Rosti, Marmalade and Duplex: Bringing It All Back Home

I want a wife. As the details of daily life become increasingly complicated, I keep finding myself wishing that I had someone to wait for the plumber, run my errands and balance my checkbook. I’d like somebody to drop my clothes at the cleaners, take the cat to the vet and clean out my closets. I’d like my taxes taken care of too. I want a lot--but I’d settle for someone who’d have dinner on the table when I get home from work.

Working women in Thailand have it easier. They may not have wives--but they have community cooks. Each district in Bangkok has a service that, for a relatively small fee, will deliver dinner to your house each evening in lacquered metal containers called pin toh . In the morning you leave the dirty containers at your door; when you get home from work they have been replaced by clean ones, filled with the evening’s meal. All you have to do is tell the service how many people you are feeding and cook your own rice.

Nobody in Los Angeles has come up with a system that sensible--but almost every week some new takeout operation opens up its doors. If you have neither the time to cook nor the energy to go out, here are three new places that want to make your life a little easier.

If I lived on the Westside, I’d probably have a kitchen filled with bags from Rosti. This offshoot of Brentwood’s trendy Trattoria Toscana devotes itself to making good, homey Italian food to take out. Everything is easy: You can fax in your order, park at the curb and run in to pick up your food. It’s packed in shopping bags, so all you have to do is grab the handle and go.

This food is a welcome change from your ordinary take-away fare. It is neither soggy Chinese nor insipid salads. The emphasis is on rotisserie-roasted meats--pork, lamb, veal and roast beef, served in generous slices with wonderful little roasted potatoes and spinach that would be even more wonderful if it weren’t cooked quite so much. You might want to order extra potatoes--these golden rosemary flecked wedges are rather wonderful.

There is also pollo al mattone-- flattened chicken--which is so impressive I was not the least surprised to find a woman next to me asking for eight orders at the same time.

Other dishes you will want to try are the various kinds of baked pasta--lasagna, ravioli, cannelloni--which travel well, and a very comforting zuppa alla Toscana that is thick with rough-cut vegetables. I’ve been less impressed with the antipasti: They suffer the fate of all salads that share a refrigerated case--the flavors tend to start slumping into one another in a very unattractive way. And while the pizzas, with their thick crusts, might be OK if you live around the corner, if you live across town they won’t survive the trip.

Tiramisu, on the other hand, travels well--as do the fresh fruit tarts.

Rosti, 908 S. Barrington Ave., Brentwood. (213) 447-8695. Open daily from 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Half chicken with potatoes, $6.75; roast veal, $11.50; vegetable soup, $3.50.

Marmalade is another new operation designed to make life on the Westside a little more comfortable. It’s an upscale deli that offers a bit of everything from the world of fancy food: cheese, pastries, smoked salmon, salads, pretty tins, dried cranberries, organic apple juice, maple syrup. It has presents that range from the wonderful (Joseph Schmidt chocolates) to candidates for the museum of things that should never have been made (bottled brandied cranberries).

The heart of the place, however, is the take-away operation, which offers dishes such as homey little chicken pot pies and nice whole roasted chickens.

But I found the food here pretty hit or miss. I liked the chicken, but poached salmon was overcooked and almost all the salads suffered from the sagging flavor syndrome. The ones I liked best were a nice Greek salad of cucumbers, onions, olives, tomatoes and Feta cheese and the crunchy asparagus salad. But the ratatouille was too thick and pasty, and grilled eggplants didn’t have much flavor. The sourdough bread was big--but sort of cottony.

There are a lot of fancy desserts, and they looked very nice, but I found I liked the big doughy American cookies best. (What I liked least was a pear poached in red wine and stuffed with chocolate ganache .)

If you live nearby, Marmalade will be very appealing. Other people probably won’t find it worth a drive across town--unless it is to buy some truly terrific capers.

Marmalade, 710 Montana Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 395-9196. Open daily 6:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Whole chicken, $8.50. Chicken pot pies, $3.95.

There’s good news for harried Eastsiders as well: a brand-new takeout operation that will turn any table into an instant church supper. Duplex, which has been holding monthly Sunday barbecues, has started cranking up the pit every day of the week and selling barbecue to go. This is seriously homey cooking--and bears absolutely no resemblance to the barbecue found anywhere else.

It’s not sticky, for starters. Or greasy. The meat is rubbed with a dry marinade and then smoked for hours until the flavors have concentrated and the fat has disappeared. The meat shrinks towards the bone and gives your teeth a real workout. The sauce, which is served on the side, is also seriously delicious: It’s not hot, but it’s flavorful, with undertones of tomato, citrus and spice.

I love the chicken and ribs--but I love the side dishes too. The cole slaw is neither soggy nor creamy--it’s the kind that bites back. The baked beans, cooked with bourbon and beer, are absolutely elegant, each bean separate and distinct. There are also two salads--good German potato and marinated tomatoes that actually have flavor, even in the middle of winter.

Charlie Haas, in the definitive article on local barbecue, wrote that “barbecue constitutes the only legitimate use of Wonder bread.” The bread at Duplex makes that statement suspect. The slices of bread are white all right--but they actually have a little character.

There’s no dessert on the take-out menu, but you might be able to talk the chef, one of the city’s best patissiers , into packing up one of his sweets.

So far, neither Duplex nor Rosti delivers. I hope that will change; what a treat it would be to get home and find dinner waiting at the door.

Duplex Bar-B-Que to Go, 1930 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 663-2430. Open Tuesday-Sunday. Half chicken, $8; half-slab pork ribs, $10; half-pound beef brisket, $9. Side dishes, $1.50-2.50.