RESTAURANTS : MAGNUM OPUS : Unabashed Luxury and Great Seafood Make This L.A’s Most Grown-Up New Restaurant

It is lunchtime at Opus, and the tide of diners is going out. It flows quietly across the carpeted floor and pauses briefly to glance at chef-proprietor Eberhard Muller, who sits nervously at a table, eating steak.

Two things are wrong with this picture. Muller, who came to Los Angeles preaching a philosophy of fish, isn’t supposed to be eating steak. More to the point, he is not supposed to be nervous.

These are uneasy times in the restaurant business. A couple of years ago, Muller’s L.A. adventure looked like a sure thing. Everybody knew Los Angeles lacked a great fish restaurant, and the young chef was wowing them in New York at Gilbert Le Coze’s Le Bernardin, serving the sort of sophisticated fish dishes formerly found only in Paris. “Come to L.A.!” urged his fans. When Muller found a room with a view--a restaurant that could promise every seat a glimpse of the water--it seemed certain that those seats would be filled.

Things change. In these times of scarce water, there’s something disquieting about a one-acre-plus man-made lake in the middle of an industrial park. And in these times of scarce money, even the rich have qualms about going out to eat in a restaurant that’s unabashedly luxurious.

“I think I just ate the diamond earrings I was going to get for my birthday,” confides one woman as she leaves. It’s easy to see why she might think so--everything about this room breathes money. Walking in, you get the impression that platoons of servers await your pleasure, eager to do your bidding. Your feet move silently across well-padded floors, and when you sit, the chairs rise up to embrace your body. The curved walls are covered with tobacco-colored wood as if this was some fabulous handcrafted yacht. There’s nothing casual about Opus; it is Los Angeles’ most grown-up new restaurant.

But are we ready for all this? Perhaps not. Everybody in Los Angeles will tell you how much we’ve been longing for a quiet restaurant, but now that we have one, the first thing we say is that it’s too expensive. Actually, the price of a meal here wouldn’t even be enough for a down payment on a pair of diamond earrings, and the prix fixe menu--five courses plus two glasses of wine--is close to a bargain. Where else can you get oysters, crab meat, truffles, wine and chocolates for $55?. I suspect that when people here in never-never land complain about the prices, it’s actually a metaphor for the sheer stuffiness of Opus. Plunked down in the middle of Los Angeles, it reminds us of those New York restaurants we’ve been running away from.

If you liked Le Bernardin, you’ll love Opus. Muller has come out West armed with part of the kitchen brigade (executive chef Ian Winslade worked with him at Le Bernardin) and some the recipes. There’s the New York restaurant’s famous hand-pounded carpaccio of tuna, and an assortment of shellfish and pasta that seems very familiar. Oysters on the half shell come not in the mingy half dozen but a more satisfying nine. And if Muller is not yet serving his famous sea urchin souffle, he says it is only because it’s not the proper season. Seasons are important here; in the three months since the restaurant opened, the fish have changed. But not enough for my taste: It’s a major disappointment to find so few local fish on the menu. I’d hoped that Muller would find new sources for seafood, or new ways to serve underused species such as bonito and rockfish. But what you find here are, for the most part, the same fish you find in every other good restaurant in Southern California: The farm-raised striped bass, the New Zealand red snapper, the Maine lobsters, the Atlantic halibut.

What Muller does with the fish, however, is rarely disappointing. There are exceptions: The Santa Barbara spot prawns have been horribly mushy every time I’ve had them, and the Mexican shrimp, served at lunch, have been hard. Muller likes to serve white beans with fish--sometimes snapper, sometimes black bass--and these are so sweet they have an unpleasant resemblance to baked beans. I hated the seared halibut with artichokes and capers, which I thought emphasized all the wrong qualities of the ingredients, making the fish seem dry and the capers sharp.

But for the most part, this kitchen has a remarkable understanding for fish. Consider the trout soup with Riesling and spring vegetables; the lightly perfumed quality of the wine brings out the sweetness of the trout, and the cream highlights its richness. Trout has rarely been so well served. Another soup, a special, combined a creamy puree of mushrooms with sweet big chunks of lobster in a very happy marriage of flavors. And one night there was a smoky tomato soup served with a dab of pesto and pieces of shrimp that was like nothing so much as a puree of summer.

The potato salad is one of the best dishes anywhere--golden potatoes layered with big chunks of fresh Dungeness crab meat and laced with truffles--a sort of potato salad gone to heaven. The spiced skate and fennel salad is a similarly earthy seafood dish, lightly touched with curry.

Among the entrees, I particularly liked the poached halibut in a lemon nage , a gentle, surprisingly flavorful dish that owes more than a little to the Vietnamese soup-salad, topped as it is with tiny peas and a tangle of greens. And the striped bass with parsleyed mussel broth plays off the strength of the fish against a forceful, bright green background. The crisp crunch of the skin in the soup is an especially nice touch.

Lunch at Opus is notable for three reasons: the price, the mousse and the view. Prices are considerably lower than they are at dinner, and there’s a $21 lunch--appetizer, main course and dessert--that makes a meal in this quiet room a good value. The mousse--an amazing chocolate concoction topped with shavings of very bitter chocolate--is better than any of the desserts on the dinner menu.

As for the view . . . at night the water disappears into the darkness and the view you get is of the monolithic Water Garden complex, which must be Los Angeles’ least-attractive piece of architecture. During the day, the buildings recede into the distance, and you can actually see the water. On nice days, you can even sit outside next to it.

But let’s get back to Muller, still sitting nervously at his table. His mood is contagious. And no wonder. Most of the waiters worked in other fine Southern California restaurants . . . until they closed. If Opus turns out to be too grown-up for our tastes, it’s likely to be a dismally long time before we see anything like it in these parts again.

Opus, 2425 W. Olympic Blvd., Santa Monica; (310) 829-2112. Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $64-$106.