RESTAURANT REVIEW : Primarily Pleasing to the Palate

Primary Process Restaurant. The name conjures the oddest preconceptions. I imagined a strict vegetarian health food restaurant with a side business in herbs and colonics. A friend of mine imagined a too cool, black-walled, windowless, cyber-punk supper club. Another friend imagined dining amid Xerox machines and computer terminals. Not one of us anticipated we’d be walking into a small, modest dinner house--one that serves Continental cuisine.

We ask the young French waiter, “Why is this restaurant named Primary Process?”

The expression on his face is at once long-suffering and amused. He glances in the direction of the kitchen. “It is the owner’s idea,” he says, and smiles affectionately. “He’s a little crazy. Actually, the name itself is from Freud.”

Ah, yes. The primary processes of Freud were the unconscious ones--breathing, sleeping, dreaming . . . eating. The secondary processes are the ones requiring consciousness--talking, learning . . . and, presumably, cooking.

Besides the name, there is nothing overtly Freudian about this restaurant. The pale pink dining room has enormous splashy prints on the wall and a pink rose motif in industrial pile carpet. There’s a tulip on each table, and a candle. It has the self-conscious cheeriness of a redecorated waiting room. The clientele is mostly composed of my parents’ generation: older couples, older lady friends, with a few younger women dining together and a few fortyish men dining solo. A small but steady stream of take-out customers comes and goes.

“Smell the garlic, Rose!” one elderly lady says as she holds the door open for her friend.

The chef, formerly of Monet’s in downtown’s California Mart, has created a modest menu that’s half Continental, half California Contemporary. Nothing’s too fancy, including the prices.

The soups are quite good. There’s potato-leek with a rich, buoyant chicken broth, a thick and hearty barley-bean, and a full-flavored lentil-and-spinach soup that is pleasantly lighter than most lentil soups.

Salads, however, are assembled with utter indifference. The salad called Italian Bitter Green is made from the standard mix now available in supermarkets--the one I tried was a little brown. The Primary Salad is a confusing mix of lettuce, tinny hearts of palm, greens and tasteless Gorgonzola. The meal-sized hot chicken salad at lunch is dazzlingly bland. All three are overwhelmed by that a-little-goes-a-long-way herb, tarragon.

Entrees are classic plates of food from the Continental era: You get plenty of sauce, generous proportions and a choice of rice or stuffed potatoes. All the chicken dishes are made with boneless breasts. The pan-baked chicken is nicely cooked--juicy and tender--but comes with what is allegedly a garlic-and-lime sauce, a thick orange-colored sauce that tastes primarily of wine. Sauteed scallops Provencal are also deftly handled--with a winy tomato-garlic sauce. A fluffy Chilean sea bass special is lightly cooked and topped with a satisfying mix of chopped fresh tomatoes and garlic.

Pastas are more contemporary. Some are light and minimal: fettuccine with oil, roasted eggplant, dried chile and garlic is pretty good but could have used a tad more of every topping except the garlic. The cream-and-spinach sauce on angel hair pasta is rich and tasty but might have been more evenly matched with a sturdier pasta. The most popular pasta dish appears to be the mixed pasta, a combination of tortellini, penne and bow-ties in a tangy red sauce with ricotta cheese.

Desserts are simply wonderful here. A creme caramel is stunningly perfect: soft and smooth and cold and sweet. And the apple pie is the best I’ve had in months and months--good crust, the apples within not too sweet and full of flavor. The chef makes his own raspberry sorbet, the frozen essence of raspberries.

If I were a Primary Process regular, I’d stick to the soup and dessert. Someone like my Aunt Peggy, however, who has spent the last 30 years of her life dining at her golf club, wouldn’t be deterred by the chicken Marsala or a wine-soaked garlic-and-lime sauce. “Smell the garlic!” she’d call out to her cronies as she swept through the door. “And the prices aren’t half bad, either!”

Primary Process Restaurant, 1947 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 446-1961. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner. Beer and wine. Visa, MasterCard. Dinner for two, food only, $25 to $48.