RESTAURANTS : MONKEY BUSINESS : Hollywood Celebrities and a Global Menu Are the Stars at This Remarkable New Hangout

How are you?” asks the maitre d’ when you walk into Monkey Bar. You look again to see if you know him. You don’t. But he sounds so sincere, it’s hard to believe he’s a stranger.

Actually, nobody’s a stranger at Monkey Bar, a restaurant so hard to get into you practically become a relative while trying to make a reservation. First they tell you to call back after noon. You point out that it is after noon. There’s a cheerful sigh on the other end of the phone, and then the man with the English accent goes off in search of someone to talk to you. He comes back, slightly exasperated, to say he can’t find anyone. “Call back in an hour?” he suggests. You do. This time a woman answers, but she’s not much help either. All the tables for this week were booked last week. “We’re a very small restaurant,” she explains, “almost a club.”

But everybody’s so upbeat and pleasant about the whole thing that you can’t get annoyed. And when you finally do show up at the restaurant--having booked two weeks in advance (“Do you think you could make it by 6:30?”)--you find that it was all worth it.

Because once you’re in the door, Monkey Bar is everything that you don’t expect a new restaurant to be. It’s comfortable. It’s quiet (well, relatively). The service is remarkably efficient, attentive and unobtrusive. And it’s packed with people who are either celebrities or look like they should be.

Glenn Close, Nick Nolte and James Brooks slide into a booth. Not a ripple runs through the room. Occasionally somebody will come over and slide in with them for a second, but it’s more like visiting friends than celebrity hounds. This is their club.

The look is perfect--there’s a bar in front (packed with women with very long hair and very short skirts and men with $400 blue jeans), then a small room (if there’s a Siberia at Monkey Bar, this is it), and finally one square, windowless room with curved green leather booths, a tiger-striped rug, etched-glass panels and wonderful lamps with black-monkey bases. This is a room made for a gossip columnist--everybody’s visible, everybody’s almost inaccessible. It’s pretty difficult to bother somebody slouched into the back of a well-curved booth.

If the room feels slightly old-fashioned, the food does not. This is the ‘90s on a plate, pick hits from the global table. If you can’t find something you want to eat here, you aren’t hungry.

The little dishes are the best; you could happily make a meal out of appetizers. The lobster tacos are terrific--double corn tortillas filled with white beans and chunks of lobster tail, served with drawn butter, truly hot chile sauce and pieces of lime. A few plates of these would send most people home happy. The Thai noodle salad is also wonderful: Its clean, pungent smell of kafir limes floats across the table, stronger than perfume, as you munch on a mixture of shrimp, cucumber, carrots and crushed peanuts. This is the closest thing to real Thai food you’ll ever find in a fancy restaurant.

Something called “grilled sashimi of tuna” comes with Thai cucumber-peanut salad, Japanese wasabi and Chinese barbecue sauce. This pan-Asian plate is absolutely delicious. And absolutely stingy; the three slim slices of tuna factor out at $3 each.

Rock shrimp, on the other hand, are served with a generous hand. They are delicately deep-fried in beer batter, each shrimp tender in its crunchy coat. This is a huge plate of lustily fried food that tastes like something you might get on a back porch in Lafayette, La. It comes with two sauces, the better one spicy, bright-red and rich with ginger.

In a cooler mood, you might want to try a truffled mushroom salad. It’s an enormous meal-on-a-plate, a tangle of grilled radicchio, wild mushrooms, greens, potatoes and shavings of Parmesan cheese all doused with a pungent truffle oil.

Mickey Rourke slinks into the restaurant. Still no stir. At the next table, the waiter valiantly tries to speak French with a Parisian customer upset to find herb-and-olive-spiked oil on the table instead of butter. “Pourquoi pas du beurre? “ she asks as Rourke slips past. “Pourquoi pas indeed?” the waiter replies, running off to get butter.

You may well be sated--on the buzz of the room and the buzz of the appetizers--by the time the main course rolls around. And this is a good thing, for the entrees are not particularly impressive. The best of them is the roast free-range chicken, with wild-mushroom dressing stuffed under its skin and garlic mashed potatoes stuffed under its body.

Jerk pork is nice, too, the pork rubbed with Jamaican spices and served with really spicy Cuban fried rice. And there’s a pretty terrific Nicoise salad made with grilled ahi tuna. But everything else is fairly ho-hum. Charlie’s Pasta, a pathetic mess of penne, is made with chicken and broccoli and garlic. The steak is merely mediocre. The vegetable plate is a big heap of nice vegetables, but they’re not prepared with enormous imagination. Air-dried duck is similar to what you’ll find all over town, except this one comes with particularly greasy flat noodles.

Specials are remarkable mostly for the sheer luxury of their ingredients. Stone crab claws, imported from Florida, cost $39 a plate. This seems pretty silly when local crabs taste so much better. The white truffles on the linguine may impress your date, but only because the appetizer costs $25. This is a bad year for white truffles, but these are bad truffles in any year.

Nobody eats dessert here. Banana cream pie comes in a shell hard as a rock. Pumpkin pie is light and airy instead of dense and delicious. “Zebra cheesecake” is very big, very black and white, very tasteless.

Does anybody care? Of course not. When you leave, shoving through the dense crowd at the bar, the maitre d’ will cry, “How was it?” with exactly the same sincerity he mustered three hours ago when you came in.

“Wonderful,” you’ll say. And mean it.

Monkey Bar, 8225 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles; (213) 658-6005. Open for dinner Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $60-$85.