Restaurants : THE GALLOPING GOURMETS : At the Classroom in the Equestrian Center, Expect Fancy Hotel Fare--and That Ain’t Hay

What’s an electric train doing at the Equestrian Center? That’s our first question. It seems to be chugging through a village of gingerbread houses.

The gingerbread houses apparently constitute a sort of term paper for students at the Los Angeles International Culinary Institute, a chefs’ school located at this horse-riding, polo-game-hosting establishment in Burbank. When you eat at the Classroom--the Equestrian Center restaurant operated in conjunction with the LAICI--you can look through a plate-glass window, right above the gingerbread display, and see student chefs in toques reducing veal stock and doing other chef-like stuff.

I’ll wager the gingerbread-house idea came from the school’s president, Raimund Hofmeister. Hofmeister is a European-style master chef--one of only 47 in this country, as the Classroom likes to point out. He served on the ’84 U.S. Culinary Olympics team, and a private dining room at the restaurant is just about wallpapered with his cooking awards. Hofmeister comes from a tradition that regards carving swans in ice and baking cakes in the form of Gothic cathedrals as important branches of the culinary art.

Not that the food served at the Classroom leans to the sculptural. Mostly it can be described as skillfully and painstakingly prepared, like the best hotel cooking (two chefs who serve under Hofmeister followed him from his former post at the Century Plaza). Take the Classroom’s hasenpfeffer: The stewed rabbit comes in a strongly reduced red-wine sauce strewn with peas--and carrot balls almost exactly the same size as the peas. This is the sort of restaurant where you see an unpeeled tomato about as often as you see a waiter not wearing a tux--viz., never, in my experience.

You can find a lot to like about this sort of cooking if you don’t pine for the whimsy and casual chance-taking of the California style. What the menu calls squab pot - au - feu is in effect an excellent onion soup, a meaty broth with a fresh, clean onion (or perhaps shallot) flavor, ornamented with pieces of squab and chunks of carrot and green bean.

The appetizers ring a few changes on the usual continental list. Duck liver comes with orzo pasta apparently cooked in stock and then dosed with butter. It’s very rich, but not merely rich, as continental cooking tends to be in Los Angeles.

Lobster salad with wildflower honey leans more to the wildflowers than the honey (some edible blossoms are scattered over the lobster chunks), but it makes for a delicious, not-quite-heavy appetizer. A little doily of potatoes Anna (think of them as fresh potato chips cooked in bulk) elegantly accompanies the smoked salmon with caper sauce, though $18 is a steep price for a little elegance.

This menu (actually designed by Hofmeister associate Russell Scott) doesn’t often stray into exotic territory. A watermelon-and-onion salad is one instance, and it happens to work fairly well. The menu ominously notes that the escargots with a Fume Blanc reduction come in a coffee-cream-curry sauce, but the effect is of curried cream sauce with faint whispers, at most, of coffee and wine--a surpassingly subtle flavor.

Among the entrees, the steak--pardon me, the grapevine-smoked baby-beef rib-eye steak--is said to enjoy the company of a sauce made from reduced Lytton Springs Zinfandel. It’s a good, tangy red-wine sauce, but I defy anybody to identify a particular wine once it’s been cooked. What you notice most about this dish is how very smoky the meat is; I thought there must be a piece of bacon wrapped around it.

The duck-and-bean cassoulet includes lengths of herby sausage, chunks of duck meat and pieces of skin that are fairly crisp at the start but inclined to soften as the dish sits. I suspect this stew was made of ingredients assembled at the last minute. And beans, of course--not the white beans traditional for this dish, but black-eyed peas and a couple of fresh fava beans. This new version of a classic dish deserves to be imitated.

In Los Angeles, you have to have at least one dish that sounds totally unprecedented, and at the Classroom it’s the roast rack of lamb with mango-chutney-fig-and-peanut crust. At first the sweet brown crust (frosting is more like it) tastes crazy. Then you realize that the lamb meat is a bit sweet itself, so the crust makes some kind of sense.

After these items, the rest of the menu seems pretty familiar. John Dory is treated to a basic Mediterranean tomato-and-basil sauce; lobster comes in vanilla cream sauce, a whiff of avant-gardism circa 1980. Roast loin of venison qualifies as a low-calorie meat but tastes rather neutral. I couldn’t quite detect the chanterelle mushrooms in the juniper-brandy sauce.

At dessert time, the traditionalism of this kitchen manifests itself. The main event, believe it or not, is crepes Suzette--very good ones, too, with bits of pineapple and peeled orange sections in the orange-liqueur sauce (flamed in the kitchen, not at the table). The Classroom’s enjoyable version of creme brulee, with a garnish of brandied pears, falls on the dry side of the custard spectrum. The rest of the dessert list consists of pastries, such as Black Forest cake, that tend to have gelatin-stiffened cream fillings, and a lumpy-looking dish of banana browned in sabayon sauce that seems out of place in the neatnik context of the Classroom.

The Classroom’s lunch menu resembles the dinner menu at the Equestrian Bar and Grill, the more informal restaurant adjoining the Classroom. It runs to ethnic inspirations such as chile relleno with goat cheese, roasted chicken with corn fritters and salsify-cream sauce, and braised lamb shanks (a big portion, incidentally). Lunch can be an enjoyable meal, too. When it’s light outside, you have more to look at than just the students in the kitchen. Through the picture windows, you can see horses running around at the Equestrian Center.

Which brings me to the last question: What’s a chef’s school doing at the Equestrian Center?

The Classroom, at the Equestrian Center, 480 Riverside Drive, Burbank; (818) 840-1320. Lunch and dinner served Tuesday through Saturday; Sunday brunch. Full bar. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $57-$104.