ROCKIN’ GOOD NEWS : Rockenwagner: Now With a Bigger Room, a Bakery, Breakfast and Lunch

The story in a nutshell: Rockenwagner has moved from its funky Venice location to a hip, gift-shoppy courtyard in Santa Monica. It now occupies a grander room that doesn’t at all feel like a meandering corridor.

And--rockin’ good news, as it were--Rockenwagner now has its own bakery. In addition to sharp California cuisine at dinner, the restaurant serves croissant-based breakfasts and, at lunch, sandwiches made with the bakery’s terrific breads. If you feel like it, you can sit outside and watch people drift around the Frank Gehry-designed Edgemar Complex while you eat a crusty lamb sandwich with sweet-and-sour beet-and-walnut salad on the side.

The big new room, disorienting though it will be to old Rockenwagnerites, will also seem a little familiar--the designer, David Kellen, worked on Hans and Mary Rockenwagner’s other restaurant, Fama, also in Santa Monica. It features the same oddly angled planes of blond wood, but in this warehouse-scale room they give a different impression, as if a miniature village had been hauled indoors in bits and pieces.

Not so familiar is Dietmar Eilbacher, a master baker imported from Germany. Customers make his acquaintance through his wares, displayed on a bread tray that may include a chewy whole wheat, a white crusted with poppy seeds, a dense walnut and a particularly crunchy and delicious “Steiner,” which contains hazelnuts, flax and sesame. The bakery also sells chocolate-cranberry-nut bread and a rye bread made with corn kernels, leeks and red peppers.

For the rest of the menu, the new Rockenwagner reassuringly resembles the old. You can still start out with a crab souffle and move on to the trio of salmon: a browned salmon fillet that looks like a pinkish braunschweiger, another cut of salmon cooked between paper-thin slices of potato, and a pile of mashed potatoes mixed with bits of salmon and studded with curly fresh potato chips. Some fresh creamed corn lurks on the plate, too.

Potatoes and corn tend to run through this menu. There is an appetizer called a short stack, consisting of crinkle-cut potato chips separating layers of salmon and salmon caviar. One night there was a special appetizer of smoked quail topped with morel mushrooms. Beside the quail lay a crinkle-cut potato-chip cup filled with the usual small vegetables and some fresh corn kernels. (Everything--quail, sauce, even the vegetables--was smoky to the max. “We just got a smoker,” the waitress explained.)

Sweetbreads, however, come in a simple but seductive sauce of vinegar and honey and not a whisper of potato. Likewise the cucumber soup, which is basically a thick, savory, vinegary broth with a little rectangle of toasted (unbuttered) phyllo enclosing cucumber chunks and about five scallops in sesame-seed crust. At the other end of the aesthetic spectrum is a calf’s-liver appetizer so rich it could almost pass for foie gras. It comes in a tart red-wine sauce speckled with currants and apple chips.

The dumplings served with crayfish tail turn out to be Chinese, not German: little steamed dim-sum packets in a light yellow sauce elegantly scented with fennel. The cleverest appetizer is barbecued-pork-and-garlic mille-feuille-- another occasion for nonbuttered phyllo sheets, toasted and assembled with a layer of tender, meaty barbecued pork, then a layer of chopped lettuce and on top a dribble of sweet Chinese black-bean sauce. It’s a sort of low-fat meat Napoleon combining about four cuisines. Unfortunately, it was served tepid on a chilly Santa Monica evening. Fortunately, next came an entree of pork tenderloin: apricot-sized rounds rolled in crushed black pepper, grilled and topped with goat cheese. The middle of the plate was filled with luscious spaetzle, just the sort of comfort food the weather called for.

Herb-crusted tuna cooked in paper has star quality. The herb seems to be primarily cilantro, and the rare fish is delicious. As a star should, the fillet leans against a brown-rice pilaf studded with bits of carrot in front of a sort of audience of snow peas in a very garlicky vinaigrette.

The smoked chicken breast recalls that smoker the waitress mentioned. The meat has a pleasant smokiness and a moist, tender texture. By contrast, the lamb tian --a Mediterranean dish of layered tomatoes, mushrooms and spinach--has a topping of sliced lamb tiled as neatly as apple slices in a tart.

Two desserts mean serious business, chocolate-wise. The warm chocolate tart, of the puffy-omelet persuasion, is intensely chocolaty and satisfyingly melted inside. Unlike most white-chocolate desserts, Rockenwagner’s white-chocolate mousse has a full chocolate flavor.

Some of the other desserts flirt coyly with avant-gardism. For instance: a warm apple “pizza” on puff pastry--”a fresh apple Danish,” one of my guests said. Hans’ baked Alaska is a standard (though very neat) model except that the grapefruit flavor of the ice cream sort of knocks out the meringue and the pastry. Grapefruit? I mean, is this Alaska, or is this Arizona?

It’s neither, of course--it’s Santa Monica. Look at the people shopping for hip gifts.

Rockenwagner, 2435 Main St . , Santa Monica; (213) 399-6504. Open Tuesday through Sunday for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Full bar. Valet parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $56-$75. Photographed by Charles Imstepf; stylist: Darren Ransdell; plates from Tesoro