RESTAURANTS : CHICAGO CHOPS : Arnie Morton’s Heads West but Keeps Its Roots, Serving Large, Satisfying Steaks

Arnie Morton’s of Chicago is a restaurant with a subtitle: The Steak House. It deserves it. You’ll have to pay The Price--steaks start at $21.95 and vegetables are strictly a la carte--but Arnie Morton’s really does serve The Steak.

As the Los Angeles franchise (there are 19 others) of a famous Chicago restaurant, the place makes a great deal of its roots. It looks like an old-fashioned Midwestern steakhouse, complete with dark wood bar, though perhaps modernized with a lighter color scheme--a steakhouse where a red-meat man might take a date.

The “menu” is a cart filled with raw ingredients. A live Maine lobster will be waving its claws around among piles of potatoes and tomatoes (you can get a beefsteak tomato either with a red onion or with blue cheese dressing). Above all, the cart is laden with plastic-wrapped chunks of meat. One by one, your waiter holds up slabs of corn-fed prime beef, all aged two to three weeks, so that you can get an idea of what you’re ordering.

If you really have an appetite, order an appetizer, maybe the black bean soup made with turtle beans, a flavorful and somewhat sweet black bean, and served with sour cream and onions. Clean-tasting smoked salmon is sliced paper-thin and comes with chopped onions, capers and moderately serious horseradish. And the baked scallops wrapped with bacon (good scallops, very good bacon) is rendered a bit silly by an overpowering apricot chutney.

The place makes one of the better Caesar salads around because it doesn’t skimp on egg in the dressing. On the other hand, the Arnie Morton salad has a ‘50s taste--romaine and iceberg lettuce with a chunky blue cheese dressing, topped with anchovies.

Titanic is the word for most things here, especially for the larger of the two porterhouse steaks. Tipping the scales at three pounds, it’s truly a majestic steak. The waiter essentially carves a filet from one side of the bone and a New York steak from the other, and serves it with slightly tart meat juices.

It’s the most satisfying steak I’ve had in years. But the other steaks are worth ordering, too--the double filet mignon (served with bearnaise sauce), the New York steak and the rib eye. For daintier appetites, the brochette of filet mignon skewered with vegetables and giant mushroom caps is excellent.

The other meats are perfectly good but not in the same league as the beef. You can get nice gamey lamb chops, served with half an apple filled with mint jelly. Or a big veal chop, which you can request “Sicilian style”; the garlicky bread-crumb crust adds interest to a bland piece of meat. The best of the non-beef meats is the lemon oregano chicken, split down the back and flattened for cooking on the grill. It’s sprinkled with chopped onions--some brown on the skin, the rest form an onion hash.

There’s some seafood: grilled swordfish steak, shrimp Alexander in garlicky breading with white wine sauce, and, of course, the lobster you met on the “menu.”

In steakhouse tradition, all vegetables are side orders. Some of them deserve this special status, such as the hash browns. They look like a potato pizza, crisp and golden brown practically all the way through. Sauteed spinach with mushrooms is more exciting than it sounds because the mushrooms are fresh and luscious.

After all this hairy-chested fare, Morton’s serves some delicious pastries. The intense, mousse-like chocolate cake sneaks in cherry liqueur and rum, like a candy filling. The New York cheesecake is rich and almost fluffy, with a subtle tartness. The pecan pie is not too sugary, with a good custard layer and an elegant amount of pecans. There’s a high-rise apple pie that inevitably comes off as something like baked apples in crust.

Arnie Morton’s is next door to the new Nikko Hotel on La Cienega Boulevard. Japanese tourists go there and the waiters assure them they’re getting “the best steak in Los Angeles.” They are.

Arnie Morton’s of Chicago, 435 S. La Cienega Blvd . ; (310) 246-1501. Open for dinner daily. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $48-$100.