RESTAURANT REVIEW : Dressed to the Nines at 435 North

In 435 North’s Beverly Hills neighborhood, window shopping is a popular sport. And so, when a friend and I were early for our reservation we looked at skinny leather pants, bejeweled T-shirts, stiletto heels. We thought, even if we could afford this stuff, where on earth would we wear it?

The answer came to us as soon we walked through the glass doors of 435 North. The front room was stuffed with people whose outfits easily out-cost the average American mortgage payment. Most seemed to be standing around in their fancy clothes as if at a very crowded cocktail party.

At the front desk, I heard the people in front of us ask for a patio seat. A patio, away from the bar scene, sounded like a good idea.

“May we sit outside too, please?” I asked the man at the desk.

“There’s the front door,” he said. “You can sit anywhere out there you like.”

My friend and I looked at each other in shock. Had we actually been asked to leave? Was it something we said? Was it my year-old best dress? If we hadn’t been so stunned, we might have left; instead we numbly obeyed the hostess who said, “This way, please,” and led us to . . . the patio.

Located behind the restaurant, the covered patio is done in pink, with glass-topped tables, banquet chairs and a piano. The shrubbery is strung with little lights. Overhead, a metal roof-skylight contraption slid noiselessly, providing intermittent slices of the night sky. On one side of us a woman in a loud Hermes jacket emanated near toxic levels of Giorgio.

Service was sluggish. It took us an hour and a half one night to get our entrees.

435 North’s food could be described as Continental California: dried herbs and sauces in eclectic combinations. Our first taste of this fare was not auspicious--the bread, highly herbed, dense focaccia, was moist and leaden.

Shrimp and escargot scampi was a plate of nicely sauced sweet shrimp and good chewy snails, but the crostini that were supposed to accompany the dish arrived several minutes after the shellfish.

What I liked best about the lobster crab cakes was the cloud of crisp potato strings that, when shattered, added a gratifying crunch to the otherwise unremarkable cakes.

A mixed salad of what the menu called “miniature lettuce” had very nice little green beans in it--and an overly sweet vinaigrette. Less sweet was the spinach salad with goat cheese and what seemed like a zillion pine nuts.

Hot-and-sour duck broth, supposedly served with a spring vegetable won ton, tasted like hoisin sauce and water, and came with two crispy, empty won-ton wrappers adrift in the soup.

The grilled swordfish was delicious--a large juicy, meaty map of fish--but its bed of cannellini beans tasted, well, a lot like navy bean soup. A sauteed breast of chicken was dry, even when dragged through an OK mustard-tarragon sauce. The accompanying polenta lasagna was a classic example, if not to say a parody of everything that was most silly about California cuisine: An architectural stack of rubbery polenta squares mortared with grilled vegetables, it collapsed into rubble the second one tried to eat it.

I liked a good-sized grilled tuna steak with a nice light caper-and-olive sauce one night. But that same night we tried to order rack of lamb rare. The waitress insisted we order it medium-rare. “The kitchen is French,” she explained, and has a tendency to undercook. I should have remembered the dry chicken I’d had earlier because the lamb we got was dry, tough, with not a hint of pink. It took a long time to flag down the waitress; when we finally did the waitress suggested we get another order of tuna since it would take a very long time to get the lamb. As it turned out, the tuna replacement took a very long time.

At lunch one day, we were seated at a pleasant table in the front room, which opened onto the sidewalk. The service was attentive, even personable. A vegetable pizza and angel hair pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil were both acceptable, but nothing extraordinary. A grilled shrimp salad had five deliciously sweet shrimp on a bed of boring romaine. Who would guess that the room would become a noisy crush of well-dressed bodies later that night? Still, when the option arose to leave before dessert, even our sweet tooths couldn’t prevail.

435 North, 435 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 273-2292. Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner Monday through Saturday. Bar open seven nights. Valet parking. Full bar. MasterCard, Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $35-$70.