RESTAURANT REVIEW : Doin’ the Mashed Potato at Boogies

“Eat Heavy . . . Dress Cool.” This is the motto of Boogies, a clothes emporium-cum-diner on the corner of the new annex of the Westside Pavilion. Implicit in the motto, of course, is all the unattainability and heartbreak of the fashionable lifestyle, since it is virtually impossible to make a practice of eating heavy and looking halfway cool in the sheer fabrics and skin-tight Spandex displayed on Boogies’ clothing racks.

Certainly, when a friend and I met for lunch at Boogies, we were not dressed particularly cool. The host nevertheless greeted us cheerfully and led us to a booth with purple seats and a white-and-black squiggled tabletop. He gave us cardboard menus in the shape of those old tabletop jukeboxes, only instead of pages of song selections, we flipped through pages of food items and little slogans, such as: “The bigger the tip, the better the service.”

There are more of these little sayings up on the walls, along with pictures of celebrities, one of Marvin Gaye’s platinum albums and pictures that have been altered to show George Bush and Marilyn Monroe in Boogies at the same time.

Each wall is a different color--red, green-blue, yellow. Over the kitchen are a lot of purple neon squiggles. On this visit, rock ‘n’ roll played at a pretty palatable volume--that is, we could talk and still hear each other.

Our waiter was a very nice-looking young man with many rings on his fingers and in his ears. He also had an incipient Van Dyke-goatee, which, he told us, he grew for his other job as a model. He sat down with us companionably in the booth to take our order.

There’s nothing formal or serious about Boogies. Right there in the menu it says: “If you think you have reservations, you’re in the wrong place.” If ever there was a restaurant where it’s OK for the waiter to schmooze with the customers, Boogies is it. Besides, we had some questions.

“Do you have a problem with people sleeping in your booths?” my friend asked. She pointed to the sign that said, “We don’t eat in your bed, please don’t sleep in our booths.”

“No, no problem,” said our waiter.

“How about dining and dashing?” I asked. “A lot of people do that here?” I pointed to the saying, “Warning: Dining and Dashing could be hazardous to your health.”

“Not really,” said the waiter. The signs, the sayings, he said, were all for decoration.

The menu also said, “All customers with serious personal problems will be served first.” Luckily, there were no ugly revelations in this respect: We ordered onion rings for starters and they were put down squarely between us, indicating, no doubt, that our personal problems were of an equal severity. The onion rings themselves were seriously greasy, even after we blotted them with a wad of paper napkins.

A cold meat-loaf sandwich came on untoasted “Texas toast,” a thick-sliced preternaturally yellow bread that a lot of coffee shops use for French toast, or serve heated with dinner. Untoasted, it’s a little like eating a moist stack of yellow paper napkins. Buried deep in all that yellowness, the meat loaf was bland, standard mystery meat. But the accompanying mashed potatoes, made with unskinned red-rose potatoes, were delicious and, hands down, the best thing I ate at Boogies.

Corn chili was relatively tasteless, lukewarm corn chowder. A half tuna melt was a glob of tuna salad on an untoasted, sodden English muffin with a slice of orange cheese partially melted on top.

Since nothing other than the mashed potatoes was particularly worth eating, we had plenty of room for dessert. Besides, the menu told us, “You haven’t lived until you’ve tried our desserts.” “Mom’s” deep-dish apple pie let on that, these days, Mom is working in a commercial bakery. The “Little Mini,” a sundae for lightweights, was still about a pound of ice cream, hot caramel, whipped cream and nuts. Before I was halfway through, I felt the sugar activating my bloodstream as if a number of auxiliary turbo engines had been attached to my heart. Ah hah! So this is unlived life.

I came back to Boogies on a Saturday afternoon and this time the music louder, so loud they could have taken down the sign forbidding sleeping in the booths because nobody could have.

The menu said, “Our chili speaks for itself,” and I was curious to find out what it had to say. The barely warm bean-and-meat stew said to me, “You have to be really desperate to eat me.”

We also tried a hamburger, ordered medium, which came out well-done on a dry bun and in need of some cool dressing. Again, the potatoes--this time, heaps of curly golden French fries--were the most compelling item. A wedge of carrot cake was big, sweet and oddly gummy. Hey, the food is not great at Boogies, but it is what the sign says: heavy.

After lunch, we browsed through the clothing department of Boogies, but after such a heavy, belt-loosening snack in the diner, the thought of maneuvering in and out of various garments was too onerous to contemplate. After all, it’s hard to keep consuming when one feels sated. Perhaps one more word of warning should be tacked on Boogies’ walls: “Shop first, eat last.”

Boogies Diner, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., Westside Pavilion, Los Angeles, (310) 446-8800. Open seven days 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Liquor license pending. Parking. Major credit cards accepted. Lunch for two, food only, $17.50-$40.