RESTAURANTS : <i> QUELLE SURPRISE!</i> : A Classy Room, a View of the Marina, Seafood Galore--and Franco-American Gnocchi

Say you’re in Marina del Rey and you want to spend a lot of money on a major meal. Lucky you: Go straight to the Dining Room.

The Dining Room is the ostentatiously understated name that the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain prefers to give its most ambitious restaurants. This particular Dining Room, recently opened at the Ritz-Carlton, Marina del Rey, takes the form of a large but fairly intimate room of deep carpets and rich fabrics, wood paneling, 19th-Century genre paintings and a wall of windows giving a view of the marina itself, complete with boats. It features a complement of low-keyed waiters--and a cuisine that requires some explanation.

The chef, Louis Chalus, worked for years under the renowned (non-nouvelle cuisine) chef Raymond Oliver at Le Grand Vefour in Paris. Since every ambitious restaurant must claim to represent a school of cookery these days--preferably a school of which it is the unique exemplar--Chalus’ Dining Room serves “fine regional cuisine with an emphasis on local seafood.” But you won’t exactly find California dishes here, and the ingredients run to Colorado lamb, Maine lobster and seafood from Japan, Hawaii and Scotland, plus the occasional foreign truffle.

Let’s say Chalus cooks French in a style that is alert to Californian ideas, particularly our love of surprises. When you sit down, a waiter may bring you something like a bit of lobster and caviar floating on mango salsa, served in a martini glass.

Chalus writes a new menu every week, which is admirable, though it means you can’t come knowing you’ll find something you liked before. (In practice, he semi-repeats. Fried Kumamoto oysters, Colorado rack of lamb, sweet potatoes with wild mushrooms and lobster with baby bok choy show up over and over with different sauces and garnishes.)

He also compiles a three-course prix-fixe dinner from the week’s menu, with an appropriate glass of wine with each course. One week, for instance, it listed sweet-potato gnocchi with wild mushrooms and artichoke cream, Pacific-style bouillabaisse in lemon-grass broth and raspberry-hazelnut nougatine.

The sweet-potato gnocchi were chewy compared to the usual white-potato kind, but they were more flavorful, and in among the wild mushrooms and artichoke cream were baby vegetables and shreds of prosciutto. The bouillabaisse--really a soupe a poisson , since it came with a bit of the hot sauce called rouille --had a wonderful broth, fishy and saffrony with an exotic tang of lemon grass and loaded with excellent ingredients that would not appear in a true Mediterranean bouillabaisse: scallops, lobster, mahi-mahi, salmon and tiny vegetables, including an inch-long ear of corn complete with tender husk.

But beware--the menu doesn’t always make clear what’s going on. “Sonoma duck foie gras , mango terrine” should have a hyphen between the foie gras and the mango . It’s a terrine of duck liver layered with mangoes, a surprisingly good combination, like having sweet Sauternes with foie gras. And Kumamoto oysters fried in cornmeal and sesame-seed breading--toasty, crunchy, not too oily--rested on what looked like green pasta and tasted like seaweed but wasn’t the menu’s beet-cilantro coulis .

Chalus is saffron-happy, particularly in his soups. A cream of wild mushroom soup garnished with asparagus flan was distinctly flavored with mushrooms and saffron. A saffrony lobster cream soup was baked in a bowl with a puff-pastry crust, an idea that was fashionable about 15 years ago, though in those days the crust rarely came out as light and flaky as this.

In the appetizer of Maine lobster and pink abalone in crispy rice paper, a sort of taco made with fried egg-roll wrapper, the best parts were the garnish of tomatoes and onions and the cilantro vinaigrette; in the seasonal green salad, it’s the slug of goat cheese in the herbal beignet. But the salmon with warm new potatoes--excellent smoky salmon, with cream and chives but no sauce--would have been better with some lemon, or dill, or something.

Here’s an example of Chalus’ tactics. One week, the Colorado rack of lamb came on a mat of sliced yellow potatoes cooked quite brown, like a bed of potatoes Anna, with a tangy ratatouille in the middle. The next week, the lamb, which had been marinated in sake and ginger, was decidedly charcoaly and came in a red wine sauce, sprinkled with boiled fava beans. It was hard to say which was better. They were both tender, flavorful and surprising.

Beef tenderloin often gets a rather aggressive treatment: a lot of cracked pepper rubbed into the sides or a sort of frosting of sherry and Stilton cheese. With this ruggedly flavorful piece of meat may come two delicate side dishes, a bit of gratin potato with a slice of black truffle on top and a custard flavored with beef marrow and with a sprig of thyme sticking out of it.

One night there was a roasted veal loin with saffron linguine in an exotic orange-gin sauce, though, on another night, the sea-urchin butter on the veal medallions on lobster linguine tasted more like a cream sauce flavored with tomato. Hawaiian onaga, a swordfish, was wrapped in a potato crust that seemed like stiff filo--not the best idea that’s occurred to this chef, though I’d eat almost anything with the Riesling-tarragon sauce that came with it.

The desserts tend to repeat, and the one not to miss is the chocolate mousse. Chocolate mousses , that is . There are three small ones--bitter, milk and white chocolate--with each little chunk set atop a crunchy cookie base on a plate piped with a veritable wallpaper pattern of colored dessert sauces.

There’s often a nougatine, which here means flavored pastry cream between a couple of nut-flavored wafers, accompanied by colorful squiggles of raspberry-and-mango sauce in the raspberry nougatine or a bit of raspberry compote in the lemon nougatine. I found a strange taste in the almond wafer on the latter, but on the whole the nougatines are more exciting than the slightly dry souffles.

And remember, even if you don’t want dessert--or if your credit card has hit its limit by the end of the meal--they’ll bring a tray of fresh chocolates after dinner. Just a little surprise.

The Dining Room, Ritz-Carlton, Marina del Rey, 4375 Admiralty Way; (310) 823-1700. Open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Full bar. Validated valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $79-$109.