Cuisine Really Bourgeois

In France, there is what is called cuisine bourgeoise , grandmother’s cooking--an endless succession of homely braises and soups and stews. In California, we have cuisine really bourgeois (CRB), which is the light, Italianate, snacky kind of stuff preferred by three out of four Volvo drivers. It’s the less-expensive, watered-down version of Urban Rustic cuisine.

Where cuisine bourgeoise has coq au vin and rillettes d’oie , CRB has smoked-turkey salad and panzanella . Where cuisine bourgeoise has the tartine , cuisine really bourgeois has the zucchini-walnut muffin. Where Frenchmen wash down their cuisine bourgeoise with charming Fleurie, plugged-in Californians make do with San Pellegrino water, very cold, no ice, no lime.

And where a branchee Parisian might be at Cafe Costes in the mid-morning, leafing through the morning paper, you’ll find her Los Angeles equivalent at Kings Road Cafe near the Beverly Center, reading the trades, tugging on her leg-warmers, sipping thoughtfully at a caffe latte with extra foam. Kings Road Cafe, a palace of cuisine really bourgeois , is a Yuban-commercial version of modern California life. A collage artist told me about the place.

Kings Road Cafe is perfect, really: loud, splashed with sunlight, next door to a pretty good newsstand, decorated in the skewed-beam/splattered-wall sort of way that’s as close as hip Los Angeles comes to an architectural vernacular. Plus good copper sconces, of course . . . you can’t overlook the sconces. The latte is good and strong, made with the house’s special dark roast; you can buy a bag of beans to go. And everybody in the cafe is attractive, fit and healthy looking, good teeth--scarcely an excess pound or a poorly chosen crop-top in the crowd.

There they are, waves of them, clutching scripts and plowing through muffins, West Hollywoodians who work out, and go to auditions, and worry a little about cholesterol. It’s also a good place to be a cool single mom, like Lisa Bonet. Outside, at tiny, round tables the size of phonograph records, sit European guys with bleary eyes and a few days of beard, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and eking hours out of a single cup of cappuccino.

Goat cheese? Check. Extra-virgin olive oil? Check. Rosemary bread? Check. Pine nuts, prosciutto, sun-dried tomatoes? Check, check, check. There’s even breakfast risotto, a nursery thing sweetened with honey and garnished with slices of dried fig, which any truly fashionable person would prefer to, say, Apple Jacks. The bread’s no good, but when you order toast, somebody sprinkles it with fresh, chopped herbs.

Braised, baked, seared, omelet, whatever, most of the egg dishes look the same--bland, thin sheets studded with trendy stuff from the checklist, nothing startling enough to distract you from this morning’s Hollywood Reporter. If it had some flavor, this could be the CRB eggs Benedict: “Seared (egg) with black pepper, prosciutto, Bel Paese on walnut toast.” A better bet might be just-set poached eggs, smoothly jacked up with chile oil and flavored with sharp grated Romano cheese.

After breakfast, the goat cheese and prosciutto jump out of the frying pan and into the panini-- or onto the pizzas, which seem to be nothing more than panini with toppings broiled onto them rather than stuffed inside of them. The pizza with mozzarella and sausage on top is pretty good, because a little grease seeps down from the cheese and enlivens the crust. The pizza with roasted red pepper, goat cheese and pine nuts tastes like a salad on dry bread, but the combination is as CRB as you can get.

Panini are decent, if a little heavy on watercress, and a couple of them--smoked chicken with red peppers and spicy mayonnaise, sliced turkey with what tastes like collard greens--are actually delicious. Pizzas and panini are served with a pleasant, oily mound of shredded red cabbage; the house green salad, dressed with a strong, salty mustard vinaigrette, is fine, the kind of thing that’s served before the tiramisu in any self-respecting CRB cafe. Though, of course, there’s no tiramisu at Kings Road Cafe (too high in cholesterol). Have another latte instead.

Kings Road Cafe, 8361 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 655-9044. Open daily, 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., Wednesday-Saturday till midnight. Cash only. No alcohol. Takeout. Breakfast or lunch for two, food only, $8-$14.50.