GARDENS OF EATING : Four Seasons’ Restaurant Offers Super Service, Fabulous Food--and a Big Bill

Ceremoniously, the waiter spooned pale tomato broth and radiatore (the new pasta in town-- rotini ‘s hipper cousin) over diced tomatoes, shredded lettuce and pale-green fava beans. Beautiful: a gentle, summery still life. And the worst possible introduction to Gardens at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Raw vegetables and a little pasta in warm tomato juice! Come on ; nobody should get away with calling this thin, acid stuff “pesto minestrone,” even if it does have shredded basil in it. I thought desperately of canceling my entree and getting out of there.

The menu had marked the pesto minestrone with a star for healthful qualities, and on general principles I should have asked the waiter exactly how healthful an experience I was letting myself in for. I knew that the executive chef at Gardens had spoken ominously--using a tense that grammarians probably call the futurological present perfect--of providing food “in keeping with the way of life people have moved toward.”

At any rate, I stayed, tasting as much of the soup as scientific study required--and was glad I did. The next course (unstarred) was terrific: a big veal chop served with porcini mushrooms and a satiny mound of orzo pasta in place of rice, all moistened with meat glaze. This was more like the way of eating that people in Los Angeles have moved toward.

The executive chef referred to, John Makin, has impressive credentials. In 1987, when he opened a Napa Valley restaurant called Duckworth, Food & Wine magazine rated him one of the 10 top chefs in the country. He has worked at a number of hotels, such as the Remington in Houston and the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, and I mean no disrespect to say that it shows. If I had to characterize what comes out of this kitchen, I’d call it luxury-hotel, prestige-dining-room food.

That means, first of all, plenty of extras: a little mound of tuna tartare on toast arrives almost as soon as you sit down, followed by a basket with four kinds of very good bread (including hot brioche toast), plus fresh bread sticks with a swirl of sesame and poppy seeds along their lengths. After dessert, the waiter--and Gardens has particularly good waiters: attentive but unobtrusive, as this quietly elegant room calls for--brings out a two-tiered silver tray of complimentary chocolates and pastries.

It also means high-gloss cookery. Every course is gorgeous, and no two plates look alike. The crab meat in the crab salad is surrounded by a little hedge made of a cucumber cut into a paper-thin spiral. The warm shredded-duck salad consists of a thick patty--practically a burger--of duck meat in a crust of crushed walnuts, partly hidden under a disheveled array of baby greens.

Seared ahi tuna “with a seaweed roll mosaic” turns out to be two old friends, slices of tuna barely cooked at the edges and raw in the middle, and sushi with a bowl of soy-and-sake ponzu sauce on the side. Very good, too, for this kind of thing, but above all impressive to look at on its square black plate. In the middle sits a dollop of wasabi painstakingly molded into the shape of a tiny pear, complete with a bit of mint for a pear leaf.

And so it goes. When Gardens serves baby corncobs, they’re crisp--apparently fresh rather than canned. The grilled shrimp come on a bed of wonderful wild mushrooms. The roast quail with gnocchi has a buttery parsley sauce and is one of the best quail appetizers around.

The entrees--that is, the non-starred, non-healthful entrees--are meaty, with interesting accompaniments. A whole Maine lobster with generous claws is removed from the shell and served, semi-reassembled, on top of a vegetable lasagna--slices of squash and eggplant that miraculously approximate the texture of pasta. The roast rack of lamb has its own particular layered companion, a sort of vegetable terrine in dryish layers like a baklava.

A big chunk of dry-aged prime New York steak comes with what the menu calls a crispy potato dome, more or less an individual portion of potatoes Anna. The surprise in the crispy salmon is that the crisp part is a sheet of salmon skin, arranged on top of a large piece of salmon, like a tin roof. Needless to say, fried salmon skin has exclusively textural interest, but the salmon itself is flavorful.

All these items come from the regular, or left-hand, side of the menu. The right side is a three-course prix-fixe dinner ($42), which bears the name of Brandon Reed, an alumnus of L’Orangerie and Max Au Triangle who works under Makin. I’ve found some excellent things on this ever-changing list: a classical lobster bisque; a seductive entree of scallops with luscious ravioli (of a curious cylindrical shape, rather like a New Year’s party favor) that taste as if there’s a bit of coconut in them; a dish of lamb chops with dark red-wine sauce, blackberries and radicchio that is a ravishing feast for the eyes.

A sheet of fried foie gras on salad greens doesn’t seem very well thought out, though. Likewise, a lobster terrine gave the effect of chunks of lobster haphazardly layered with vegetables. Still, on the whole, the prix-fixe dinner is worth considering, especially since there are usually two or three choices for each course.

After the pesto minestrone experience, I avoided most of the health-starred dishes--a little hard to do in the entree category, where there are a lot of them--but those I did try weren’t half-bad. A dish of shrimp with broad noodles, part of one night’s prix-fixe meal, was enjoyably crunchy as well as a bit spicy, and the half-chicken with mashed potatoes on the regular menu was an excellent herb-marinated roasted chicken. The skin had been removed for fat-avoidance purposes, but serious dieters should exercise restraint anyway--it’s half of a fairly large chicken.

The desserts include a creme brulee with a particularly delicate crust and a heavy vanilla flavor, the usual brownie-like flourless chocolate cake and a rich mascarpone cheesecake, almost like an Italian coeur a la creme. The best desserts fall at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum: The milk-chocolate timbale with sesame cream looks like a cylindrical Art Deco building with a sort of chocolate flagpole. Summer pudding, on the other hand, is a naive but irresistibly charming English dessert of bread soaked with fresh berry juices and topped with cream.

What have I learned by this experience? That hotel dining can be elegant and delightful, as long as price is no object; that John Makin appears to deserve the praise that has been heaped upon him; and that you don’t have to be afraid of starred dishes. Not always , anyway.

Gardens, Four Seasons Hotel, 300 S. Doheny Drive, Los Angeles; (213) 273-2222. Open for breakfast and dinner daily, for brunch Sunday and for lunch Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $63-$127.

Food stylist: Norman Stewart