RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Duet of Trendy and Clumsy

The first time I saw slipcovered furniture, I was visiting a college friend at his family home in New Orleans’ genteel Garden District. My friend’s mother, an aristocratic, nervous woman, had just put summer slipcovers on the living room chairs and sofa. I was expected to approve but was, instead, utterly confused: Why, I wondered, would someone want to put what looked like rumpled white pajamas on their furniture?

I was swamped by an identical moment of aesthetic confusion on my first visit to Duet, the bar and restaurant occupying the former site of the Shaker Mountain Inn on North Central Avenue in Glendale.

The split levels and rough wood paneling perpetuate the former inn’s urban ski lodge look. To this, Duet’s decorator has applied a variety of trendy, if disjunctive design elements. Plaster walls are rubbed a mottled peach or lemon that clashes with the muted green and violet booths. Most striking, however, are the chairs . . . they wear slipcovers, wrinkly, slightly ill-fitting unbleached cotton jammies.

Luckily, the mix of trendy ideas and clumsy execution is far more pronounced in the decor than in the cooking.

Framed in bricks on the sunken level of the central atrium, the open kitchen resembles an enormous hearth, with chefs and appliances where the logs and fire would be. Chef Andre Guerrero--formerly of Cafe Le Monde, Stoney Point, Alice’s in Malibu and Brio in Tarzana--is an old Glendale favorite. His chef de cuisine, Robert A. Sperry, a Guerrero in-law, also cooked at Alice’s, but I knew his work from Mrs. Rasperry’s Pantry, a charming tiny Glendale restaurant he operated with his wife Bernadette, a.k.a., Mrs. R.A. Sperry--get it?

It was at Mrs. Rasperry’s Pantry that I had my first piece of fish cooked by R.A. himself and I still remember the experience: Chilean seabass as light and fluffy as a cloud. I’ve eaten pounds of the fish since, most of it handled far less artfully. At Duet, the bass is served on a bed of sauteed leeks with a gentle ginger-annato-lime sauce: R.A. Sperry hasn’t lost his touch.

Over the years, the Guerrero family has developed its own strong strain of California Cuisine incorporating elements of French, Italian, Japanese, Filipino and other Asian cooking. Portions are generous, presentation is usually simple, occasionally cluttered.

Salads are interesting and good. My favorite is the fried chicken salad, available in a meal-sized portion at lunch and as an appetizer at dinner. Arugula with ranch dressing is surrounded by barbecued pecans and chunks of crunchy fried chicken: an all-American picnic on a plate. Also notable is the compellingly bitter chicory salad with Gorgonzola and more of those seasoned pecans.

Griddled corn cakes are a dull foil for wondrous spicy shrimp on one appetizer. A good seafood ravioli has cream, chopped scallops and shiitake mushrooms for a monochromatic study in pleasurable chewiness. While I enjoyed a special risotto with wild rice and duck, I prefer the salmon risotto on the dinner menu, with its pencil asparagus and crunchy fried leeks.

A variety of pastas are meatless--notably the one called “ravioli Max,” good cheese-filled pasta in a cream sauce with lightly cooked fresh spinach. A respectable filet mignon comes with green peppercorns and a brandy sauce; the so-called shoestring potatoes, however, look exactly like regular ole french fries to me. Chicken adobo, a lively Filipino chicken and rice dish, is spiked with palm vinegar, garlic, pineapple and tomato-cilantro relish. The lomo de puerco , a Caribbean roast pork, is unexpectedly dull. Twice, my dinner vegetables were ice-cold. Once, I told the waitress about this; she apologized, took my plate and returned it with everything microwaved and shriveled.

On weekend nights, Duet offers live music upstairs. I wandered in one Sunday night when Jim and Martha Hession and their American Jazz Quartet were playing. Hession’s piano playing astonished us throughout dinner, so after dessert we climbed the stairs to have a look. We found a choreographer and his professional dancers jitterbugging on the dance floor, the small crowd laughing and clapping with delight: a spontaneous floor show, enchanting and hilarious and no doubt only one of many such moments Duet has in store for us.

* Duet, 900 Central Ave., Glendale, (818) 240-0808. Lunch and dinner seven days. Full bar. Major credit cards. Lot parking. Dinner for two, food only, $32 to $64.