alcoholic beverages, Street parking. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $28-$55.