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RESTAURANTS : French, Mexican, Japanese, Italian . . . and Midwestern : Chef David Slay’s style at La Veranda is California-eclectic with a heartland sensibilty

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David Slay has guts. Chefs have been coming here from Europe for a long time, but he’s the first to make a point of having come to Los Angeles from the Midwest. Until recently he was the hottest chef in St. Louis, Mo.

Now he’s in Beverly Hills, though, ensconced in a restaurant named La Veranda on the site of the old La Polonaise, and it’s been fairly crowded every time I’ve been there. What we need to know is why La Veranda is crowded.

It can’t be the usual L.A. trendoid appeal. There’s no striking architectural statement here--despite several visits, I can’t remember anything at all about the room except that it’s comfortable, the sound level stays around a dull roar and the walls are light ocher. I could be wrong about the walls too.

And it can’t be thunderbolts of California Cuisine inspiration on the menu. Slay cooks in the same basic area as most of our well-known chefs: that is, an eclectic (our favorite word) mix of French, Japanese, Mexican and all sorts of other influences, above all Italian. But his menu is not our traditional California tightrope act of daring, even shocking combinations.

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In fact, it’s a little tricky to characterize this menu at all. You can say that Slay has something of a taste for garlic and Parmesan. There is perhaps a trace of Midwestern plainness about the food, because instead of the elaborate garnishes our chefs indulge in, an entree is accompanied by just a vegetable of the day (and it will be the same vegetable for every entree). Say, green and yellow string beans one night, potatoes the next.

There’s definitely a Midwestern charm factor involved in La Veranda’s popularity. Slay makes a point of visiting every table, dressed in his kitchen whites, at some point during the meal. Both he and his wife earnestly ask everyone whether the food was to their taste and how it might be improved. They’re disarmingly open and easy to like.

And the prices are fairly easy to like, considering the Beverly Hills location and La Veranda’s general style of cuisine. There are early bird dinners, including soup and coffee, as low as $14.

There are a couple of good inspirations on the menu too. The greatest is the appetizer called pastina of the day, more or less a risotto made from tiny star-shaped soup noodles, and it’s a charmer, comfort food verging on baby food. The pasta has less flavor than cornmeal but a wonderfully luscious texture. The topping du jour might be a bit of seafood or some meat glaze and fried pine nuts.

The next most interesting thing is a subtle entree: salmon in a Parmesan crust (cooked on Teflon, the menu boasts). The “crust” is microscopically thin and you can scarcely detect the Parmesan, but it does contribute a whisper of cheesiness, a whiff of unfamiliar elegance. Incidentally, although the mention of Teflon might suggest that this dish is fried without grease, it’s actually running with oil.

However, you can’t say this is a menu that’s going to set the town on fire. Mostly it runs in the middle of our local pack. There are smoked salmon quesadillas made with flaky flour tortillas, topped with dollops of red pepper puree. The tuna tartare is pretty--divided by slices of buttered ficelle and waffle-cut potato chips, with some toasted sticks of angel hair sticking out of it, it looks like a couple of butterflies in a huddle.

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The calamari are big tubular sections of squid, like rigatoni with a curiously soft but rubbery texture. They come in a fresh tomato sauce loaded with capers. The potato pancakes that come topped with goat cheese and two caviars (salmon and delicious tiny yellow caviar) are a tiny bit heavy, despite being composed of thin slices. But hey, what do you want from a potato pancake?

Garlic is not a Midwestern cliche, but it’s all over this menu. There’s a cream of garlic soup with the mild, faintly bitter note of roasted garlic cloves. The most garlicky thing about it is really the croutons.

The grilled vegetables come with a very garlicky basil sauce, sort of like pesto without the cheese and ground nuts. The vegetables themselves are a disappointment, though. There isn’t much on the plate, and compared with the robust medley of squashes and peppers and so on we’re used to at the likes of Angeli, they’re a drab, limp little pile.

The grilled eggplants of this appetizer are also available as a side dish with the entrees. The most interesting of the vegetable sides, though, is crisp-fried spinach that looks like some kind of seaweed--the waiters like to make you guess what it is--but crumbles magically in the mouth.

Garlic really rules the entree list. There are lamb chops with sesame sauce, basically the same garlicky-lemony tahini flavoring we’re familiar with in hummus , only thinned with meat juices. The roast chicken is half a big, meaty bird flavored with roast garlic.

Garlic isn’t the dominant note of the scallops on garlic sabayon--that would be the scallops themselves, big ones with good texture, though they have been so resolutely browned with grill marks that the surfaces are a little rubbery. The scallops are the best part of this dish, but if you want to taste the garlic, you have to eat the sabayon sauce by itself.

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The pastas don’t sound positively exciting, but they tend to be good. Rigatoni with broccoli is a simple, sound idea. So is fusilli with Gorgonzola, which is also brightened with fried Italian parsley.

But the grilled swordfish dribbled with olive oil is something you can get anywhere in town, and the veal loin with fried angel hair is a little less than it sounds. The angel hair is about a dozen straight wires of unboiled pasta, fried light brown and laid on top of a plain piece of veal as a crunchy ornament.

The weakness of this kitchen is, for our tastes, a sort of flatness. Sometimes Slay over-complicates his dishes, but when he does it isn’t in daring ways. There’s a faintly muddled dish of calf’s liver with caramelized onions, prosciutto and Marsala sauce that also contains mushrooms, for no discernible reason. There are also mushrooms in that dish of lamb chops in sesame sauce. It’s like finding a couple of marbles on the dining room table.

At dessert time, there are some puzzles (two sheets of puff pastry with a shapeless mass of pastry cream between them) and disappointments (a tiny and under-caramelized tarte tatin ), but there are some real successes too. The lemon pie is filled with a rich, sweet, mouth-filling lemon custard--it’s not one of the puckery lemon tarts that are going around. There’s a walnut pie that sounds as if it’s going to be like a pecan pie, but the walnut flavor is matched with honey, a good combination.

And I confess a guilty taste for the white chocolate pie. With a thin layer of dark chocolate on top and a bottom layer of crushed chocolate cookies sandwiching a fondant-like white chocolate filling, it’s like a shameless amplification of the marshmallow cookies of our childhoods.

Maybe that’s the sort of thing Beverly Hills likes about La Veranda too. It’s a home a couple of blocks away from home.

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La Veranda

255 S. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills; (213) 274-7246.

Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday; dinner 5-10:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 5-11:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. American Express, Diners Club, MasterCard, Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $52-$64.

Suggested dishes: pastina of the day, $6.50; smoked salmon quesadillas, $6.25; fusilli with Gorgonzola, $15; lamb chops with sesame sauce, $22; scallops on garlic sabayon, $18; salmon in Parmesan crust, $18; lemon pie, $5.50; walnut tart, $5.50.

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