RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Yen for Exotic Tastes of East and West at O’toto

O’toto is semi-distinctive. The front of the dining room, up by the windows, is decently whitewashed while the rest is full of the standard exposed ducts and unpainted struts and beams. Vertical neon lights hang from the ceiling like “Star Wars” swords; peeler logs swing overhead in the glass alley through which you enter.

Altogether, it’s a pleasant place, blending Japanese austerity and American funk. You could imagine hanging out here, but being on slightly better behavior than at home.

The menu is semi-distinctive too--a California melange with Italian and Southwestern elements, but heavier on the Asian side than usual (chef Jeanette Holley grew up in Japan and Korea) and occasionally quite American. It has a terrific tuna tempura salad, for instance: a chunk of rare tuna in very thin batter, served with daikon and greens in peanut oil vinaigrette. But the best of the entrees is ravioli filled with fontina cheese and butternut squash, the startlingly sweet, rich flavor shrewdly cut with faintly bitter olive oil.

And at the same time, there is a very beefy meatloaf flavored with bits of onion and sweet pepper in a gravy-like wine sauce. The spicy scallops with fried shredded leek taste--leek topping aside--like something that could have come from Paul Prudhomme. Pork loin comes with an exotic sweet-and-sour accompaniment that is at bottom good old American bread dressing.

Mostly we’re talking about California Cuisine here. Appetizers such as new potatoes in olive sauce ( tapenade ); a soft, luscious goat cheese flan with heavily grilled (practically charcoalized) Japanese eggplant; shredded green papaya with shrimp. The soup of the day might be a puree of carrot with a clever note of ginger.

The most exotic of the appetizers by far is the sticky rice tamale in bamboo. It’s not much like a tamale, really--it’s something in the Vietnamese or Thai line, a small triangular loaf steamed in a bamboo leaf packet. The rice, which is very sticky indeed, has a salty soy flavor; the filling is like corned beef. It grows on you, but it’s still a pretty monochromatic dish.

Some things here don’t work very well at all, though. I once had an appetizer of fried sea bass served on a salad overpoweringly flavored with tarragon. It was something between a salad and a sour licorice dish.

Tongue with epazote is not an insane combination (the sauce is like an understated mole ) but the texture of the thin-sliced tongue is a lot like wet flannel. Garlic chicken with aglioli sauce is like any roast garlic chicken, but O’toto’s other chicken dish--stuffed with goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes and olives in orange sauce with about a bale of rosemary--is like being mugged. At least one of those ingredients, and a lot of that rosemary, has got to go.

The best of the desserts are two diametrically opposed cheesecakes. One is warmly flavored with a Japanese pumpkin called kabocha and served in syrup, the other quite tart--like the usual cheesecake’s sour cream frosting all the way through--with little bursts of ginger flavor.

The idea of a cardamom-spiced pear crisp with rose-flavored cream is a little over the edge, but it works pretty well, and the name certainly tells you what to expect. On special there has been a walnut orange torte that tasted good too, accompanied by stewed apricots and some whipped cream sprinkled with walnuts. However, it had the sort of angel food texture that calls for a bread knife.

I’d stay away from the ices. The horchata ice tastes of little but cinnamon and clove, and the “cookies of the world” that accompany it are pretty ordinary. The Japanese plum mousse has dry, granular texture, like something that has been refrozen before serving.

Stick to the ravioli, the meatloaf and the cheesecake and you’ll be fine (well, don’t forget about the tuna salad--tuna tempura salad, that is). If you do, O’toto is OK.

O’toto, 7119 Melrose Ave . , Hollywood; (213) 937-5435. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday; dinner 5:30-10:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 5:30-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Beer and wine. Valet parking. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $32-$59.