Let the Secret Get Out: Mum’s the Word in Hip Long Beach

Now that the gigantic AMC 16 movie house has opened in downtown Long Beach, perhaps the area’s long awaited renaissance will become more than just Chamber of Commerce hype. There already is one very encouraging sign, just down the street--a triumvirate of upscale restaurants: L’Opera, Pine Avenue Fish House and Mum’s.

Mum’s, possibly the least known of the three, bills itself as a pizza and pasta grill, but don’t be taken in by that plain label. It’s eccentric from top to bottom, and handsome too. Blond wood furniture, a color scheme of soft greens and whites and dramatic lighting make the ambience aggressively contemporary, and a hip, well-dressed crowd eagerly has taken up residence. Friday and Saturday nights are particularly animated, thanks in part to live jazz.

On the main floor, seating is at elegantly dressed cafe-style tables, two long rows of them running the length of the dining room. There’s a sleek bar with a flashy open kitchen where embers glow softly in a worn tile pizza oven. This is a good place for nibbling on appetizers and socializing.

Upstairs, on the mezzanine level, the prime tables are high-backed, semi-circular booths upholstered in grainy black cloth. These booths, which look as if they might have been designed by Edward Hopper, offer some of the more intimate dining in town--they’re so high you can’t see from one into the next. Thick padding muffles neighboring sounds as well.

It’s a grand feeling to sit up here, looking down on the bustle of the kitchen and main floor below. (Maybe you’ll regret not having a direct view of all the art that Mum’s displays so prominently. Personally, I don’t mind. To me, the color-streaked canvases look like nothing but adult finger-paintings).

While you are musing, a waiter drops by in timely fashion to recite a long list of daily specials. Bring a tape recorder. This is one of those restaurants where the dishes read like recipes: lots of ingredients in improbable combinations. Credit (or blame) young executive chef Enrique Tonoco for that.

Tonoco is a protege of Antonio Tommasi, one of the best Italian chefs in Los Angeles. They worked at Chianti Cucina on Melrose Avenue, so you can proceed with confidence when it comes to dishes such as minestrone, pizza with mozzarella, tomato sauce and oregano, Caesar salad or penne with spicy tomato sauce. Tonoco’s pizza crusts are thin, crisp around the edge and delightfully chewy in the center. His pastas are clean-tasting and al dente. His thick, grainy marinara sauce is the best in Long Beach.

The remaining 90% of the menu is quite a bit dicier, many items being fundamentally delicious but firmly overboard in conception. Good Thai-style spring rolls, for example, have a gingered beef filling, delicate curry spices and a crunchy see-through skin. Why, then, goo them up in a pool of cloying plum-flavored sauce?

Sometimes you run into a simple, perfect dish such as crab cakes with tarragon butter--pretty rich, maybe, but flaky, intensely flavored crab cakes nonetheless. Then you find yourself confronted with a numbing creation such as jumbo scallops wrapped in sole with lobster ravioli, fried vegetables and piccata sauce.

One waitress informed us that this dish “practically made us famous.” Well, not to me. It’s a colorful, extraterrestrial-looking pile of deep-fried turnip, parsnip and onion shavings surrounded by fat, sole-wrapped scallops and green ravioli with a minced lobster filling, with the fish and ravioli blanketed in a lemon butter sauce that goes heavy on the capers. It strikes me as adult finger-painting--like the stuff on the walls, only in three dimensions.

As I’ve said, the pizza crusts are exemplary. The best of the toppings might be barbecued chicken, even though it oddly falls a bit short in terms of both innovation and aesthetic success. Now that California Pizza Kitchen is a $100-million dollar corporation, the notion of a pizza with chopped chicken meat, cilantro, sliced red onion, barbecue sauce and a slightly smoky cheese hardly seems radical--even when, as in this case, the barbecue sauce is terribly sweet.

Nothing seems particularly out of line about pizza with asparagus, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, goat cheese and tomato, either, unless you consider that artichoke doesn’t really go with any of those other flavors. Vegetarians will do better sticking to the pizza with sauteed eggplant, goat cheese and tomato. Meat eaters can cotton to the Italian sausage and ham pizza (ask the kitchen to hold the artichokes).

Then there are the pastas. Along with a few familiar faces are such Tonoco creations as cilantro- jalapeno tagliolini with peas and blackened shrimp in red pepper cream sauce, or chestnut flour ravioli filled with veal in morel mushroom sauce, or Thai linguine with chicken, julienned carrots, green onion, roasted peanuts and spicy ginger sauce. The tagliolini isn’t all that bad, despite being outrageously rich and creamy. Thai linguine, though, is a sticky mess.

A few salads and grill items round out the menu, the best of which probably are the spinach salad with a grainy mustard dressing, the prosciutto-wrapped filet mignon in a classic cognac-mustard sauce and a simple mesquite-grilled swordfish with garlic butter. I’d pass on the Chinese duck salad with spicy mango sauce, arugula and fried onions. The duck is soft and lean, and the onions are fried tempura-style (an interesting twist), but the dressing is so sour that the entire plate is unappealing.

Desserts, prepared daily by Pamela Greek, are fittingly eccentric. Greek bows to popular demand in making a conventional tirami su , but she seems more in her element with eggy blueberry banana bread pudding served in a dense slice with whipped cream. It may be nothing more than adult finger-painting, but the flavor, I’m grateful to say, is pure and redemptive.

Mum’s is moderately expensive. Starters are $4.25 to $$9.95. Pizzas are $8.25 to $10.75. Pastas are $8.95 to $12.95. Grills are $15.50 to $18.95.

Max Jacobson is a free-lance writer who reviews restaurants weekly for The Times Orange County Edition. * MUM’S

144 Pine Ave., Long Beach.

(310) 437-7700.

11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays; till midnight Fridays; noon to midnight Saturday; noon to 11 p.m. Sundays.

All major cards.