HOT SPOT, WARM FOOD : The Crowd Is Young, the Spices Mild--but Oh, Those Saddlebags

EE-ooo! The howl of fun-loving youth, as at a rock concert or a stand-up comedy show, rings out above the hubbub of Kachina Grill. The howlers are doing tequila shooters with Tabasco backs.

To launch Kachina Grill in downtown Los Angeles, David Wilhelm, the force behind the El Torito Grill restaurants, teamed up with Elie Samaha, the owner of Roxbury, a celebrity-oriented West Hollywood hangout, creating what you’d have to call Southwestern Youth cuisine. The functional dining room (notable for particularly dark exposed ducts in the ceiling) is pretty loud, and the “atrium” room--with one bank of windows looking out on Bunker Hill and the other inward on the restaurant--is positively rackety. This appears to be the first Southwestern restaurant to enjoy a major celebrity opening, attended by Mickey Rourke, Christian Slater and Kiefer Sutherland.

The food makes the obligatory bows in the direction of Saint Estephe, where John Sedlar first announced the New Southwestern cuisine. There are painterly dribbles of colored sauce on chef Robert Simoni’s plates, though they’re not as enamel-precise as Sedlar’s. Still, it’s a long way from the reverent foodie-ism of Saint Estephe to happy hour at Kachina Grill.

Tabasco backs aside, hot pepper is not much in evidence here. The Taos red chili, for instance, is meaty and full of cumin but hardly hot. At lunch, the same rich chili comes mixed with beans and sour cream as an Albuquerque sundae, and somehow the preponderance of cumin seems more Moroccan than Southwestern.

The crown of this menu is duck cooked in tequila, available as an appetizer “saddlebag”--a sort of taco made with a crepe--or as an entree. The entree plate features corn pudding (a sweet, moist cousin of corn bread) and pine-nut stuffing, but go for the saddlebag. The crepe and duck in sweet, aromatic sauce are something like a cross between Peking duck and a duck tamale.

Chile-lime-and-tortilla soup, the lighter of the two soups, gives the impression of a thin enchilada sauce mixed with a respectable amount of chicken, tortillas and some of that irresistible corn pudding. The Zuni corn-and-black-bean soup is two soups in one: sweet corn chowder on one side of the plate and thick black-bean puree on the other, linked by a red Z of mild pepper puree.

The gulf-shrimp-and-green-corn tamale looks like one of the reed boats that ply Lake Titicaca in the Andes. The husk-wrapped tamale is the boat; the crunchy shrimp rest on the sweet but surprisingly peppery masa like a sunburned crew, and everything floats in tomatillo sauce.

The other openers are more conventional Mexican/New Mexican stuff, such as chile relleno in blue-corn breading (with good Mexican cheese filling) or soft corn tacos, which you can get with fillings such as blackened fish. At lunch, you can even get combination plates.

The best dinner entree is only moderately Southwestern. It’s the mesquite-grilled swordfish with “desert sunset sauce”--red wine and butter with sweet peppers. The dullest harks even more faintly to the great Southwest: fettuccine with grilled chicken, which you might take for pasta con pesto garnished with chicken breast. The Southwestern touches are also quite subtle on the filet of beef with tumbleweed onions, though the very mild red-chile puree and very mild cheese sauce look arrestingly gory.

The tumbleweed onions are lightly breaded, julienned onion rings. You may have noticed the role of verbal magic in conjuring a Southwestern identity at this restaurant. The “ranchera sauce” on the rack of lamb is an almost undetectable puree of mild peppers; mostly you taste very good lamb, and mostly you smell terrific rosemary potatoes. If you come across the jalapeno jelly (which is red), you’ll taste sugar and something pleasantly herbal--until rather late in the game, when the heat kicks in.

I must point out that one of the best things on this or any other menu comes with the chile-fried chicken served at lunch. While the bird is passably moist, in a slightly peppery breading, the mashed potatoes are the very essence of spuds.

The best of the desserts is another saddlebag. In place of duck is a thick, chewy mass of richly flavored stewed apples with lots of cinnamon in a sea of fresh caramel sauce, accompanied by very cinnamony ice cream. The warm fruit cobbler--which lacks a crust, making it a bogus cobbler--resembles the saddlebag’s payload, or perhaps the filling of an apple pie. The orange-honey creme brulee (on the sweet side) has a good, rich, smooth texture.

The rest of the dessert list doesn’t do much for me. Tequila-raisin ice cream struggles to unite ingredients that don’t want to know each other. The chocolate bread pudding is a mushy, depraved concoction of chocolate croutons in cream.

That one seems ghastly to me, but maybe, if I’d had a couple of tequila shooters with Tabasco backs, and if my head were ringing from sitting near the bar, maybe it would look like the future of Southwestern cuisine.

Kachina Grill, Wells Fargo Center, 330 S. Hope St., Los Angeles; (213) 625-0956. Open for lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking and validation available. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $36-$62.