Freedom From Choice

At a restaurant you trust, from Valentino to Lakespring, there is something pretty comforting about putting the responsibility for your dinner into somebody else’s hands, about sitting down and saying “feed me,” and knowing that you will be well fed. What I mean is neither the soup-or-salad, what-kind-of-dressing-would-you-like-on-that-sir thing, nor the number-two-dinner approach, where the menu has been engraved in stone since Betty Grable was still making pictures, but the kind of restaurant where you sit down, a waiter intuits what you’d like to eat, and the food starts appearing a couple of minutes later, one platter at a time.

Rich people’s restaurants are famous for service like this, of course, especially high-end Italian rooms and the sort of Continental places whose appeal is mysterious to non-regulars; so are certain sushi bars; so is almost any restaurant where the waiters know you well enough to call you by name. It is, as Devo used to say, freedom from choice.

Las Carretas, a homey new Cuban joint in an industrial section of Burbank, is strangely placed in a supermarket-adjacent shopping arcade, decked out with red-leather booths, beer signs and 3-D film-set Western scenes on the walls, left over from when the place was a hamburger stand called Jimbo’s. The centerpiece of the room is a construction of variously garnished bales of hay that looks like something artist Robert Rauschenberg might have dreamed up. Las Carretas’ proprietors, Cuban-born Armenians, formerly owned the well-loved Glendale Cuban restaurant El Morro, which was where people in the East Valley used to go for fried plantains and black beans when Versailles and El Colmao seemed too far away. They, the Hasakian family, remember what you like to eat.

The restaurant is fine, if inconsistent, when you drop in for a quick lunch of Cuban sandwiches, the sweetly spiced ground-beef dish picadillo or the firm Cuban omelets called tortillas , or for such specials as fricasseed chicken glazed with a sweet sauce of tomatoes and wine. There are avocado salads to start, cool, ripe chunks of the fruit strewn with slivers of raw onion and garlicky splashes of a strong olive-oil vinaigrette, and thin, pounded circles of green plantains, fried crisply and served like potato chips.

But the best meals at Las Carretas always seem to begin with a phone call in advance for the paella or the arroz con pollo or the arroz con camarones-- which must be ordered an hour in advance--and a meal put together by one of the owners.

The first time I went to Las Carretas, there appeared, after a brief consultation with a waiter, a giant platter of the house salad, basically shredded iceberg lettuce garnished with ripe avocado and cool half-moons of tomato, tossed with a strongly garlicked vinaigrette; and then roasted leg of pork, soft as butter, dressed with citrus and garlic in the Cuban manner, sliced and served at room temperature--probably overcooked, but nice with the salad, and very nice with draughts of the cool Zinfandel we’d brought in. There were fried green plantains and bowls of rich, salty black beans, and logs of the tuber yuca slicked with olive oil, lemon and garlic.

Next came paella , which involves a stupendous amount of seafood--clams and lobster claws and mussels and fish and such, mostly cooked to a uniform chewiness--served in a clay casserole atop lots of lovely, perfectly seasoned yellow rice. Paella is rather expensive at about $40, but it will comfortably feed four with side dishes.

Other meals involved arroz con pollo , which is much cheaper than the paella and somewhat better, preceded by salad, a platter of firm-textured Cuban tamales, and a platter of deep-fried croquetas and a couple of meat-stuffed dumplings made from deep-fried mashed potatoes. There was also Las Carretas’ pollo frito , a crisp-fried take on Versailles’ famous garlicky roast chicken, and platefuls of a sort of Cuban chicken-fried steak, onto which we squeezed lime.

They were splendid, convivial dinners . . . and the food may have been the least of it all. Bring plenty of friends, and as many bottles of sturdy red wine.

Las Carretas

226 E. Alameda St., Burbank, (818) 848-1915. Open daily, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Lot parking. Beer (no wine). Takeout. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $10-$25 ($40-$50 with paella).