TALL ORDERS : At Checkers, the Atmosphere May Be Refined, but the Food Is Downright Dashing

Checkers still flies the flag of the ‘80s, when California Cuisine stood for swashbuckling invention. Former Checkers chef Thomas Keller was famous for his architectural- fantasy food, and new chef William Valentine is no slouch in the food-as-art department either. The old expansiveness lives on at this elegant downtown hotel restaurant.

The old expensiveness lives on, too. The cheapest appetizer, entree and dessert total $74 for two, plus tip, and that’s if you’re drinking tap water throughout the meal. For the hotel’s guests, the price tag may pose no problem--if they can afford to stay there, they can probably afford to eat there. For the rest of us, visiting Checkers may involve a long, hard decision.

The hotel is unprepossessing in appearance, its tiny marquee half-obscured by the library construction next door. The restaurant, which you reach by wandering through what looks like a suite of living rooms, is furnished in beige with discreet paintings on the walls. (And speaking of quiet, you can actually hear what people at your table are saying.)

In contrast to this mild environment, the plates are full of high drama. You rarely see such obsessive attention paid to dashing appearance these days: tall food, food with things sticking out of it, food with colorful flecks of this and that scattered around the plate.

After a complimentary canape, which might be a spring roll filled with smoked salmon on a plate dribbled with pureed basil and hot-chile oil, you might want a salad. The marinated beet and endive salad comes in a vinaigrette spiked with bits of walnut and goat cheese on a plate piled high with vivid curlicues of beet.

The menu changes every day, but among the appetizers you might find rosemary-skewered tiger prawns: three large prawns impaled on a twig of rosemary and grilled on both sides. Then the top prawn is twisted 90 degrees, making a sort of pup tent out of the assembly, which is erected beside a neat row of paper-thin slices of fried green apple.

For a soft-shell crab roll, fried crab and avocado may be rolled up in two carpets of glutinous rice and propped up on the plate in a little pond of cucumber vinaigrette that tastes faintly of wasabi. Call it twin towers of a very rich brand of sushi.

The sweetbreads appetizer may be moistened with meat glaze and a “marmalade” of caramelized onions, accompanied by a chewy little wheel of fried new potato slices. A ragout of foie gras and wild mushrooms, two plush ingredients, could arrive on a bed of sauteed onion puree called soubise.

The entrees are splashy, too. A veal chop might come with potato galette , grilled radicchio, endive and a balsamic vinegar sauce, but you can be sure that there will be a dramatic length of bone--four or five inches--sticking out of it like a handle. Rack of lamb is sometimes garnished with a mixture of roasted shallots and blackberries, an aggressively flavored accompaniment that also presents lamb in an unaccustomed color scheme of saturated purple.

Often a prime rib steak--very tender meat, with no bone--is set on top of a potato pancake flavored with bits of onion and bacon, which itself rests on a bed of sauteed chanterelle mushrooms. It looks a little like Stirling Castle in Scotland, seen from afar, but when you start cutting, it collapses into a profoundly beefy mush. Some things are just plain meaty, like the hot, smoked galantine of duck--a clove-scented mass of duck in sausage form surrounded by meat glaze. The epitome of this California derring-do may well be sea scallops with Lapsang souchong tea, rice noodles and leek-and-asparagus stir fry. The tea flavor is more subtle than you’d expect, the scallops and asparagus cooked rare and very sweet. The rice noodles form a high, frivolous topping: a stir-fry with a bouffant.

The ultimate dessert is the plat de degustation. It might consist of a little bowl of Champagne ice with four little wedges of pastry, like a line of tugboats coasting around it: a chocolate-bourbon torte, a peanut-butter tart glazed with soft chocolate, a lemon-sabayon tart (call it lemon brulee ), a coconut cheesecake. The second line of defense around that is formed by an almond cookie with mango sorbet and a crunchy cookie with honey-banana-rum-pecan ice cream.

If you still feel like tall food, the tallest food in town is the bananas Foster (a New Orleans specialty, a hint that Valentine used to work in that city, at the Windsor Court Hotel). For this, a Pilsner glass is filled with Tahitian vanilla ice cream and topped with sliced bananas cooked in a rum banana liqueur sauce (heavy on the rum, you drivers). Two long, curly wands of striped cookie poke into the top bananas.

Once upon a time, before everything became buried in pasta, the West Coast was truly wild, and it was a lot like this.

Checkers Restaurant, Checkers Hotel, 535 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles; (213) 891-0519 and 624-0000. Breakfast, lunch and dinner served daily; Sunday brunch. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $74-$112.