RESTAURANTS : A CHINESE STARSHIP : Off We Go, Into the Wild Gray Yonder--a Cantonese-French Appetizer Odyssey

Once upon a time, when this place was a Greek restaurant called Grandia Palace, it stunned the eye. Rows of Corinthian columns marched through a regular forest of classical Greco-Roman statues, and I seem to remember a lot of the sort of ivy that, let’s say, never needs watering.

Today, all that has been swept away, the room is clean and spare . . . and it still stuns the eye. Now the dining room walls are a screaming shade of red. You sit on charcoal-gray banquettes with backs formed by tubular cushions, and at either end of a row, these tubes curve around in a J shape, giving the effect of a conversation pit on the starship Enterprise.

The dove-gray bar is easier on the eye. Nothing to see here but a bas-relief map of the world over the bar, bar stools with seats shaped like inverted cones and a great big conversation pit with a large globe lamp hanging over it, looking like a bathysphere weighing down the end of a fishing pole.

The exterior of the restaurant is quiet indeed. Only the valet parking sign indicates that this is the T Room. The door with the address is locked; the curving black door at the corner of El Centro Avenue, which leads into the bar, has no sign; the neglected-looking door halfway between them stands under a marquee that still reads “Grandia Palace.”

Needless to say, a different crowd frequents the place than the one that used to come here for grape leaves and taramosalata --a younger, artier crowd, probably following owner Bret Witke from his defunct club, b2. One night it looked as if somebody was doing a fashion photo shoot, because a devastating blond woman was striking poses on the bar in front of a bank of photographer’s lights.

The menu is not divided into the usual categories of appetizers, entrees and desserts for two reasons: (1) the restaurant considers everything an appetizer, and (2) it just doesn’t serve anything you could call a dessert. Whatever you order will come on a pedestal plate, as in some old-fashioned Chinese restaurants.

The food’s pretty good--mostly Cantonese dishes with occasional nods to French cuisine. Most things tend to be a little sweet, but rarely tired or dull. The slightly oily spring rolls are decently crisp and come with a sweet, tangy, very red dipping sauce. Like the pot stickers, which are not quite as exciting, they offer a choice of chicken or vegetable (mostly cabbage) filling. The best of the dim sum-type appetizers is the chicken shiu mai , neat little pasta bags with green onion and carrot threads among the chicken-and-transparent-noodle filling.

You can also get that moo shu-like Chinese taco where you wrap a chicken or seafood mixture in lettuce leaves and dose them with sweet, gingery, bean-based hoisin sauce. Not bad. A different sweet bean sauce comes on oysters, which are good and fresh. You can get scallops (“giant scallops,” that is) in a pleasant, somewhat neutral Chinese white sauce.

You could call the foregoing dishes relatively appetizer-like and the rest of the menu more entree-like. The latter section runs heavily to chicken. T Room chicken is a mixture of chunks of chicken and walnut meats in a sweet, gingery, quite red barbecue sauce. Sauteed garlic chicken seems perfectly French in its meaty, powerful, garlicky sauce (the waiters suggest adding some chile oil, a good idea). Chicken with peanuts is the usual, with blackened hot peppers scattered among the meat.

Smoked chicken with seaweed and honey walnuts sounds more fun than it is, though. Sure, it thrills the heart to see a pedestal plate loaded with what looks like lawn clippings, but underneath the fluff of shredded seaweed, the chicken strips taste like breaded skin. A couple of sweetened walnut pieces here and there don’t save it.

Most of the rest of the entrees feature shellfish, such as a whole lobster, mostly removed from the shell, in a Chinese white sauce perfumed with fresh ginger and garnished with a radish carved into a pretty pincushion-like blossom. The insert menu often lists crystal shrimp, cooked until just translucent in the same sort of gingery white sauce, but the shrimp dish to get is the salt-and-pepper prawns, a big plate of fried prawns sprinkled with salt and red and black pepper (it’s not really as hot as the menu warns).

You don’t get a huge choice of noodle dishes. You could call Lo mein Chinese spaghetti with shrimp, and Shanghai noodle is a fairly light and refreshing dish of angel hair in a gingery sauce with a choice of chicken or seafood.

But perhaps you didn’t come to the T Room to eat but for some other reason--to enjoy the frisson of a futuristic room existing unsuspectedly behind a grimy exterior, or to gossip and watch who comes in or to do the odd fashion shoot. Have a snack while you’re here anyway. It’s not bad.

The T Room, 5657 Melrose Ave., Hollywood; (213) 467-4068. Dinner served daily. Full bar. Valet parking. Dinner/snacks for two, food only, $14-$72.