RESTAURANT REVIEW : Rosebud’s California Cuisine Makes for Tough Sledding

As we settled into the quaint white English cottage that is Rosebud, a flowerpot appeared at the table, freshly baked bread bulging out of the top. The bread was too hot to touch. I tried to pry it out of the pot with a knife. No luck.

When I sought procedural advice, the waitress said to go at it any way we could, that there really was no right way to deal with this potted loaf sensibly. Several scorched fingers later, I determined that I didn’t much like the caraway dill bread anyway.

Meanwhile, I scanned the menu. “One thing’s sure,” I said. “Somebody has to order the blueberry fettuccine.” But when the waitress came, we ordered appetizers, steak and turkey. No guts.

The mu shu duck was a little crepe folded around some dry duck and vegetables and topped with a yellow substance that tasted like papaya jam. It wasn’t very good, but I didn’t say that to the cheerful owners who, it turned out, would come up at virtually every course and ask how we liked it.

The truth of the matter was, there wasn’t very much we did like that night, and this made us feel very badly, because Rosebud is an attractive place, owned by four people who no doubt mean well.

The chef, however, apparently subscribes to the most outrageous stereotype of California Cuisine: The more peculiar and jarring the combination of ingredients, the better the food.

As we ate on, we grew glum. My friend had chosen filet medallions with roasted peppers and a roasted garlic sauce. The filet was tough, the roasted peppers were whole limp halves flopped inelegantly around the steak, and the sauce was so bad that my friend pronounced it “the most depressing plate of food I’ve ever had.”

I was having my own trauma grappling with paillard of turkey breast with wild mushroom lasagna. There were two sheets of turkey that looked and tasted as if they had been boiled. The so-called lasagna was a bunch of chopped mushrooms wrapped in weirdly-floury noodles.

We left without trying dessert.

Over the next few days, I began to disbelieve my memories. After all, there had been good reviews of Rosebud. So I returned with two friends. “Somebody,” I said, “has to order the blueberry fettuccine.”

One friend ordered scallops, the other chili. I squirmed and hesitated and finally ordered the roasted loin of lamb served with raspberry sauce on blueberry fettuccine.

First, however, there were appetizers. I had the Manhattan corn chowder, a bowl of smoky, thick, brown gravy with corn in it. One friend had tough salmon ravioli, the other a passable mixed-green salad.

The chili was a thick mass of dark beans that was the best, most savory item we ate--probably because it was created by one of the owners and not the chef. The scallops were unappetizingly undercooked and the saffron, cilantro and tomato sauces they sat in, although very pretty, had no discernible taste, for which, I believe, we had reason to be grateful.

On my plate, the lamb itself was edible, but the blueberry fettuccine tasted like blueberry pasta in pancake syrup, with a few shiitake thrown in. In a word, it was vile. I left most of the $17 plate of food uneaten.

When an owner came up and cheerfully inquired “How d’ya like it?,” I could scarcely feign pleasure. “It is really weird,” I said. “Way too weird for me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You have to be really adventurous for the blueberry fettuccine.”

I was a little relieved to discover that the problem was with me--and my friends. Apparently, we are just not adventurous enough to appreciate Rosebud’s dinner cuisine. While I have no desire to cultivate such a quality in myself, for the sake of the pleasant people who own the place, I hope that Rosebud finds enough food warriors willing to pay generously to eat the impossible.

We did return to Rosebud one last time, for breakfast. We found that even the unadventurous, such as ourselves, could find something to eat in the morning. (I had some good corn meal “griddler” cakes and a friend had a satisfactory omelet.) According to an owner, the breakfast menu was inherited pretty much intact from the restaurant that previously occupied Rosebud’s site.

Perhaps the former restaurant had a dinner menu, as well.

Rosebud, a Citizen’s Cafe, 125 N. Larchmont Blvd., (213) 463-2814. Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner. No alcohol. Street parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $33-$75.