RESTAURANT REVIEW : Consistency at California Pizza Kitchen

The 14th California Pizza Kitchen on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City is teeming with customers. My friend and I get off the escalator at the restaurant’s front door and find a slew of people waiting for tables. We give our name to the young host, who says with just the right mixture of pride and regret, “It’ll be 20 minutes or so. . . .” It’s a Saturday night and the sky is clear, so we decide to take a short walk.

At a crosswalk, we look up at the bright new restaurant, at the gleaming open kitchen and dining room’s clean white, yellow and black tiles, at the people crowded around the tables inside. From this vantage, the CPK looks alluring: posh and well-lit, well-populated and sophisticated. My friend Kirk says, “This view right here is all the advertising they’ll ever need.”

When we return to the restaurant, we’re promptly seated right next to the glass wall overlooking Ventura Boulevard. It’s a great table, with a bird’s-eye view of traffic and sparkling lights. The glass is so clear I feel vertiginous, as if I could scootch the wrong way in my chair and tumble down to the street.

“Yeah, I’m an actor,” our waiter tells the customers behind us. “I know it’s impossible, waiting tables, trying to be a star, but I think I’m different, I think it can happen to me, so that’s why I’m doing it.” Pizzas, pastas, and salads sail from the kitchen. Customers of all ages seem nevertheless homogeneous--all healthy, attractive and at ease, as if they’ve been coming to this place for years.

Recipes are invented and perfected in test kitchens and prepared by rote. There is no chef on duty: There’s no need for one. A manager watches the food as it comes out of the kitchen. Computers write up checks. The prices and a trendy menu of pasta and designer pizzas attract a casual, well-heeled clientele. The wide open, well-lit room is a great place to see and be seen. The service is fast and good-natured, the food is consistent, fellow customers look pretty good--in short, the CPK may be a formula, but it’s a formula that works.

The food itself is not great. A “Greek Style Salad” is huge and acceptable with lemony dressing, sun-dried tomatoes, goat cheese and red and yellow peppers, yet the only resemblance it has to a traditional Greek Salad is a few Greek olives. The Caribbean shrimp pizza allegedly has blackened shrimp, pork, and banana chutney, among other curiosities, but mine comes studded with unidentifiable little brown chunks, one of which occasionally tasted like banana.

In time I found that the more traditional the pizza, the better: The vegetarian, the five cheese and tomato, the mushroom pepperoni and the sausage are all fine. At the same time, it’s fun to see pizzas like the B.L.T. with a mound of lettuce on it and the otherwise ghastly Santa Fe chicken with a big glob of guacamole and sour cream in the middle. God knows what they won’t put on a pizza. (“Licorice,” says one friend. “There’s no pizza here with licorice on it.”) The light pastas--the tomato-basil and the shrimp and scallop, for instance--are also acceptable.

But the food, which is consistent, standardized and cheerfully presented, is only part of what makes the CPK so successful. The casual atmosphere and well-lit room is a great open forum for people-watching. In the garage, as we’re waiting for the valet, Kirk turns to me. “I have never been looked at so frankly and openly by other people,” he says. “For a moment there, I thought I was famous.”

California Pizza Kitchen, 12265 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, (818) 505-6437. Lunch and dinner 1 1:30 a.m.-11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 11:30 a.m.-12 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Beer and wine. All major credit cards. Validated valet parking. Dinner for two, food only, $22-$42.