A CARIBBEAN CRUISE : With His Latest Cha Cha Cha, Toribio Prado Sails His Spicy Islands Cuisine Into the Valley

Not so long ago, people were always asking what the next cuisine was going to be. The usual confident answer was that after Thai, Cajun and Southwestern, the only possible candidate was Caribbean. So far, though, the next cuisine has simply turned out to be more Italian food, only less expensive, and we don’t hear the question so much these days.

But maybe Caribbean cuisine really is gathering steam. A few years back, Toribio Prado opened a successful little joint in East Hollywood called Cha Cha Cha, with a jazzy ambience of spicy food, serious noise and giddy paintings. He followed that with Cafe Mambo in East Hollywood and Prado on Larchmont Avenue, and now he has opened his second Cha Cha Cha, this one in the San Fernando Valley.

Cha Cha Cha Encino inevitably doesn’t have quite so much the air of a bohemian hangout as the original at Virgil and Melrose. It’s far larger--positively barn-like, in fact--so the tables are farther apart, and you don’t get to know the people at the next table as well as you do, willy-nilly, at the old Cha Cha Cha. This vast whitewashed space, splattered with sunny, tropical naive art heavy on red and yellow, imparts a quieter and more expansive feeling, from the metal sculpture of an angel hanging from the ceiling to the antique map of the Caribbean painted on the floor.

The menu defines Caribbean food rather broadly--there’s room for an Argentine steak, for instance--and it makes its peace with the more-Italian-less-expensive mood of the times. The offerings include pastas and pizzas (notably a terrific garlic pizza topped with a rich cheese and lots of chewy, browned cloves) and are sanely priced. Mostly, though, the menu sticks to the rough and lively tropical food you’d expect.

Crispy jerk pork, for instance, pleasingly splits the difference between the dryish Jamaican barbecue and Mexican carnitas (not the really crisp kind, despite the dish’s name), while the spicing suggests West Indian curry. I’ve had it at dinner in a dark broth and at brunch accompanied by bits of raw asparagus and three sauces: a bland cilantro pesto tasting mostly of nuts, a good, creamy mustard sauce and a sweet-sour compote of rhubarb and cranberries.

Banana boats--short cylinders of potato and tomato wrapped in fried slices of plantain--taste like Indian potato samosas with a delicious banana sweetness in place of dough crust. Cha Cha Cha’s tamales, which are about the size of your finger and topped with black-bean paste, come with sour cream, golden caviar and a sharp tomatillo sauce with a dainty little kick. A big $18.75 appetizer plate that could serve three or four includes three banana boats, three tamales, an artichoke with a garlicky stuffing and two exemplary, almost spherical crab cakes.

The big news among the entrees is the sea bass Veracruz. By tradition, our local Mexican seafood restaurants have cut corners on this classic dish (more often made with red snapper) and botched it shamefully, but Cha Cha Cha makes a marvelous version, the fish moist and resilient, the onion-and-sweet-pepper sauce lively and tangy. When the angels in heaven send out for Mexican seafood, this is probably what they order.

From a different area of the Caribbean aesthetic, the camarones negros have a sinister, almost satanic glamour. The jet-black sauce of toasted peppers is bittersweet and relentlessly hot, with chunks of garlic floating around in it. Like many dishes here, these shrimp come with a simple garnish of fresh pineapple sprinkled with pomegranate seeds--but on this plate, it comes off as a sardonic jest.

Dessert plates tend to be sprinkled spectacularly with powdered sugar or shaved chocolate, with the sugar forming snowdrifts around the tarte tatin-- perhaps one not made with the most caramelized apples in town, but a pretty luscious tarte tatin anyway. Powdered sugar and chocolate shavings encompass a chocolate banana tart--think of it as chocolate pudding with banana topped by almost half an inch of thick, fudgy chocolate.

Brunch is a specialty here, with an unusually wide selection from the lunch/dinner menu plus egg dishes. These include huevos negros (two poached eggs on a French roll in the same menacing black sauce as the camarones ) and eggs Prado, an impressive dish in the eggs Benedict line but without ham.

This may not be the lively Hollywood Cha Cha Cha, but it’s certainly a bright spot in the Valley, and the waiters seem jazzed to be working here. Maybe, if we wait long enough, Caribbean will be the next cuisine after all.

Cha Cha Cha, 17499 Ventura Blvd . , Encino; (818) 789-3600. Open for dinner nightly, lunch Monday through Friday and for brunch Saturday and Sunday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $40-$73.