RESTAURANT REVIEW : Courtney’s . . . Home Cooking Away From Home

If you had a mom who was a really good cook--that is, if she made great meat loaf and great lasagna and about the best brownies you’ve ever had, and if she decided to open a place to sell her cooking, well, it would probably look and feel and taste a lot like Courtney’s Gourmet Take Out.

A friend and I stopped by Courtney’s one weekday when we were sneaking off to the beach. It was around 11 a.m., but for various reasons, I hadn’t had any coffee yet and I couldn’t stop yawning. So the first thing I did was to ask the man behind the counter for a double espresso, which was delivered shortly in a paper cup. Good and eye-opening, I was soon able to take stock of the charming little takeout restaurant I’d stumbled into.

There were baskets and bay leaf wreaths and bows everywhere. My friend said that the decor made Courtney’s a very gender-specific place, which was his way of saying that it felt like a bastion of female crafts and sensibility. Which it was. This makes it a pretty comfortable place for women to eat lunch by themselves, which to my mind is a great value for a dining establishment.

As we waited for our food, we strayed about the small store. One woman sat and ate lunch, reading the newspaper. Near her, there were a few coffee sippers and then a flurry of people who, like us, ordered lunch to take out. There were a few cookbooks on display and lots of gourmet items: dry bean soup mixes, honeys, oils, pancake mixes, black popcorn, an assortment of coffee beans. There were pink straw flowers on the pale wood tables, and an assortment of cooking magazines to browse.

We ordered two of Courtney’s box lunches, which come with a sandwich of your choice, any two deli salads, an apple, a brownie and two candy sticks. We pulled some pop and water from the refrigerated case and headed out.

Because it was cold and windy and the sand was blowing, we drove to a little breakwater in Marina del Rey and found a bench out of the wind. The boxes sat on our laps as if we’d each bought a whole bakery cake of our own to eat. I had the roasted sliced eggplant sandwich on a sliced baguette. The menu said the sandwich came with fresh mozzarella, which I think of as the very white fresh-made balls of cheese that come in water, but this mozzarella was just the regular sliced white rubbery stuff that comes on pizza. Still, the baguette was crusty and good, the eggplant had a lot of flavor and the sandwich was so huge I could eat only a third of it. In fact, the portions were so generous, we could easily have had a nice lunch for two from one lunch.

My friend had a Santa Fe-style chicken breast on sourdough bread with cilantro mayonnaise and avocado. The chicken was a little dry, but the deliciously pungent mayonnaise helped make up for it. Of the four salads we had, the chicken curry salad with currants was probably the most lively and interesting.

The Greek salad contained very thin slices of red and yellow peppers and red onions, a few olives and a very meager dusting of feta cheese. Besides being vinegary and insubstantial, it was very hard to spear those long, thin vegetables with a plastic fork. There was also too little cheese in the tortellini salad, which was so loaded with strong sun-dried tomatoes that it needed some soothing creaminess for balance.

The green salad with citrus dressing was about the world’s most normal salad. All told, it tasted like a picnic lunch your mother might pack for you if she had lots of goodies in the refrigerator. Since most of us don’t have mothers packing our picnics, however, Courtney’s is a quite acceptable substitute.

Later that week, I brought dinner home from Courtney’s. Sold by the pound, the items, warmed and spread out over the table, were like the array of leftovers from one week in the life of an overachieving mother-cook. The cream of almond soup tasted like, well, cream and ground almonds, and reminded me of all the cream and puree soups my mother tried out when she got her first Cuisinart. I especially liked a cold spinach frittata, a wide wedge of eggs and well-spiced spinach and potatoes. The vegetarian lasagna was utterly, generically good. A roasted chicken with a bread-crumb crust was moist and tasty, and inspired a friend of mine to confess his secret passion for Shake ‘n’ Bake. The meat loaf was delicious both hot and cold.

We’d ordered a couple of desserts from Courtney’s assortment of bundt cakes, muffins and other baked goods, but somehow, they never made it into the large take-out box we carried from the restaurant. But the brownies that came in the box lunches--rich and chocolaty and large--they alone can make patronizing Courtney’s worthwhile.

* Courtney’s, 2829 Ocean Park Blvd., Santa Monica, (213) 314-6311, fax (213) 314-6315. Open Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Saturday 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Major credit cards. Street parking. Dinner for two, food only, $14 to $30. Box lunches $10.75 to $10.95.