Restaurants : COUNTER CULTURE : <i> Where to Eat </i> Foie Gras <i> in a Mini-Mall? At Santa Monica’s Carrots, for Starters.</i>

How do you get a restaurant to pull in the big spenders? Simple: Don’t give them an inch. Put the place in a dumb storefront in an obscure mini-mall and give it a nothing name like Carrots. Price the menu toward the high end of the Westside range but provide no decor to speak of: A tape deck by the cash register and three chefs jockeying for position at a range and grill will do just fine.

But one of the chefs will have to be Fred Iwasaki. This stolid former sous chef at Spago and Chinois on Main is the main reason Carrots is packed with gleeful Westsiders in expensive sportswear, hugging one another and rejoicing to be seated even at the counter.

In fact, the counter is probably the best place to sit, what with Iwasaki and those other two chefs dodging one another for your entertainment. But one thing about a restaurant like this: You never get the feeling you’ve been seated in Siberia. The whole place is like any other restaurant’s Siberia, except for the fact that everybody wants to be there.

It’s a strange thing to eat foie gras sitting at a counter, but that’s part of the fun. You’re eating excellent California cuisine, a little more Asian-inspired than usual, in a burger-and-fries setting. If a short-order joint could be a substantial restaurant, it would be Carrots.

The appetizers run to salads of one sort or another, the most striking on the regular menu being marinated salmon mixed with diced tomato and minced onion and some shreds of apple. It’s a symphony in earthy shades of red, and the flavors of the salmon, the tomato and the vinaigrette dressing (the apple doesn’t contribute a lot) are surprisingly harmonious.

One special was an even more impressive appetizer: a duck salad made with very smoky duck, indeed. The meat was purplish-brown and tasted like densely textured, three-alarm smoky ham. The sauce might have been another vinaigrette, but it tasted mostly of smoke and duck juices.

The rest of the salads look more ordinary: baby greens topped with snaky red strings of beet; a seafood salad, which includes rock shrimp, crab meat and more of Carrots’ good salmon; big grilled shrimp, still hot, in a basil-and-mustard sauce, and spicy chicken salad, which is heavy on the peanut oil, but, with its mustard sauce (and no won-ton crisps), seems more Californian than Chinese.

The beef salad has its fans, but I don’t really understand the thrill. It’s a pleasant but rather bland mixture of beef, enoki mushrooms and radish sprouts in a mild mustard sauce. It is served in a freshly made potato shell, that cup-shaped vessel of fried potato strands that was big about 20 years ago and is ripe for rediscovery.

The foie gras appetizer belongs to the modern genre of off-beat luxury. It’s just a rich slab of fresh duck liver, heavily sprinkled with black pepper and sauteed with an “apple-port sauce”--a strong meat glaze that’s a little on the sweet side, like many here, but the total effect of mild sweetness and buttery liver is irresistible.

I’m not moved by the sauteed crab cake, though. Maybe it’s the fact that it is sauteed rather than fried; in the absence of an aromatic crust of browned crab meat, it tastes like a thickish pancake that happens to have some crab in it. The pancake effect is only intensified by the sherry-enriched sauce, which gives the unsettling impression of butter and maple syrup.

As if to reinforce the greasy-spoon motif, all Carrots’ non-seafood entrees come with potato salad--a very good potato salad, to be sure, warm and tangy with fresh chunks of potato. So you might have potato salad with your grilled New York steak, which is thinly sliced and smothered in a meaty shallot sauce surprisingly spiked with soy and fresh ginger--one of the best Franco-Oriental-fusion sauces anywhere.

More meat and potato entrees: three grilled, marinated lamb chops in garlic-butter sauce; roasted veal loin in a decidedly sweet port sauce, the curse somewhat lifted by a dose of wasabi horseradish, and grilled chicken with a ginger-sesame-seed vinaigrette, which is like a wacky ginger-flavored tahini sauce--and also a little like the sauce on the potato salad.

Generally speaking, the presence of that potato salad is a good sign, for the meat entrees are all very satisfying. The seafood side of this seven-entree menu, however, is wobbly. The lobster with black-bean sauce and black mussels is a straightforward Chinese treatment that you can get at even plainer lunch counters than this one. The sauteed Alaskan halibut with oba -leaf-and-tomato sauce is a sad, pinched sort of dish, just halibut with pureed tomato, though the fish does look deceptively handsome in that pale reddish sea.

But when it comes to the grilled salmon, we are moving in the territory of greatness. This salmon comes in an impressive sauce described as red-onion butter, a puree of sweet, fried red onions with a faint bite of cayenne that goes surprisingly well with the meaty, subtle sweetness of salmon. This is the most memorable dish at Carrots.

After a reasonably ambitious menu like this one, no restaurant worth its arugula would truckle to its customers with pastries; these diners would’ve had enough sweets during the appetizers and entrees. Carrots gives three dessert choices: espresso ice cream, vanilla ice cream or raspberry sorbet.

All come with raspberries and a sliced strawberry; the ice creams are served in a rather chewy sesame-brittle cup. For the record, the espresso has a good espresso flavor, the vanilla is coarse-textured like ice milk, and the sorbet has good, penetrating raspberry flavor.

And that’s all the dessert available at this lunch counter of distinction.

Suggested dishes: marinated salmon, $10.50; smoked - duck salad, $11.50; sauteed foie gras , $11.50; grilled salmon with red - onion butter, $15.75; grilled marinated lamb chop, $19.75; New York steak with spicy onion sauce, $17.50; raspberry sorbet, $3.50.

Carrots, 2834 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica; (213) 453-6505. Dinner served nightly except Sunday. Beer and wine only. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $52-$74.