RESTAURANTS : RINGSIDE AT SUNSET : A Cape Cod-Like Atmosphere With a California Menu That Doesn’t Make Waves

Sunset. A pair of joggers bounce down the beach, radiating the catch-up aura of dusk-hour aerobics. A lone volleyball net casts lengthening shadows. Massive gray clouds are momentarily brushed with pink glory, all that sunset stuff.

Most tables at 1 Pico have pretty close to a ringside seat on this soothing show. As the dusk gathers outside the plate-glass windows, a massive stone fireplace crackles behind you (well, not really--it’s a gas fire, but a convincing one, complete with ashes and glowing embers, which looks as if it might crackle). Warm and serene, you watch Santa Monica State Beach get slowly swallowed up in murky fog.

One reason for all the serenity around here must be the architecture. 1 Pico belongs to Shutters on the Beach, a hotel with more rafters, shutters, white railings and wood siding than you can shake a clapboard at. Even in the daytime, you’d feel very far from Santa Monica here, somewhere quiet and civilized, maybe at a recherche inn on Cape Cod. The food goes right along with the fantasy, because it’s what a creative-minded, exquisite inn (viz., one that keeps up to date on California tastes) would feature: salad, pasta, chicken and fish, plus a handful of meat entrees and, of course, a killer chocolate dessert.

So we have mushroom ravioli tossed in herbs and butter, not big on mushroom flavor but of a perfectly al dente texture. Roma tomato soup with grilled scallops has a pleasant, clean tartness like a summer-weight spaghetti sauce, the effect reinforced by the toasted slice of baguette bread spread with olive puree that floats along with four or five scallops. The modest Caesar salad stars a curl of toasted Parmesan cheese (that’s the “crispy Parmesan roll”) and some garlicky croutons. Sweet, plump Chardonnay-steamed mussels swim in a mild herb cream sauce; delicately seared ahi tuna comes with a light soy dressing and some peppery lettuces.

Nearly all the appetizers are fairly good in this easygoing way, just what you’d want for sunset-watching. Curiously, though, the kitchen lacks a steady hand with salt. One night, the Maryland crab cake (served with corn kernels and baby lettuces) was abusively salty, while the seafood soup could have used salt. Or lemon, or something--it was basically a good, saffron-seafood stock, but too low-keyed for its own good.

Many of the entrees have a similarly discreet and unobtrusive quality. The lightly creamed spinach under the applewood-smoked salmon is as interesting as the salmon itself. A halibut special (the waitress stresses that the restaurant doesn’t have specials most nights) drifts by without disturbing the waters at all: nicely cooked fish with mashed potatoes.

But others may have some unexpected quality. Wide ribbon pasta is mixed with sugar snap peas and chunks of duck (the menu description “shredded duck” leads you to expect less duck than you actually find), but it has an elusive flavor that seems to be ginger. The penne are tossed with portabella and unspecified “wild” mushrooms, and I swear I found a delicious morel in there one time.

In L.A., we know what to expect from grilled vegetable salad--something with a balsamic vinegar dressing. Here the vegetables are flavored with garlic instead and come with a mound of couscous. You can order chicken two ways, roasted on a rotisserie or grilled. The latter is actually more fun, because the middling-browned skinless breast comes on top of some tiny brown lentils cooked in broth with a hint of tomato puree. They’re earthy, chewy and slightly sweet.

The big, simply prepared veal chop shares a plate with an extremely crisp--make that positively wiry-- potato galette, listed on the menu as a crisp potato cake. The same chewy potato cake (which tastes OK once you get into it) comes with the herb-crusted rack of lamb. This is very sweet and flavorful lamb, a little on the fatty side, and in addition to the potato garnish, it has some of the excellent lightly creamed spinach that showed up under the salmon.

The dessert selection seems to change more than the rest of the menu; you might be told about a special like plum crisp or an individual peach pie (rather huge, looking like a semi-collapsed circus big top, and not nearly as sweet as most peach pies). Fortunately, most of this excellent and distinctive list is always available.

There’s a very tart lemon tart with a very rich crust and a real strawberry shortcake (though sometimes there’s some alien chocolate on it). Best of all is the warm chocolate pudding cake in caramel sauce. This tastes like it was invented by a kid who grew up preferring chocolate cake batter licked from the mixer blades to the finished cake. It’s rich, moist and powerfully chocolate, like warmed-up devil’s food batter mixed with a bit of frosting.

We all have an idea of what hotel food is like, whether we think of shrimp cocktail and steak sandwiches or three-cheese calzone and tricky carved vegetables. 1 Pico has succeeded in creating something different from our expectations: inn food in a faraway setting .

1 Pico, Shutters on the Beach Hotel, 1 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 458- 0030. Lunch and dinner served daily. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $46-$83.