RESTAURANT REVIEW : Caruso Ristorante Sings Best at Dessert Time

When I called Caruso Ristorante to make Friday-night dinner reservations for three, the gentleman accepting the reservation asked, “Is this a special occasion?”

“No,” I said.

“Birthday? Anniversary?”

“No,” I said. “Just three good friends having dinner together.”

“Don’t wanna buy a bottle of champagne for your husband? Get him bombed? Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky!”

This was the kind of jocular, overly familiar talk I remembered from my stint as a cocktail waitress in a country club years ago. So when the three of us converged on Caruso’s later that evening, I was not surprised to walk into a schmoozy piano bar full of people who seemed to know each other. A friendly hostess with long red hair and a very teeny, very tight skirt greeted us, and a rather more formal young man in a black suit showed us to our booth and handed us heavy black upholstered menus entitled “Caruso and Me.” (Caruso and Me is the name of the original San Pedro restaurant opened by Bif Caruso.)

The dining room, once the site of Sonny Bono’s old restaurant, was a hodgepodge of contemporary decorating trends--Mexican floor tiles, marbleized walls, lace curtains, lots of etched glass, floral upholstery on the booths and an industrial ceiling with ducts and pipe truss sprayed with flecked paint. Two huge drawings, like cartoon spinoffs of Picasso’s work, dominated one wall--and they were for sale: $20,000 for the matched set.

A man in a belted tunic brought us hot bread full of strong green olives and a plate of condiments: butter, hot pepper, roasted garlic and honey-nut butter. While we loved the garlic, which miraculously had no lingering effect, we wondered if anybody, ever, put honey-nut butter on olive bread.

Our drink orders were taken by a waiter also in a belted tunic. Most of the staff wore these tunics, which are of indeterminate color and have a varied costume effect: A waiter with a shaved head looked like a martial-arts expert in his; a tall, slim woman with short blond hair looked like a female lieutenant on “Star Trek” in hers. Our waiter looked like Sid Caesar in a too-short bathrobe.

Or at least we think he was our waiter. So many different tunic-clad people came to our table, it was never quite clear who we might ask for a check. Despite this, silverware cleared with earlier courses was not replaced and dirty plates stayed on the table through coffee. During one meal, a busboy we never saw before or again appeared after we’d eaten our salads and swiftly cleared everything off the table--silverware, water glasses, bread plates--before we could stop him. When we actually needed something--another piece of bread, another Pellegrino, the check--nobody was to be found.

The kind of over-familiarity voiced by the man who took my reservation was also a recurring theme. A waiter serving entrees to a nearby table looked over at us and called out, “You guys waitin’ for something?” When a busboy decrumbed our table, he looked up at us and said, “Doesn’t this embarrass you, having somebody clean up all your crumbs?”

As I look down the list of dishes I ate at Caruso, two items stand out as excellent: a simple lemon tart served in a nice creme anglaise , and a chocolate tart with an intense, not-too-sweet filling and a compelling layer of chewy, crunchy almonds. They, and all the desserts, are made at Caruso’s by a dessert chef who will shortly open a bakery behind the restaurant--good news for the neighborhood.

The rest of the food ranged from adequate to problematic. Ingredients are of a good quality and portions ranged from the generous to the mingy. Grilled New Zealand scampi were perfectly cooked--sweet and soft--and dramatically displayed in their shells, nevermind that there was about a tablespoon of actual scampi meat for $10. A caprese salad was passable. But a bowl of stracciatella (Italian broth with egg and spinach) barely made it to the table; most, as the waiter made sure to show us, had slopped onto his tray. Before our eyes, he wiped off the bowl’s rim, dragging the napkin into the soup as well; the bit of spinach that stuck to his hand he flicked off onto the floor. The soup, incidently, was lukewarm and had no discernible flavor.

Entrees came with a display of steamed but still-hard vegetables: cauliflower and the eternal broccoli and carrots. The New York steak was huge and well-cooked and in a nice porcini mushroom sauce. A rack of lamb was neither tender nor particularly tasty. A blackened swordfish in a pepper cream sauce was spicy-good but so thin it seemed an insult for $18. Linguine with clams was inexplicably tasteless. Chicken brochettes, a special one night, were a little too sweet for my taste.

My advice? Stick with dessert.

Caruso Ristorante, 8478 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. (213) 653-6348. Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner seven nights. Entertainment Tuesday through Saturday. Full bar. Major credit cards. Valet parking. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$80.