RESTAURANTS : A PLACE CALLED JOE’S : It’s the Dream Diner: Plain, Unpretentious, Reasonable, Even a Bit Sophisticated

Old Rockenwagner is gone, ascended to the restaurant Valhalla of Main Street in Santa Monica. Its former Venice location is now just a place called Joe’s.

Drive around this great nation, and you’ll see many a Joe’s restaurant. In your heart, you always hope that one of them will turn out to serve some real Joe’s personal idea of cuisine and not just industrial-grade lunch-counter fare. This Joe’s is that dream diner: plain and unpretentious, producing hearty, reasonably priced food that is at the same time distinctive, even (without particularly dwelling on it) sophisticated.

The trouble with the other Joes, probably, is that most of them got their kitchen experience in an Army mess or a string of greasy spoons. Joe Miller happens to have spent time working at ambitious restaurants such as the Brentwood Bar & Grill and Cafe Katsu. He knows a lot of subtle tricks, such as hiding a luscious slice of eggplant under an arugula salad that looks as if it’s topped with poached eggs, except they’re really little globes of mild sheep’s-milk cheese.

From the counter seats, you can see Joe working hard in the tiny kitchen. Once in a while, he ventures out to ask everybody how they like the food. From the plain, typed menu to the small wine list, humble and folksy rule.

The style certainly fits this building, which has the inimitable rambling look of a California cottage to which additions have been made at random intervals. You enter by a tiny front room that has space for four tables and a couple of counter seats; the remaining 10 tables snake around the corner in what is obviously an enclosed porch (some little patches of soil remain unpaved, with what may be petunias struggling to grow in them).

Joe’s draws a wider clientele than a lot of restaurants: foodies, bohemians and seniors who’re pleased to find a place that respects the potato. The seniors probably live in the neighborhood, and the bohemians might have wandered in from one of the art galleries or coffee shops nearby. As for the foodies--well, if they came expecting to find Rockenwagner, they’re in for a surprise.

It’s true: Joe’s food has none of the sheen of the former inhabitant’s. But it does have its charm. Call it Recession Nouvelle, meat-and-potatoes California Cuisine or whatever you like. You don’t find this particular mix of sophistication and homeyness anywhere else.

The green salad, for instance, has the usual assorted greens, but they’re tossed with ranch dressing, not balsamic vinaigrette. You can get shiitake mushrooms (with mozzarella melted on them), but the mushrooms--big, meaty ones--taste distinctly as if they’ve been brushed with A-1 steak sauce.

And the potato does roam widely on this menu. With many an entree, mashed potatoes come under the meat, or a baked potato (with a Parmesan topping) shares the plate. The potato has been sneaking back into California Cuisine, but Joe’s also breaks the still widespread taboo on butter. Some dishes positively drown in it.

The excellent seafood risotto--saffrony, not quite mushy, topped with exquisite scallops--has the most fashionable look of any dish here. A red-orange thatch of fried carrot threads rides on top, and an aromatic seafood sauce collects around the bottom. The deceptively simple tuna tartare sounds like an ‘80s cliche--just chunks of raw tuna bound with mayonnaise and a lot of capers--but it’s mounded on a thin slice of salmon, which improves it surprisingly.

If you order the chicken-ravioli appetizer, you get two large ones in rather aggressively chewy al dente dough. A light but effective reduction of tomato juices serves for a sauce, though, and the plate is casually strewn with tomatoes and sprinkled with minced basil. Casual strewing is as much a trademark of this kitchen as mashed potatoes.

Or fried wild mushrooms. Never mind that roasted beef sounds like something you might eat at the Renaissance Faire. On top of mostly well-done beef slices, themselves arranged on a mound of mashed potatoes, Joe shovels a savory heap of mushrooms and onions, all fried quite brown and sprinkled with balsamic vinegar. In fact, if this weren’t such a meat-and-potatoes dish, you could just about call it a salad in balsamic vinaigrette.

Along the same general lines, the roast pork loin consists of a mound of mashed potatoes topped by three slices of pork loin rolled up with tiny slivers of carrot. At the base of the mashed-potato mountain lies a pool of reduced pork juices, and the whole concoction is strewn--yes, strewn--with fried mushrooms and caramelized garlic cloves.

Salmon with asparagus comes on an elongated plate. The salmon, heated until crisp (“Very hot plate,” warns the waiter), forms a sort of median strip separating a sharp red-wine reduction from half a dozen asparagus spears, some wild rice and a big handful of sliced carrot (unsauced, but at least not mushy).

The rest of the entrees don’t aim quite so high. The pleasant “crispy chicken” is definitely crisp--one side has been fried red-orange--but it simply sits on a bed of spinach in some slightly sweet meat juices. You can also get halibut in a sauce liberally seasoned with cumin and sprinkled with thin slices of artichoke heart deep-fried until crisp, like wan yellow-green blossoms.

There are also two prix-fixe dinners consisting of either two or three appetizers and an entree, the choices overlapping the regular menu somewhat. Tuna tartare, chicken ravioli and roast pork loin, for instance, show up on the prix-fixe as well as the a la carte side of the menu.

The soup of the day seems strictly a prix-fixe affair, and I have had a great, tangy fresh cream-of-tomato soup with fried mushrooms (of course) floating in it. By contrast, spaghetti with clams tasted like something from an Italian restaurant 20 years ago, with a rather acid fresh tomato sauce and about three tiny clams.

One night I ordered the more expensive prix-fixe dinner and got a simple salad of green beans in a garlicky dressing, crunchy grilled shrimp with a couple of pieces of sun-dried tomato that had been reconstituted and were somewhat sweet, like a cross between tomato paste and ketchup. Then came a rich but rather plain hot potato-and-leek soup and then, as a third appetizer, a small portion of the sweet-fleshed fish known as dorade. The waiter said it was not the same dish as the regular menu’s dorade with fingerling potatoes, but it did come with firm-fleshed diced potato, lima beans and a lot of butter. The entree proper (I could have taken the pork loin instead) was turkey breast with wild rice.

With the prix-fixe dinners, you get what the menu calls a dessert surprise. Usually, the surprise is that the waiter hands you the dessert menu and lets you pick any dessert you want. On one particular night, the surprise was actually chosen for me, but it was probably the best dessert in the house: tarte tatin.

A lot of boring tarte tatins have been served in our town, usually because chefs are afraid to let the apples get as caramelized as they should be. Not so here: The apples are very sweet and soft--and very dark from a caramelized sauce. On the side comes a mound that at first looks like vanilla ice cream but turns out to be vanilla-scented cream whipped until it’s almost butter.

The dessert menu also lists a terrific banana mousse, topped with fried banana slices and surrounded with mango sauce. As a sort of self-referential joke, the plate is strewn with strawberry chunks exactly as the earlier courses are often strewn with tomato chunks.

The chocolate fudge cake consists of layers of good fudge plus some chocolate ice cream. A poached pear comes with a sort of cocoa-flavored bread of chocolate biscotto and whipped cream. The hazelnut creme brulee has chocolate stuff in it, too, and a thick and somewhat gluey caramel crust. The cheesecake is the kind with a tart frosting and comes with lots of berries and grapes.

And to finish, of course you’ll want a cup of joe. Here you can get it regular or decaf and even in a tiny cup with lemon peel.

Joe’s Restaurant, 1023 Abbot Kinney Blvd . , Venice; (310) 399-5811. Open for dinner Tuesday through Sunday and for brunch Saturday and Sunday. Valet parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$58.

Food stylist: Norman Stewart; props: Tesoro, Beverly Hills; silverware: Pavillon Christofle, Beverly Hills