Restaurants : RETRO HOLLYWOOD : Classy Nostalgia Mingles With Nouvelle Cuisine in Seward Street’s Film-Industry Canteen

Seward Street is part of the real Hollywood. The working Hollywood, that is--not the glamour side and not Hollywood Boulevard, with its strange nocturnal life forms. Seward Street is a street you’d probably never have any reason to drive down unless you were getting some film reels developed.

Big blank walls, most no higher than two stories, line Seward: Film labs and sound stages don’t go in for a lot of windows. It looks like an industrial neighborhood in a small town, which is exactly what Hollywood was when this street got into its line of work. It radiates backstage-film-biz nostalgia.

This is still a working industrial district, and it needs a place to eat. In the Hollywood Canteen, it has both: a workaday diner and an in-group nostalgia palace.

The Hollywood Canteen does this in a distinctly classy way. You don’t find the photos of dead celebrities that pass for film nostalgia in fast-food outlets on Highland Avenue. Located in a dowdy old green stucco building, the Hollywood Canteen reproduces the visual style of the ‘30s and ‘40s with unusual fidelity, complete with the touching stodginess generally airbrushed out of period revivals. It doesn’t let you forget that this was an age that yearned for elegance and dignity on a trailer-court budget.

The front room features a U-shaped lunch counter whose green-terrazzo surface shows signs of having seen prolonged duty; pies and newspapers are piled casually at each end. A banquette with tables runs along two walls. Through a doorway with old-fashioned pilaster-style frames is a dining room full of plain ‘30s-style dark booths (the wood veneer perhaps not quite as dark as one might like) and, beyond that, a dining garden. Both rooms have screwy light fixtures of the restrained Art Deco sort seen in Myrna Loy movies.

In defiance of the anti-tobacco movement, a tiny takeout window displays cigars and cigarettes for sale alongside movie trade publications and Altoids Curiously Refreshing Mints. Selling cigarettes goes with the period territory, of course, but the habit contrasts curiously with the menu’s boast of serving organic meat and produce whenever possible. Into every nostalgia restaurant a little anachronism must fall, just as in so many costume movies the heroine must have a modern hairdo.

For instance: At breakfast you have a conventional choice of pancakes, French toast, omelet or two eggs any style. Everything comes with nicely done hash browns and a choice of sausage--but the choices include the healthful (turkey) and the exotic (maple-flavored), and the links are miniature, a la nouvelle cuisine: fat little bullets about 1 3/4 inches long. One of the omelet fillings is artichoke heart (which unfortunately colors the eggs a dingy mustard yellow).

The lunch menu--basically a streamlined version of dinner with extra sandwiches--contains the most emphatic anachronism: a grilled-fish sandwich on olive bread with lettuce, tomato and guacamole. On the side come a designer-type potato salad of new potatoes and sweet peppers and the Hollywood Canteen’s signature vegetable, a soft and slithery julienne of cucumber. I’d prefer a signature with a little more flavor--sweet or salty or sour or something--but in Hollywood, uniqueness counts.

At breakfast and lunch, a lot of film-industry working stiffs come here. Dinner is a shade more glamorous, with the occasional Marilyn Monroe wanna-be dining at a strategically chosen table, but don’t expect to see any luminaries whose names you might know. “Looks like production and PR people,” hazarded one of my guests. Hopeful actors wait on tables, as usual, and so do occasional members of the slightly less numerous tribe of hopeful screenwriters.

The menu, partly printed in a retro typeface, has a feature of almost unheard-of archaism for a hip restaurant: The names of the dishes are just names, not virtual recipes in the California Cuisine tradition (“three sea scallops and two mussels in a such-and-such sauce on radicchio with brioche toast”). As a result, the possibility of a surprise still exists.

The baldly named spinach salad, for instance, turns out to include toasted hazelnuts, mandarin slices and a whole-seed mustard dressing. The Caesar salad comes with fresh bread nuggets in place of croutons: miniature buns the size of jawbreakers baked with Parmesan on top. Many other menus would trumpet them.

On the other hand, the rich, ham-fragrant split-pea soup (served Mondays) contains croutons, too, but the sort nobody should boast about. They have a nasty stale-garlic smell.

The rest of the menu has somewhat better aim. The appetizer of wild mushrooms on sourdough would do honor to any Westside restaurant. (Apparently, sourdough is a generic term here--you might actually get wheat toast. But who cares.) It tastes as meaty as a burger--an elegant shiitake burger.

In fact, it’s decidedly better than the menu’s organic-beef hamburger. The hamburger certainly looks good--a thick, browned patty in a grill-marked bun--but the kitchen blisters the exterior of the meat disastrously, and I’ve been served a grill-marked bun that was stone cold.

The potato pancake with smoked salmon ranks with the mushroom appetizer: thin slices of salmon toothpicked to a medium-thin potato patty with chunks of onion in it.

The Hollywood Canteen’s chili is good, too--or rather its chilis, since you can get the basic vegetarian model augmented with chicken or beef. Red beans and a strong bean broth make up the bulk of the chilis, but onions, sweet peppers and chunks of squash float around in there as well.

The appetizers may have occasionally wandered into ‘90s territory (example: a salad with raw tuna as red as chunks of watermelon), but the entrees have a proper period air. Fifty years ago, the enjoyable Canteen chicken, with its flavors of mustard and Worcestershire, would probably have been called deviled chicken.

The New York steak would have been smothered in onions rather than shallots (well, not quite smothered), but the sauce has a pre-Julia Child overtone suspiciously like A-1 Sauce. A certain chewiness adds old-fashioned character.

Chicken stew with mushrooms is, in effect, a chicken shepherd’s pie--chicken fricassee with bell peppers and rosemary, crisscrossed by piped mashed potato. I suppose mushrooms are involved, but not many--if it’s mushrooms you want, stick to the shiitake appetizer.

The lamb chops are tender, smoky, compact chunks of meat that look a full two inches thick and come in a sweetish red-wine sauce with a hint of spice.

I wouldn’t want my life to depend on identifying the “glaze” on the glazed salmon; I suspect it might be the topping of softened onions lightly flecked with orange relish. This rests on a perfectly cooked piece of fish, which in turn rests on some of the Canteen’s ever-present cucumber julienne. The rest of the plate remains bare, making this perhaps the only thing here with the spare, empty look of a nouvelle entree.

People tolerate less anachronism at dessert time--perhaps a reassuring chocolate cheesecake to smooth re-entry to the present. At any rate, you can get chocolate cheesecake, one with less dissonance between the chocolate and the cheese than usual, topped with curls of white chocolate some people--but not this one--love. The regular cheesecake is on the sweet side, even a bit sweeter than the chocolate one.

This kitchen’s idea of creme brulee rather resembles vanilla pudding, and its strawberry-rhubarb pie could pass for strawberry pie without quite enough sugar. The low-rise pear tart has strange dark patches, possibly pieces of colored skin, but tastes right.

All is forgiven, though, with one bite of that endangered species of dessert, banana-cream pie. Dietarily indefensible, topped with thick whipped cream, it belongs heart and soul to the canteen era. And to judge by the way people gobble it up at the Hollywood Canteen, it belongs to the present, too.

Hollywood Canteen, 1006 N. Seward St., Hollywood; (213) 465-0961. Open for breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday and for dinner Monday through Saturday. Beer and wine. Valet parking. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$76.

Food stylist: Alice M. Hart/ Food for Film