ROMANCE UNDER THE TREES : A Lovely Setting and a Colorful History Have Made the Four Oaks a Fixture for Decades
The Four Oaks Restaurant has roots. There was an inn on the site, on the upper reaches of what is now Beverly Glen Boulevard, as early as the 1880s. At least part of the multilevel house that stands on the site today was built in 1909. During Prohibition, a speakeasy and brothel were said to have operated here. (In the 1960s, the then-owner of the property discovered the remains of a still behind a hidden panel on the lower level.)
In the late 1960s, the Cafe Four Oaks (as it was then known) was bought by a former actor named Jack Allen, who turned it into a “creative” sort of place. There were souffles and lots of things with herbs; homemade bread was served in terra-cotta flower pots, and the house dessert was called Lemon Thing.
The food hardly mattered, though. The Four Oaks had location, times three. Nestled in a corner of the canyon, shaded by magnificent sycamore trees (the gigantic eponymous four-trunked oak was cut down in the 1940s to make room for a small parking lot), it had two delightful patios and a rustic, multi-room indoor dining area that seemed many miles and many decades from contemporary Los Angeles. It was casual but seriously romantic.
In 1987, the Four Oaks got new owners and a partly new name--the Four Oaks Restaurant. Claude Segal served briefly as chef, but in mid-1988 his place was taken by Belgian-born, Swiss-trained Peter Roelant, who had worked with the legendary Fredy Girardet and then served as co-chef for six years at L’Orangerie.
The Four Oaks is not a high-profile restaurant in today’s L.A. dining scene; its clientele is not the trendiest, and it is often missing from Best Restaurant lists. But it has endured. The common wisdom is that it owes its survival less to its food than to its undeniably romantic setting, which remains more or less unchanged from Allen’s day.
I had some very enjoyable meals at the Four Oaks a few years ago with my then-fiancee--but the circumstances almost certainly colored the experience. How good would the Four Oaks be, I wondered, if the atmosphere held no erotic charge? What would the food taste like without the seasoning of romance? To find out, I had a couple of meals there recently in amiable but hardly amorous company.
Dinner with assorted friends: A mild evening. The restaurant about half full. A few obviously dating couples but also some larger parties, at least one all-male business dinner, a few couples long past the dating stage.
We end up trying what seems like a little of everything. A special appetizer of small baked potatoes topped with creme fraiche, a bit of julienned smoked salmon and a teaspoon or so of Sevruga caviar--sublime. An engagingly simple if pretentiously named “Duo of Oak Leaves Salad with Just Crisp Young Vegetables”--a red and green oak-leaf-lettuce salad tossed in balsamic vinegar and basil dressing with baby vegetables radiating out from under it in spoke pattern. Genuinely spicy black-bean soup, deliciously overloaded with rock shrimp, thin slices of duck sausage and corn-bread croutons. Maryland crab fritters, their almost custardy interior recalling not Maryland fritters at all but the shrimp or chicken croquettes of chef Roelant’s native Belgium. Unusually light, flaky spring rolls filled with shredded vegetables and bits of Maine lobster in a honey-ginger-soy glaze. There seems to be no particular focus to the food thus far, but everything is very satisfying.
Main courses are less successful. “Chinese Style” Atlantic salmon, in the same glaze that adorns the spring roll but otherwise not Chinese in any sense I could detect, is nicely cooked, and sliced peppery roasted duck breast in cabernet sauce with garlic mashed potatoes is hearty and savory, but neither seems particularly inspired. A nightly special of sauteed beef tenderloin in a spicy green-peppercorn sauce, served with mashed potatoes and asparagus, is perfect for the meat-and-potatoes man in our party. But his girlfriend’s New Zealand snapper, a beautiful piece of fish, perfectly seared, is immersed in a pool of cranberry sauce (!) and accompanied by dry, chewy pumpkin-filled ravioli--a pre-Halloween trick that is no treat.
We share three pretty good desserts. Two of them--a feuillete of roasted pears with cinnamon ice cream, and a special of roasted figs with warm thick cream--are noticeably modest in size and light on the sugar, which is fine with us. The third is by-the-book profiteroles, better than most restaurants can manage.
Late lunch with the guys: a warmish afternoon. A scattering of other customers, including a chic ladies’ birthday luncheon, a casually dressed middle-aged couple and a French woman of a certain age eating alone.
Three of our party choose soup and fish, and we have a wonderful meal. To begin, a thick, unorthodox “gazpacho” of pureed radish and cucumber, tart and aromatic; a pure, intensely flavorful tomato soup spiked with basil leaves and slivers of roasted garlic; a light, sweet corn chowder, milky rather than creamy, streaked with red bell pepper coulis. Then a glorious wedge of center-cut swordfish with a mix of multicolored sweet pepper strips and Nicoise olives and half a dozen long, thin, homemade potato chips; a generous serving of rare tuna, encrusted in garlic, black pepper and ginger, blackened, sliced and served with jasmine rice; a handsome chunk of halibut encrusted in basil, surrounded by small mounds of potatoes mashed with lemon-flavored olive oil.
Our fourth does less well. His carpaccio of salmon is delicate to the point of blandness, and the 3/4-inch-thick wedges of blue-corn pancake garnish seem out of place. His main dish, a special of penne with rock shrimp, comes with an unadvertised curry sauce that tastes of curry powder right from the can.
Desserts are again small in size and only modestly sweet--a frozen black-currant souffle, cut into bars and stacked akimbo like a Richard Serra sculpture, an almond tuile filled with assorted berries and warm orange mousse, and a bowl of three fresh-tasting fruit sorbets with more berries.
The verdict? A lot of good stuff, especially soups and fish. And a lovely, refreshingly rural setting, even if you’re not in it for the romance. On the other hand, being blinded by love when you eat here probably wouldn’t hurt.
*
Four Oaks Restaurant, 2181 N . Beverly Glen Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 470-2265. Dinner served nightly, lunch served Tuesday through Saturday, brunch on Sunday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only: $74-$97.
