RESTAURANTS : A ROOM WITH A VIEW : With Doors on the Walls and Meat on the Menu, Cafe Del Rey Serves a Satisfying Meal

Ducts rule this room. Adelta of silvery air ducts fills Cafe Del Rey’s ceiling, slanting down toward the tables and ending in shallow cones like inverted tin coolie hats. Big Brother is air-conditioning you.

Where have we seen this air-duct fetish before? At West Channel Bar & Grill in San Pedro, the previous home of Cafe Del Rey’s chef, Katsuo Nagasawa. Here, again, he gives us a restaurant with a great view of a marina--in this case, Marina del Rey--and a dining room chockablock with gorgeous ducts.

The Marina seems to have taken to the ducts. Or maybe the neighborhood just likes the maniacally customized wooden doors that have been nailed onto the walls or the metal barrel-vaulting erected in the bar to no discernible purpose or the strict no-smoking policy. Maybe people come because of the eternal lure of seeing pleasure-boat masts bobbing on the water just a few yards from their tables.

However, I suspect that the food has a lot to do with it, because it doesn’t much resemble what was being served in this room when it housed the old Fiasco Restaurant. Nagasawa, whose other credits include La Petite Chaya, Max au Triangle and the Orange County edition of Bistango, is a stylish, eclectic chef with a taste for meaty flavors (even game; venison and bear have appeared on the daily changing menu) and pretty plate arrangements.

Take the grilled-rabbit-with-wild-mushrooms appetizer. This consists of rabbit meat mixed with mushrooms and a thick reduction of meat juices, placed in a tall, twisted cup of filo pastry topped by a swirl of carrot threads. A dainty dish for a serious carnivore.

Nagasawa has always liked to play around with American foods. He makes great crab cakes--crisp-fried, high-domed oblate spheroids with a good chewy texture, utterly unlike the mushy crab burgers that California chefs usually turn out. They’re a little dry but come with a grapefruit-flavored beurre blanc that suits them surprisingly well and a thatch of fried leek threads (“deep-fried vegetable spaghetti”) for fun.

The most memorable flavor probably belongs to the warm smoked-salmon salad, made from salmon smoked on the premises and, true to the menu designation, served warm (flash-grilled, scarcely cooked at all) on polenta with two freshly fried potato chips stuck into it. This is a creamy polenta, different from the grainier roasted-polenta appetizer, the latter a squat cylinder of cornmeal containing a few tiny bits of powerfully flavored wild bacon--that’s bacon made from wild boar--surrounded by diced zucchini and peppers in a light meat glaze rendered slightly unearthly by the addition of Cambozola (a triple-cream blue cheese).

The menu has a pizza section, and I foresee a big future for one of them--Thai chicken pizza. Topped with cheese and chicken, with spicy Thai peanut sauce playing the part of tomato sauce, it just might be what everybody’s been waiting for: a sort of hot peanut-butter sandwich with chicken and spices. When you start seeing chicken-and-peanut-butter pizzas in your frozen-foods section, just remember that Nagasawa’s version had a unique sesame-flavored crust.

In line with Nagasawa’s habit of playing around with American foods, steak-and-potatoes aficionados can get a grilled filet mignon, but it will have a crust of herbs (notable flavors of rosemary and garlic). On the side will be a puff of mashed potato spiked with jalapeno peppers, plus some crusty fried oysters and perhaps (depending on what the day’s menu decrees) a meat sauce with some lentils in it.

Or if you want pork chops with raisin sauce, you can get the skewered pork loin. It, too, is cooked in a crust--in this case, one with the sweet aromas of Chinese five spice--and mounted on a bed of sweet braised leeks. For raisin sauce, it’s really a sort of raisin chutney with curry spices. The best part is four or five barely cooked baby bok choy.

Things do get a little sweet sometimes. Nagasawa’s version of Peking duck comes with candy-sweet braised green onions and a great relish of mango and golden raisins. Too bad the duck isn’t particularly flavorful and the rolled-up pancake has dried to the consistency of paper.

That’s an uncharacteristic failure. Generally, you can trust this menu, whether you order something as simple as oak-smoked baby chicken (the flesh pink from long smoking) with a rich Pommery mustard sauce and more polenta or classically blackened ono with black-bean sauce or the elaborate Moroccan lamb with couscous. In the latter dish, tender grilled lamb chops are topped with a geodesic dome of eggplant slices, enclosing diced peppers, zucchini and onion. On one side you’ll find a mound of couscous and on the other a pool of meat glaze with a scattering of green fava beans.

That lamb chop was one of the specialties at the West Channel, as was the thick veal chop with onion marmalade served with a “double-baked potato galette”--think of it as a thick, moist potato pancake. It seems to me that the fettuccine with duck meat showed up down there, too, with its powerfully meaty sauce and scattering of green peas.

The desserts lack something of the focus of the rest of the meal. The tiramisu is a real crowd pleaser, a high-standing block of fluffy mascarpone layers separated by ladyfingers (as they should be), but it doesn’t have much coffee or liqueur flavor.

Several desserts hark back to Nagasawa’s West Channel days as well. There used to be a good creme brulee there, and the coconut creme brulee here also has a good caramelized crust and a soft texture. The sorbets and ice creams come in a tulip-shell pastry with berries--I’ve had vanilla-white-chocolate-wild-honey ice cream (tasting mostly of the honey) with warm fudge sauce on it, like a hot-fudge sundae from Lilliput. The warm apple tart seems to ring a bell, too: thin slices of apple on (hard to cut) flaky pastry with vanilla ice cream and delicious fresh butter-scotch sauce.

Chocolate features heavily on the list, but not, sad to say, in the best desserts. The chocolate silk pie will please real addicts: a thick slab of chocolate ganache on a graham-cracker crust with some berries down at the bottom, like prisoners in a chocolate dungeon. The chocolate pecan tart is passable, but the thick layer of chocolate frosting makes it all but inedible. And the chocolate parfait, though it has a nice milk-chocolate layer, consists mostly of the kind of gelatin-stiffened mousse that makes you think of continental restaurants where the desserts are designed with a shelf life of several days.

I can’t imagine going here for the desserts alone, but I certainly would for pretty food that’s also meaty food--and for that Thai chicken pizza. And especially if I wanted to avoid tobacco smoke (say, maybe that’s the reason for all those ducts).

Cafe Del Rey, 4451 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey; (213) 823-6395. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $39-$79.