Eating ‘Lite’ on the Town : Health: Several Valley restaurants have decided to help the customer dine more wisely by specializing in low-fat, low cholesterol dishes.

“Thin’s In” intones the name of one Tarzana restaurant, and indeed, the late renaissance notwithstanding, what else is new?

The emphasis is on light and healthy these days, especially here in the San Fernando Valley. The recession has tightened our belts, both figuratively and literally, and many of us are busy experiencing the joys of vegetarian, low-fat and low-cholesterol cooking.

It’s easy to get your favorite restaurant to cook foods this way. You can ask the kitchen to steam your vegetables, or to omit salt and fat when preparing meats or fish. But it may be easier simply to choose restaurants that pride themselves in serving health-oriented foods. There is more variety, and you don’t risk a miscommunication.

I’ve recently made several surprising discoveries. Here are five to cut your teeth on.

Thin’s In Cafe

Even the mugs are “lite” at Thin’s In Cafe, an airy, well-scrubbed restaurant with white walls and salmon-colored banquettes that hopes to corner the diet-dining market in Tarzana. These mugs, used for caffeine-free iced tea and other diet beverages, are made from an ultra-light, clear plastic. When you pick one up, it practically floats to your lips.

Don’t think of calories in this restaurant, think of exchanges. Exchanges refer to controlled portions and describe amounts of protein, bread and fat allowed on a variety of diets.

The restaurant adds no salt or sugar to any of its foods (although some might argue that sucrose, used to sweeten the desserts, is indeed a sugar), and all meals have been approved by the American Heart Assn. On the surface, little is sacrificed in terms of variety. The lunch menu has such items as vegetable lasagna, chicken enchilada and potato stuffed with chicken chili; the dinner menu is a short list of luxury foods such as Belgian brisket and barbecued ribs.

And then there is the restaurant’s showpiece, a huge case filled with what they call “Desserts Without Guilt.” We’re talking napoleon, banana cream pie, chocolate cake and dipped peanut butter cookies. Wow! I feel guilty just thinking about them.

So how do these things taste? Pretty good, though you might have a hard time believing that these foods are not high in calories.

Salads require little denial, in that the thick, creamy dressings--green goddess and ranch are two--are oil-free, made with a combination of buttermilk and diet mayonnaise. But anyone who bites into the tasty, saucy barbecued beef ribs or Belgian brisket is deluding himself if he thinks these foods have been completely defatted.

Desserts such as pralines and cream--a delicious dish of yellow fluff made from starches and emulsifiers--taste awfully sweet. And heaven knows how many calories there are in an “exchange” of sucrose.

Thin’s In Cafe, 18706 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana, (818) 776-0229. Open Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to midnight; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Visa/MasterCard/Discover accepted. Chicken Rotissary

This modest, cafeteria-style restaurant is cut in the mold of Zankou Chicken, (the Hollywood and Glendale chicken palaces that serve plump, crisp-skinned rotisserie chicken with a deadly intense garlic sauce), but the food here is lighter, more austere.

You can see the chickens turning on their spits from the street, but you can’t really smell them roasting until you enter. It’s a clean, bright place with a tile floor, peppermint stick tables and chairs and a trompe l’oeil blue skylight ceiling, and it feels more like an ice-cream parlor than a restaurant. Both the menu and the red sign over the metal roaster trumpet the benefits of this cooking: spit-roasted chickens, no oil, no preservatives, direct-flame cooking with all natural juices. And indeed, that’s what you get.

A whole chicken, juicy and golden brown, sells for an amazing $5, served with two toasted pita breads and a garlic sauce that is a killer in its own right. This garlic sauce is not the equal of Zankou’s--it lacks the sweetness and subtlety--but is still a joy when smeared on pita and eaten between bites of moist, roasted chicken. There are plenty of healthy Middle Eastern condiments here, too: creamy hummus, a garbanzo bean dip, excellent pickled turnips, good fluffy rice and mutabal, and eggplant dip. Chicken Rotissary caters, too, for orders of 15 birds and up.

Chicken Rotissary, 5658 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys, (818) 781-0615. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Cash only. Leonor’s

Leonor Garcia became a vegetarian barely 12 years ago, and she’s felt better ever since. Just ask her.

Her North Hollywood restaurant, the original of two locations, feels more festive than serious. It’s dark and bohemian but definitely not smoke-filled, and the arching, wood slat ceiling and hand-painted walls make you think you have wandered into a giant picnic basket.

Clientele here are mostly alternative-lifestyles types looking like fashion models for secondhand clothing stores. Most come for Leonor’s fresh, pulp-free fruit and vegetable juices, creative salads and “forever young” dinners, mostly soy protein and vegetable fantasies on Latin American themes.

Dory’s Bolivian pejtu is one dinner with bizarre but undeniable appeal. It’s a small mound of steamed lima beans, green beans, potatoes, mushrooms and onions, topped with raw cheese and a piquant red substance Leonor has dubbed Bolivian sauce. Pizzas are made with a slightly sweet (from molasses) stone-ground wheat crust. Overstuffed burritos and tacos are fashioned from exotica such as soy chicken, brown rice and wild cilantro.

There are excellent, discus-shaped rolls, and the sound of the juicer grinding away in the background to remind you of how fresh everything is. Very Veggie, a juice made from carrot, celery, spinach, beet, tomato and cucumber, would be the ultimo V-8, if it had two more ingredients. So call it a V-6.

Leonor’s, 11403 Victory Blvd., North Hollywood, (818) 980-9011 and 12445 Moorpark St., Van Nuys, (818) 762-0660. Both restaurants are open Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. The Victory location opens Sunday, noon to 9 p.m. Both stores are cash only. Dukey’s Seafood Express

Everything but the food is blue and white, the colors of the sea, at Dukey’s Seafood Express, a fast-food operation in Tarzana. It’s a spotless, bright takeout/eat-in type place, done up in blue and white tiles that look clean enough to eat on. Servers sport cheerful blue Dukey’s T-shirts. The paper is printed in bright blue ink.

The main draw here is inexpensive, simply broiled fish, brushed with a lemony, low-fat marinade, sprinkled with Spike and paprika, then grilled over charcoal. Oddly, I find the lower-priced entries here (snapper, trout and catfish, for example, all $4.99) more moist and tastier than such dishes as swordfish and halibut, themselves $2 pricier. But at these prices, every dinner constitutes a good value.

There is a good, creamy clam chowder to start the proceedings off, and traditional seafood salads made with bay shrimp, crab or a combination of both, that you can douse with Slender Choice, a cholesterol free salad dressing. Side dishes, except for a good, zippy cole slaw, are blah. And watch out for the gummy au gratin potatoes. One side order probably has the calories of two entire fish dinners.

Dukey’s Seafood Express, 5511 Reseda Blvd., Tarzana, (818) 776-1452. Sunday through Thursday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Cash only. Follow Your Heart Cafe

This pleasant cafe is squeezed into a far corner of a health-oriented market by the same name, completely enclosed behind an indoor wooden trellis.

Walk through the market and you can see what you are about to eat in the cafe: organically grown vegetables and fruits, soy products, rice cakes, amazuke, tempeh and much, much more.

All of the foods served here are health oriented, and the dishes marked on the menu with a little heart symbol indicate that they have met guidelines established by the American Heart Assn.’s “Dine to Your Heart’s Content” program.

Good starters include baba ghannouj , a grainy eggplant dip made with olive oil, lemon and herbs, and a huge basket of nachos, made from those thick, crunchy stone-ground corn chips with two kinds of cheeses, avocado, green onion, black olives and a good salsa.

Salads are a strong suit here, and there are lots of good, hearty soups. The spinach salad is so fresh it squeaks on your teeth, and there are good mushroom slices, red onions, pieces of apple and toasted rosemary walnuts sprinkled throughout. Mushroom barley soup is an austere version, but it is shot through with clean, pure flavors. There are excellent sandwiches and stir-fries, plus a wide range of desserts. Try the coconut pudding, regrettably high in cholesterol, perhaps, but worth it.

Follow Your Heart Cafe, 21825 Sherman Way, Canoga Park. (818) 348-3240. Monday through Saturday 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Visa/MasterCard accepted.