RESTAURANTS : ON THE BEACH : Wolfgang Puck’s Newest Is a Neighborhood, Multiethnic Culinary Aquarium

It’s easy to tell that Wolfgang Puck’s newest restaurant, Granita, was designed by his wife and partner, Barbara Lazaroff. It doesn’t feature a riot of chinoiserie like their Chinois on Main, but it roils and undulates in the same inimitable style. What look like undersea life forms cover most surfaces, blobby invertebrate shapes in slate green and a glowing, mildly sinister pink. It’s like a musky Lazaroff tribute to “The Little Mermaid.”

Maybe a restaurant located near the beach ought to look like a giant aquarium, but the relatively quiet submarine color scheme may have another purpose. While Puck has located his other restaurants in the teeming Westside, he’s put Granita 11 miles up the coast in quiet, exclusive Malibu. It’s a neighborhood restaurant in a way that Spago, Chinois and Eureka can never be.

Hence the colors run to pastels, and the furniture is covered in more sound-absorbent fabric than at Puck’s other restaurants (the noise level never reaches Spago’s roar, to say nothing of Eureka’s industrial howl). Granita is actually located in a shopping center, Malibu Colony Plaza. In its lurid way, Granita is gracious and homey, even suburban.

Puck’s restaurants have always catered to celebrities, so in coming to the Malibu Colony, Puck is in effect providing them the convenience of their own Puckateria. This may explain why Granita lacks the distinct culinary personality of Spago (pizza and pasta), Chinois (Chinese) and Eureka (beer and sausage). Granita--call it Wolfgang’s One-Stop--serves a little of all three.

It serves the least of Eureka. However, now that Granita is officially open, you can get excellent Eureka-style pork sausages (a pair of surprisingly long ones) with mashed potatoes and red-cabbage salad at lunch.

Mostly Granita serves Puck’s sort of Italian food--not surprising, as chef, sous-chef and pastry chef (Joseph Manzare, Kevin Ripley and Rochelle Huppin) have all worked at Spago. That means pizzas, of course, such as the echt -Spago-ish lamb-sausage pizza. The “Jewish pizza” that Puck has often served at Spago (but not listed on the menu) goes a little further here. It has become the potato galette : as it were, lox and cream cheese (well, creme fraiche) on a giant potato pancake that has been baked crisp in a pizza oven.

That means pastas too, of course; for example, duck-and-sun-dried-tomato ravioli with a mysterious sauce that bears a faint suggestion of maple syrup or a soupy shrimp-and-scallop risotto, strongly perfumed with saffron. It means carpaccio--rather, blue-fin tuna carpaccio: thick slices of fresh raw fish, mingled with strips of pickled ginger. This is an East Asian sort of carpaccio, come to think of it (hey, here in Malibu, we’re within walking distance of the Pacific Rim). Likewise, the grilled-shrimp appetizer comes with a Thai cucumber salad that gets more real Thai flavor than you’d have imagined in a polyethnic restaurant. An appetizer of steamed clams and mussels--which overflow the soup plate, a portion almost suitable for an entree--come in a salty, aromatic and faintly bitter Chinese black-bean sauce, a distinct improvement on the plain broth traditionally served with steamed clams.

For a main course, the waiters tend to steer you to the Chinese-style duck--let them, unless you’ve already had your fat quota for the week. The meat is rich with melting fat, surpassingly tender and well browned. Among the entrees, though, the Mediterranean generally rules.

A rich Mediterranean fish soup--fish, shrimp and half a lobster--comes in a white-wine-and-saffron sauce almost as flavorful (though not as thick) as a bisque. You can get Sonoma lamb (or veal, depending on what the ever-shifting menu decrees) with a Provencal sort of idea: artichoke mousse. Grilled New York steak gets cut into slices thicker than the nouvelle cuisine tradition, probably to keep the meat warm on its bed of watercress, and sprinkled with caramelized onions and balsamic vinegar.

Lunch partly duplicates the dinner menu, but it also offers possibly the only lobster-and-bacon club sandwich on pecan bread in town. It’s amusingly indulgent, though messy to handle. “Never order this on a date,” said my lunch partner, wiping her hands on everything in reach.

Granita’s name refers to an Italian frozen dessert made without eggs or cream to give it a smooth texture--the literal meaning is grainy. Naturally, the dessert list features a couple of granitas . Granita di limone , served in a coconut tuile cookie, is just the thing for a hot day, tart and fresh-tasting. The granita di caffe , wrapped in a sort of broad belt of chocolate and including some semifrozen cream, is richer and somehow colder--it deserves a very hot day.

You can get an unusually good tangy cheesecake, marbled with chocolate. The chocolate tiramisu has layers of semifrozen ice milk between the layers of sponge cake and is rather hard to eat, particularly with its remarkably tough cap of something candied. The hazelnut semifreddo canoli is culinary deconstructionism: a slug of rich ice served with three hazelnut wafers substituting for a canoli tube.

Pot de creme is a creamier version of old-fashioned chocolate pudding with a sugar crust, like creme brulee . The powerful chocolate-hazelnut cake resembles a large puffy brownie. Apple-fennel tart (the fennel appears to be in the crust) has a thick topping of apples and a little accompanying sugar cookie in the shape of a shark.

Which brings us back to this culinary aquarium. The big question, for some people at least, is, where are the “good” seats? My guess is in the room at the back--separated from the crowd somewhat but with a pretty view of the room. Siberia is the outdoor seating, I suppose: clear windows, with their wavy leading patterns, separate you from the throng. Only the hedging protects you from the real world--the shopping-center parking lot.

It’s a glasnost Siberia, though, decently provided with a full complement of submarine design elements and even some painted ponds snaking around the floor. Sitting there wouldn’t be punishment.

Granita, 23725 W. Malibu Road, Malibu; (213) 456-0488. Open for dinner nightly; Wednesday through Friday for lunch. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $48-$80.