Safe!

On the roster of ethnic-restaurant insecurities, somewhere between the fear of having to toast a colleague with a native liqueur that smells like carburetor cleaner and the sinking sensation experienced when you realize you’ve just ordered two courses of barbecued spleen, is the feeling that you might be ordering the wrong thing. This is most common in Chinese restaurants, of course, where no satisfactory English translation exists for many weird but tasty fishes or for most of those obscure, imported vegetables that are in season for only three days a year.

It also happens in Italian or Latin-American restaurants that turn out to specialize in the last thing on the menu you might think of ordering--say, Peruvian squid-ink risotto-- which will turn up later in the travel section of the New York Times. Sometimes, an ordinary take-out joint will have a fantastic, completely separate, Thai-only menu you’ll never see unless you know to ask for it.

And sometimes, you might have the sneaking suspicion that you’ve ended up in a Cambodian equivalent of Denny’s or the Salvadoran version of Taco Bell, though you may not be familiar enough with the cuisine to tell for certain. At other times, you’re almost sure.

The first time I stepped into the Safety Zone Cafe, a plush Koreatown restaurant where I was supposed to meet a reporter for the Korea Times, I was almost too awe-struck to breathe: The place is a Smithsonian-quality masterpiece of bad 1970s restaurant design. There are rubber trees everywhere, some dying and some in perfect health, a nine-foot statue of a Roman emperor rendered in distressed bronze-look plastic, and a lot of customers in wide-lapel business suits.

Plaster baby elephants, mounted on lamp bases, are poised to climb doric columns toward glowing globes of light. Potted fake poinsettias line the rim of a drained reflecting pool, and lime-green satin bordello curtains open up onto a private dining room. Plaster friezes near the ceiling depict harvest bounty. The walls, half-timbered, are painted the color of mint-chip ice cream; artificial yellow roses soar against them; tiled Roman-style eaves spill down from the lilac-purple ceiling toward the sea-green carpet. The faux-bronze sea-shanty lighting fixtures look kidnapped from the fourth most elegant seafood house in Tulsa, Okla.

Wildly improbable music, everything from Pat Boone to Kenny Rogers and back again, blasts from an elaborate sound system behind the cash register . . . all that’s missing is an engraved Oly mirror or two. Everything on the Safety Zone menu is translated into English, and the restaurant seemed popular with second-generation Koreans. This is the first Koreatown place I’ve ever been to where you hear more English than Korean.

But the first three times I visited the restaurant, everybody around me seemed to be getting the same thing, the identity of which I couldn’t figure out. We had good fried rice with kimchi, a thick, chile-red plate of stuff into which the waitress folded a freshly fried egg, and we had bi bim bap , a tasty vegetable melange into which you fold the rice yourself. There was a wonderful version of Korean steak tartare, shredded bits of raw flank steak mixed about with a raw egg yolk, strips of fresh pear and a dressing that was not unlike something you’d find on a good Chinese chicken salad: a very refreshing dish. Mandu , floppy, beef-stuffed Korean dumplings floating in beef broth, were spectacular enough to bring to mind a certain dish of tortellini in brodo at a certain Bolognese trattoria.

We tried barbecued eel in a thick, sweet soy, flabbier and less concentrated than what you might expect if you go to a lot of sushi bars, and also so-so barbecued short ribs. We had something-- bul ko ki dup bap --that was like a soggy Beef Bowl sort of thing, and iron bowls of spicy black-cod stew that sang with chile and garlic, and thin cellophane chap chae noodles fried with kimchi and pork.

And finally, we managed to eavesdrop on our fellow diners, and learn the restaurant’s terrible secret--two-thirds of the people in the restaurant were eating . . . steak and potatoes! Safety Zone is the Korean Sizzler; simmered octopus its equivalent of Malibu Chicken; little bowls of kimchi its salad bar. Safety Zone may not be a joint for connoisseurs after all, but you can hardly go wrong by ordering the wrong thing.

Safety Zone Cafe, 3630 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 387-7595. Open daily, 11 a.m.-11:30 p.m. Take-out and delivery. Full bar. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $15-$25.