LIPP-SMACKING FOOD : With Bam Bam Salads and Italian Sunrises, This Bistro Pays Lip Service to Melrose Cool

The Lipp is smack in the goofiest part of Melrose, next door to the place that sells giant plastic cows and down the block from the garishly painted rock ‘n’ roll gas station that pumps out ethyl and “Dust in the Wind.” It’s a bit of Gallic cool carved out of what used to be the coffee shop Mel ‘n’ Rose’s, a modern bistro, sort of nicely gloomy and aged looking, with wooden booths and hatracks, high ceilings, mote-filled beams of sunlight. A shaded patio holds one of the few smoking sections left in the city; the bar features hard-boiled eggs and good cappuccino , country wine by the glass and herbal cocktails made with sherry. Though the restaurant is only a few months old, it feels as if it has been around forever.

A very Melrose crowd hangs out here, the black-Jeep movie-industry squadron, sure, but also Euro tourists, improv actors, local families and the over-pierced legions of the night, whose tattoos glow like Matisses in the late-afternoon sun.

Brasserie Lipp in Paris, the pleasant Left Bank Hemingway haunt that is presumably the inspiration for this restaurant, specializes in pigs’ trotters, sauerkraut and a delicious salad made from cattle snouts. This is not the sort of cuisine one serves on Melrose if one expects to stay in business more than a couple of weeks, and as you’d expect, the Lipp is more cool California restaurant than new-wave brasserie.

Chef Fred Eric is a Joachim Splichal protege who became famous serving murky piles of soba noodles on glass bricks at the nightclub Flaming Colossus. He cooked until recently at the Olive, where he pioneered the “booster box,” a dish that looks like a bunch of appetizers on a ride at Coney Island. Eric’s presentations can make him seem less like a chef than a frustrated artist, a budding Isamu Noguchi or Jean Tinguely reduced to constructing sculpture out of food, but he has real food sense, a fondness for strong flavors like cumin and fresh ginger, a free hand with fresh chiles, a keen appreciation for textural contrast.

Still, the food is spectacularly visual here, stacked and splattered and propped into improbable verticality, ribbons of neon-green tortilla chips soaring from goblets of shrimp cocktail, grilled sausages set on end in puddles of parsleyed tomato sauce, pan-grilled whitefish filets disappearing into the middle distance like a steeply raked stage, fried Brie wedges arranged into a Stonehenge of cheese.

At breakfast, there is often a thing called Italian Sunrise (they’re big into strange menu names here): poached eggs perched on upended slabs of fried polenta, bound with classic mushroom duxelles and sitting in bright red and yellow pools of tomato coulis . It looks more like the mock-up for a postmodern opera set than anything you might actually eat before noon.

Pretty much alone among Los Angeles restaurants of this caliber, Lipp allows two people to eat a full dinner--appetizers, entrees, a bottle of French red and a shared dessert--for less than $50: a deal. One can only hope that the price-quality thing will survive when Eric departs as scheduled in a couple of months to open his own restaurant in Los Feliz.

Bam Bam salad, presumably named after Flintstone Betty Rubble’s kid, is a towering, Thai-inflected assemblage of shredded, crispy fried beef, toasted garlic and watercress, shot through with a weirdly appealing wallop of fresh mint; the vivid tostada salad is deconstructed into sort of a Cobb salad timbale, with crunchy bits of tortilla chip where you might expect to find the bacon; Waldorf salad is less the Miracle Whip-soused holiday dish you probably ate as a kid than a decent grilled-chicken salad with walnuts and bits of diced apple, garnished with dime-size rounds of sliced grape.

The Vaguely Vegan plate involves grilled, steamed and sauteed vegetables pressed into a rough pyramid around an alp of mashed potatoes, this on a chewy brown-rice cake that has been pan-fried to a crunch and set in a lake of salty soy-based dressing, the kind of dish the friends of vegetarians will stare at hungrily as they gnaw the very ordinary grilled steak.

Porky Prime Cut--thin grilled pork chops crusted with spice--is propped up like a model of a Las Vegas hotel. Where you’d expect the swimming pool, you’ll find a puddle of coffee-brown bean puree spiced to resemble barbecue sauce. Thickly breaded slices of fried green tomato might be cabanas, and an unmolded, pumpkin-orange dome of sweet-potato salad could be the planetarium. You could put the dish into a Joseph Cornell box if it weren’t quite so delicious.

Desserts include the usual creme brulees and ultra-chocolate whatevers, an extremely 3-D chocolate-banana thing and a nut torte that tastes like a great sticky bun without the bun.

The Lipp, 7313 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles; (213) 930-0256. Open for brunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Beer and wine. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $33-$42.