Restaurants : BISTRO HEAVEN : Santa Monica’s Fennel Still Has Five French Chefs; Everything Else Has Changed

Five years ago, the food media were assuring us that onion soup was just around the corner. French bistro food, they promised, was going to be the next big thing, and any day we’d be sitting down to hearty terrines and gigots d’agneaux.

But somehow we went right on eating pasta and pizza. Grilled fish became more popular. Wolfgang Puck opened three new restaurants. We discovered the Southwest and the joys of Pacific Rim cuisine. Meanwhile, those cozy French bistros failed to materialize.

“Too heavy,” the pundits claimed. “Too homey. Nobody in Southern California wants to eat that food.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps it took a recession to make it happen. Last month, one of L.A.’s premier French restaurants tired of trying to sell high-priced food and turned itself into a bistro. The room is cozy. The food is delicious. The prices are friendly. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer place.

Fennel, you may remember, is the restaurant experiment initiated by four high-profile French chefs--Michel Rostang, Michel Chabran, Yan Jacquot and Andre Genin, with six stars among them--who decided to open the first intercontinental restaurant. With some help from Air France, they began shuttling back and forth between Orly and LAX. They had a rotating schedule, so if you were lucky, you might show up for dinner and find one of France’s finest chefs in the kitchen. A little less luck would bring you food prepared by chef-in-residence Jean-Pierre Bosc--no slouch himself.

A couple of months ago, Bosc departed for La Serre. Depending upon whom you talk to, you’ll get different reasons for his departure, but the results are simple: The restaurant changed.

The old Fennel was a slightly schizophrenic place: You could get wonderful food there (especially when chefs Rostang or Chabran were in town), but you could also have a fairly disappointing meal. This was particularly hard to take given the height of the prices and the coldness of the room.

These days the first thing you notice when you walk in the door is that the room has changed. The transformation is amazing: The chill is gone, and this is now a happy place. Looking at the warm wood, the zinc bar and the writing on the mirror, you get the sense that a bistro is what this room really wanted to be all along.

Everything else is transformed, too. In place of a pricey wine list, there’s an affordable one--with a long list of aperitifs. These range from the classic pastis to such ghastly sounding concoctions as “Le Panache,” which is made with beer and 7-Up. To nibble with your drinks, there are little $4 snacks such as tiny herb-sprinkled, fried-goat-cheese ravioli, the most enticing fast food you’ve ever tasted. The rillettes de porc are slightly bland, but the slices of saucisson served with deep-black, oil-cured olives are bistro heaven on a plate.

The menu itself is even better. And no wonder. The new chef is Laurent Grangien, who has been in charge of Rostang’s bistros (including the superb Bistrot d’a Cote) for several years. This is not imitation French food--this is the real thing. And it tastes like it.

To begin, try the mesclun, served with a little cake of roasted goat cheese layered with sliced potatoes and pine nuts. The salad itself is simply dressed, but as you sample the greens and then take a bite of the cheese-and-potato concoction, you know why people in France wear such satisfied smiles.

Now order the half-smoked salmon, which comes on a bed of those tiny green lentils from Puy. The salmon itself is mildly smoky, just enough to make it flavorful, not enough to make it lox. Lightly cooked, it has an astonishingly crisp skin that crackles when you touch it with your fork. The flavor is framed by the slightly toothy saltiness of the lentils. This is an extraordinarily delicious dish.

It does not, however, come with the luxurious gratin Dauphinois-- creamy scalloped potatoes perfumed with garlic--that accompany so many of the other dishes, such as that crisp, juicy chicken that turns on a spit in the kitchen.

Bistro food is the opposite of everything we’re told is smart to eat. It is the sort of comfort food that leads a person to wonder why the French have a lower incidence of heart disease than we do. Consider Fennel’s butter-and-cheese-filled gratin of macaroni sitting so seductively next to the jarret de veau. It’s delicious--and it couldn’t possibly be good for you.

There are lots of guilty pleasures here. An innocent-sounding salad--”Fennel’s vegetable salad with crab meat, corail sauce”--turns out to be a sneaky and delicious version of crab Louis. The terrine of chicken livers is everything it should be, which means that your doctor would rather you didn’t eat it. The warm salad of Lyon sausage, served on lentils, is also all fat and flavor. And the duck confit, with its crisp skin and silky, salty meat, is absolutely the best confit I’ve had in L.A.

But you can eat sensibly here: There’s a very sedate green salad, topped with a colorful julienne of vegetables. The flavorful soupe de poissons is nothing more than a wonderful broth filled with naked mussels. There is lots of fish--including red snapper with an entirely proper sauce vierge. And there’s a fine, lean beef stew with carrots so good you want to eat them and throw the meat away. (I would, however, steer away from the grilled pot au feu-- a contradiction in terms that is every bit as awful as it sounds.)

Desserts are as different from what they once were as are the rest of the dishes on the menu. In this case, though, it makes me a little sad. The original pastry chef at Fennel, Philippe Benot, produced gorgeous, innovative desserts. His real triumph was the hot chocolate tart in a bright-green sauce that tasted like essence of pistachios. It’s gone.

What has replaced it is the classic dessert cart of the classic bistro. Oeufs a la neige. Chocolate mousse. Tarte au citron. Tarte tatin. Prunes poached in red wine. A few glaces and sorbets. It’s a good deal (you get three for $6), and the desserts are fine--the prunes are actually better than that--but hardly memorable.

In France, after the homey comfort of a bistro meal, you’d be more likely to eat fruit and cheese than a big dessert. I’m waiting for the day when Fennel has a few ripe cheeses sitting next to that dessert cart.

But even without it, this is the perfect restaurant in which to celebrate Bastille Day. As you drink your pastis, you might want to consider that French restaurants were a direct result of the revolution. When the aristocrats lost their heads, their cooks lost their jobs and were forced to look for alternate employment. It’s taken a while, but the revolution is finally reaching our shores.

Fennel, 1535 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica; (213) 394-2079. Dinner served nightly except Sunday; lunch served Tuesday through Saturday. Full bar. MasterCard, Visa and American Express cards accepted. Dinner for 2, food only, $40-$65.

Recommended dishes: fried-goat-cheese ravioli, $4; fish soup, $6; mesclun salad, $7.50; chicken-liver terrine, $5; rotisserie chicken, $14; half-smoked salmon with lentils, $14.

Stylist: Norman Stewart