MALL FAVORS : With Saint Estephe’s Location and Joe Miller’s Partnership, Reed’s Adds Up

Going to the dentist and going to a shopping mall have just about equal appeal for me. And the idea of eating at the mall has never been compelling. At least not until a few weeks ago, when I decided to expand my horizons and venture out to Reed’s, the new Manhattan Beach restaurant opened by Brandon Reed in partnership with Joe Miller (of Joe’s in Venice).

Say “beach,” and I picture a restaurant at least flirting with sand, something with the tang of seaweed in the breeze. And, ideally, just a short stroll from the water. “Turn left into the Manhattan Village mall,” the voice on the phone informed me. “The closest landmark is Ralphs.” And a good thing, too. Without that familiar red sign to guide me, I could have been circling the mall till past dinnertime.

Bikini’s John Sedlar, a chef with an idiosyncratic vision if there ever was one, pioneered this very site with his late restaurant Saint Estephe and proved that people really will flock to a mall to eat, if the reward is as beautifully crafted as his reinvented Southwest cuisine. His is a hard act to follow, and Reed’s has sensibly taken a different tack. Like Joe’s, Reed’s is going for the middle ground with its California-French idiom. This is cooking everybody can understand. The portions are generous; the price is just right. The son of Joe’s? Not quite yet.

Rusted steel letters on the small, squared-off building spell out Reed’s. The tall windows are open to the breeze on an Indian summer night. Inside, the look is clean and spare, almost Scandinavian in its minimalism. The walls are faced in pale, satiny maple, and the tables are set far enough apart for real conversation. All the color in the dining room is concentrated in the bright, oversized canvases depicting lemons, radishes and other raw materials spilled onto a tabletop, and in the carefully composed plates sent out from the kitchen.

The painter is Patricia Reed. The cook is her son, 31-year-old Brandon Reed, who grew up in the restaurant business (his mother had a restaurant in Monterey) and headed for the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco straight out of high school. He later worked at L’Orangerie (where he met Miller), with Joachim Splichal at Max au Triangle and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Reed’s menu is a mixed bag of Italianesque pasta dishes and nouvelle French fish preparations, with a few Euro-Asian dishes to fill in the range. The kitchen’s emphasis is on fresh everyday ingredients served with a generous hand at prices that won’t make anyone flinch. Expensive ingredients are used more as accents, to add just a touch of luxe to a dish. Slivers of smoked salmon are tucked beneath tender corn cakes--not the cliched mini versions but honest-to-goodness pancakes with a dollop of dilled creme fraiche and a bright red-pepper coulis. One night’s special was an ahi tuna steak served in a red wine reduction scattered with sumptuous little cubes of foie gras.

Both Joe’s and Reed’s feature two prix fixe menus every night, which at $28 or $35 for a four-course menu is a bargain by any standard. This kind of sampling is a sensible way to deal with a first encounter. While most restaurants discourage any veering from the menu, Reed’s is flexible. “We’ll basically let people have anything they want,” Reed says.

There’s so much right about this restaurant in concept and in spirit that it’s puzzling why the kitchen is so slow to catch the obvious missteps. Good ideas and cooking savvy don’t always translate to the plate. It looks like a would-be hairdresser has done the salad, arranging the baby greens into fat strands, adorning them with small coins of goat cheese and dribbling a dark, puckery vinaigrette as thick as conditioner over the top. The ravioli is equally mystifying. Not only is the dough tough and resistant, the filling is virtually solid salmon instead of a juicy orchestration of flavors and texture. Potato-basil cannelloni, starchy as it sounds, actually works with its accompanying sauteed scallops and garnish of frizzed basil. But the shredded-duck-and-white-bean salad features half-cooked white beans garnished with soggy spinach leaves. This is a dish that should never have left the kitchen.

Things definitely begin to look up with the main courses, such as a serious carnivore’s plate of rare roast beef and a wonderfully appealing special of salmon encrusted with finely chopped mushrooms. Grilled Italian sausage on a bed of polenta makes a satisfying rustic supper. Slices of pork tenderloin are arranged atop homey mashed potatoes. But when every other dish sports the layered look, it quickly becomes overworked. Breaded veal on top of pale fettuccine is a good example. A few bites, and your plate looks much the way it did when your mother cut up your food for you.

Chicken pot pie, always a favorite of mine, looks cute with its browned pillow of puff pastry. The big chunks of chicken are moist, the vegetables al dente , but alas, everything is cloaked in a pasty sauce that had dried up in the oven. Back to the drafting board with that one.

The star of the dessert menu is the dark caramelized tarte tatin made with fat wedges of apple. Both the lemon tart, with a glassy crust of caramelized sugar on top, and the warm bread pudding, studded with pears and served with a little pitcher of nutmeg-scented cream, run a close second.

This is a restaurant just out of the starting gate, so the menu has its hits and many more misses. If the kitchen can work out the glitches and catch up to the concept that works so well at Joe’s, Reed’s might put this mall back on the culinary map.

Reed’s, 2640 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Manhattan Beach; (310) 546-3299. Lunch served Tuesday through Friday, dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Parking lot in front. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $50-$60. Prix-fixe menus, $28 and $35 per person.