RESTAURANT REVIEW : Santa Monica’s Belle-Vue Lets In the Light

The Belle-Vue, established in 1937, was for many years the good French restaurant in Santa Monica. Sitting at the far western end of Santa Monica Boulevard, it dished up steaks and chops, escargot and sweetbreads without challenge. But in recent years, Ocean Boulevard and the 3rd Street Promenade became studded with new restaurants, including one restaurant so truly French, its chefs commute in shifts from their Michelin-starred restaurants in France. Slowly, the Belle-Vue found itself an anachronistic cave of dark wood, private booths and Franco-American cuisine.

What, then, does an aging, upstaged grande dame do under such a circumstance? In this town, she closes down and has a face lift.

Thus, the 54-year-old legend, retaining the familiar blocky pink neon sign, cozy bar and at least a modicum of the old dark wood, reopened recently as a French brasserie. Gone are the booths, and about 75% of the men’s club ambience. Now, there is more light, stylish new tables and chairs and a daring new menu.

Some old-time Belle-Vue regulars were immediately offended by soft rock on the p.a. system, the sea urchin sauce on the monkfish, and the loss of privacy at their favorite booths. They abandoned ship. Meanwhile, a lot of new customers ignore the new cosmetics and tune right in to what lingers from Belle-Vue’s eternally clubby, Franco-American soul. One of my friends sat down, peered around the room, and said, “This looks like a place to eat meat.”

While one can still find escargot , bouillabaisse and prime rib on the menu, one has to search them out from among eclecticisms of the trendiest variety. Chinese chicken salad with pickled ginger. Mahi-mahi with strawberry salsa. Pizza with scallops; pizza with pineapple, chicken, and celery. A chicken and papaya sandwich.

Our first dinner at the Belle-Vue was pretty darn good, and this I attribute to the fact that we “ate meat” and also to our waiter, an expressive young man with a thick ponytail. When I asked which was preferable, potatoes with caviar or crab cakes, he instantly endorsed crab cakes.

When I asked about the monkfish, he was more torn: In good conscience, he wasn’t about to denigrate the food at his place of employment; still, he could not bring himself to recommend the monkfish. So he made a little mewing noise.

I ordered the lamb chops.

The crab cakes came with a chile-hot aioli and a pile of deep-fried leeks. At first taste, the leeks seemed suspect; they looked and tasted like my crunchy dry winter lawn, but piled on the crab cakes with the creamy aioli , they added an ingenious, pleasing crunch. My friend had the raw tuna and avocado with horseradish soy, which was fresh and good and very much like a California roll, hold the rice.

Our entrees were quite acceptable; as my friend suggested, the Belle-Vue is a pretty good place to eat meat. My lamb chops and his prime rib were both perfectly cooked, juicy and large.

Around us, most of the window tables were taken. There were a few dressed-up dates, and a few more casually dressed walk-ins. A couple of older men curled over their onion soups. At one point, a large table of average, conservative middle-aged couples came in. They started out behaving quite sedately, but soon began, as a group, to have fits of howling, screeching laughter. This laughter was so loud and erupted so frequently and with such force there was soon no way we could conduct a conversation at our table. We tried, then, to eavesdrop to see what was so funny, but all we heard were a few comments about a U-turn someone made. As far as we could figure, they were some kind of laughing club. We did not, indeed could not, linger over our coffee. At that moment, we really missed the booths.

On several return visits to the Belle-Vue, we walked on the wilder side of the menu, forays which proved somewhat risky, especially since we never again had our first waiter to mew us back on course. There were some high points, although again, they tended to be the less outrageous menu items. The Chinese chicken salad with Napa cabbage and pickled ginger was luscious. And to tell the truth, the bouillabaisse was pretty good, too: All the seafood was fresh and lightly cooked, and the soup itself was full-bodied, but not overpowering. My portion, however, was served without the promised rouille and garlic croutons; in general, we found that the kitchen did have a tendency to forget last-minute touches.

A generous slab of grilled Norwegian salmon was also sweet and juicy and lovely. But in order to eat the swordfish, we had to remove the blue cheese-and-tomato-rosette, a big swirl of cold butter and cheese that tasted mostly of refrigerant. And the raspberry sauce on the black Angus tenderloin was an indignity against the black Angus from whose loin had come the otherwise lovely piece of meat. A roasted half chicken with Dijon mustard and cornmeal was just that: half a chicken abundantly slathered with mustard from the jar, rolled in cornmeal, and then fried so that a peculiarly gritty and gooshy crust formed.

Warnings--or at least quite pronounced mewings--also go out against the saffron fettuccine with clams; a heap of dry, tough pasta with a few good clams that were grievously mismatched with too many too-strong Kalamata olives and chunks of undercooked Japanese eggplant that tasted like Styrofoam. Surprisingly, the scallop-and-leek pizza was not half bad.

Overall, the Belle-Vue is like a curious cross between a men’s club bar ‘n’ grill and the trendy new bistro--a marriage between Musso & Frank and the California Pizza Kitchen. He’s too old-fashioned, she’s too trendy--will it work? Not, I think, without many, many adjustments.

In the meantime, eat the meat.

Belle-Vue French Brasserie, 101 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (213) 393-2843. Open for lunch and dinner seven days. Validated parking. Full bar. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $34 - $77.