RESTAURANT REVIEW : Grill Doesn’t Live Up to Expectations

Chatsworth, tucked into the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, is a good place to ride a horse. It’s still exurbia out here, in spite of all the rapid growth the area has seen. Gaze in awe at the profile of these mountains; almost any sunset up here justifies the long drive from the flatland.

The new Chatsworth Hotel doesn’t aim to change any of that, of course. This grand, ivory-colored manor house (looming as large as a mountain itself on the corner of Lassen Street and Topanga Canyon Boulevard) commands deserved attention. And it’s handsome, all right, although nature didn’t plan on having this much competition.

Even more conspicuous is the hotel’s meticulously designed restaurant, Santa Susana Grill, home to the Pacific Rim cuisine of a fellow named David Neff. “Dine beneath the stars,” intones the menu, “amid dazzling culinary creations and a courteous, helpful staff.” So far, so good.

Inside, the appointments are positively lavish. It’s a vast, oblong room with a high, latticed ceiling and vaguely Southwestern airs, bolstered by gilded pillars and decorated with handsome plants and exotic flowers in enormous earthenware pots.

The main floor uses slabs of brown stone and a rich carpet to maximum effect, and beautifully upholstered wooden chairs add luxuriant class. Up above, on a sort of mezzanine that runs the full perimeter of the room, the seating is at huge, semicircular banquettes, done in that synthetic tartan fabric you’d expect to find on a late model Chrysler. Robin’s-egg blue tablecloths, draped over tables throughout, blend in nicely with all the room’s pastel colors.

The menu’s boast about the staff is not an idle one. Everybody is pleasant and cheerful here, and quite young, rather like the people who serve you at a restaurant in a national park. And I’m sure they are helpful because the kind of dazzle provided by this kitchen is not necessarily of a positive nature.

Pacific Rim turns out to be, in this case, either Mexican, Japanese or frontier style, with obligatory traces of hotel school French and California Italian. Japanese garlic clams and cocteles mariscos pretty much sum up the style. The clams are dressed with garlic and served with a miso -ginger dipping sauce. The coctel is mostly chunks of shrimp in a cocktail sauce enlivened by cilantro and red pepper.

The soups are the kind you can stand a spoon in, and here that’s not good news. Rocky Peak chicken corn chowder is full of good flavors like cumin and fresh corn, but impossibly pasty. The more traditional cream of carrot soup is bright orange but bland; food processor cuisine.

The salads and pizzas can be problematic as well. Spinach and warm barbecued chicken salad, for instance, is one big conceptual mess: a huge bowl of good spinach greens tossed with a sticky dressing containing bacon bits and pecans, then served with a huge, uncut hunk (the menu promised julienne strips) of sugary barbecued chicken. Pacific Rim pizza is a tomatoless creation smeared with Chinese hoisin sauce and topped with leeks, shiitake mushrooms, garlic and bay shrimp. The crust is apt to be puffy and undercooked, and the surfeit of sweet, cloying hoisin turns it into one of the world’s most bizarre desserts.

Things improve, although not dramatically, when it’s time for entrees. Guadalajara barbecued chicken doesn’t suffer from an excess of sugar like its cousin atop the spinach salad. It’s simply good marinated and broiled chicken, accompanied by salsa, rice, black beans and guacamole--not too different, in essence, from what you’d get in any Mexican chicken takeout.

That old standby, the baked stuffed pork chop, is another safe choice here. It’s a thick, one-inch chop stuffed with a sage dressing and baked. This chop is tasty enough, but it could be a bit more tender. The unctuous sherry wine sauce underneath is characterless at best.

Desserts, a familiar array of cakes and pies, are all made in-house and equally nondescript. Layer cakes, such as carrot and marble, are served about at refrigerator temperature, with stiff frostings and the same texture that you get from a commercial mix. Pies have an under-shortened white flour crust, with pudding-style fillings like coconut and lemon.

Given the beautiful surroundings and environment here, you naturally expect more. To have less than a great meal in a place like this seems, to use that indubitably Southwestern (to wit, Hopi) expression, like koyaanisqatsi : “life out of balance.”

Suggested dishes: Japanese garlic clams, $5.95; Guadalajara barbecued chicken, $11.95; baked stuffed pork chop, $12.95.

Santa Susana Grill at the Chatsworth Hotel, 8777 Topanga Canyon Blvd., Chatsworth, (818) 709-1300. Breakfast 6:30 to 11 a.m. daily, lunch 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, dinner 4 to 10 p.m. daily. Parking lot. Full bar. All major cards accepted. Dinner for two, $30 to $50.