RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Quirky Visual Feast at Metro

Young, trendy and postmodern to a panic, Metro on Melrose Avenue is another visually hectic, noisy Hollywood cucina . Lately, I don’t even think of the food at these places as Italian; I think of it as restaurant food--what you go out to eat in this town.

Indeed Metro doesn’t look particularly Italian. There are no photographs of Italy, no stray Italian groceries. Designed as some pop futuristic hangout, it’s heavily accessorized with detritus from the industrial/silicon age. A long matte-black sculpture of cogs and gears divides the dining room and bar; at either end of the sculpture is a computer stand where waiters and waitresses punch in orders. The blond wood tabletops are inlaid with discarded copper circuit boards, their dot patters inscrutable as hieroglyphics. Overhead, a thicket of chandeliers are fanciful assemblages of spage-age jetsam.

At 8 on a weekday evening, the restaurant is slow; at 10, however, the place is packed. On several visits, we found the service staff distracted and prone to neglect; other times we were served promptly, cheerfully, seamlessly.

The food, we found, could also be inconsistent. Appetizers were largely pretty good, but pastas were problematic.

The house bread was a moist, spongy product, very effective for sopping up the olive oil provided on each table, but less impressive as the base of the bruschetta sandwich, open-faced, with fresh mozzarella and chopped, seasoned tomatoes. The bresaola (air-dried beef) came with nice mixed greens and unremarkable artichoke hearts. The appetizer I liked best, however, was a pretty plate of grilled shrimp and perfectly cooked small scallops around a small bed of white beans.

The Caesar salad was a dramatic, wing-like display of whole romaine leaves and eggplant croutons, which was pretty good. An endive, radicchio and arugula salad was lightly dressed and fresh, although the arugula content could best described as “trace.”

There was no discernible pasta in the pasta e fagioli , but as a bean soup, it was quite tasty. According to the menu, rigatoni ai funghi di bosco came with shiitake, porcini and oyster mushrooms topped with ricotta and mascarpone cheeses. Instead, we got rigatoni in red sauce with only the tiniest shreds of mushrooms and a clump of ricotta only. Veal-filled ravioli with sage butter were terribly undercooked.

Better at Metro are the pizzas, with their good chewy crusts. I especially liked the pizza topped with flavorful grilled vegetables.

Chicken breast stuffed with mushrooms was perfumed with fresh rosemary and had a pleasurably crisp skin. The seafood mixed grill was full of sweet shrimp and scallops and a slab of pale salmon. The lamb, served on lentils, was a bit overdone one time (we’d asked for medium-rare) and the promised polenta came out as two small, tough squares of the stuff.

The best use of the spongy house bread was in a lovely, fluffy, barely sweet bread pudding studded with raisins and served in a pool of cream. The ricotta cheesecake had good crust and flavor and a not-so-good graininess. Big goblets came full of creamy and luscious gelato.

The Gipsy Kings blare on the sound system. Pizza dough flies in the kitchen. Light comes from fixtures that look like weird robot heads. Yet despite its visual quirks, Metro provides more or less what we’ve come to expect from so many restaurants in this town.

Metro, 7302 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 935-1678. Lunch and dinner seven days. Full bar. Valet parking. Most major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $30 to $50.