EXOTIC RIFFS : John Sedlar in His Bikini: Painted Plates, Chicken Feet, Chateau d’Yquem on Tap

The last great restaurant to open before the recession hit Los Angeles was probably Bikini, which debuted two years ago in a posh office building near the Santa Monica Greyhound station. It’s run by John Sedlar, who brought the world New Southwest Cuisine before he chucked it for the Expanded Pacific Rim thing.

Bikini may be the most eclectic restaurant in California, a lushly modern place with a two-story Eric Orr waterfall sculpture and a chef who is unafraid to riff on exotic dishes such as the banana-leaf-wrapped Nicaraguan tamale nacatamal and the spiky Thai-style dumpling. Sedlar pipes varicolored sauces into abstract sunsets and garnishes the skyscapes with medium-rare, grilled salmon. He serves chicken legs with the feet still attached. He stencils snide mottoes, such as “The Melting Pot Is Full,” in turmeric or paprika on his plates in the sort of up-yours, Eat the Rich spirit that was largely, if erroneously, supposed to be the force behind ‘80s cuisine. A neon sign above the upstairs bar says “Chateau d’Yquem on Tap,” which it is, at $32 and $40 a glass.

Although less well known than many of his contemporaries, Sedlar was among the most influential L.A. chefs of the ‘80s. You indirectly have Sedlar to thank each time you nibble on a blue-corn tortilla chip or eat a chile-rubbed steak, each time you encounter a plate painted with brightly colored squirts of sauce that might have delighted a Fauve. The move to Santa Monica from Manhattan Beach, where his landmark Saint Estephe was located, seems to have done splendid things for Sedlar’s career. Sedlar has now become the latest California sensation on the celebrity-chef circuit.

Meals at Bikini open with a doll’s teacup full of tarragon-scented custard, unmolded onto an enormous painted plate emblazoned with a Roy Lichtenstein-type cartoon--”Blam Blam,” the plate says--and drizzled with a gram or so of rice vinegar and sesame oil. The effect is dramatic. Next comes a warm, hand-patted tortilla and slabs of butter crusted with cracked black pepper and herbs; then, perhaps, a basket of freshly fried sopapillas : a solid “A” before the first course even arrives.

He may be most famous for his Southwestern cooking, but Sedlar seems to be at his best when his food cleaves closest to nouvelle French cuisine. There is a gorgeous composed salad, almost Art Deco in its formality, with soft, luxurious smoked eel, a mound of vinegared, julienned root vegetables and thinly sliced Asian pears, nearly transparent and glazed with sesame oil, overlapped into a Machine Age-perfect circle. A dish involving sheets of cilantro pasta--”open ravioli”--draped over stewed snails and a wash of the deepest-green cilantro puree, garnished with leaves of fried cilantro, is a somber meditation on that herb.

Egg foo yong, soft scrambled duck eggs tucked back into their shells with bits of shrimp and crunchy chunks of ginger, is less a pun on the faux -Cantonese from which it takes its name than on the custardy eggs with caviar served at L’Orangerie; Oaxacan sopes seems less like the classic Mexican antojito than like a very French spiced-clam tart with a masa shell where you might expect puff pastry. The Provencal-inspired rare roast lamb with three kinds of eggplant is among the best lamb dishes in town.

But of the half-dozen or so best restaurants in Los Angeles, Bikini can also be among the most problematic, from the uninteresting, overpriced wine list to the indifferent greeting at the door. While Sedlar is among the most inventive chefs in the world, sometimes, frankly, his ideas don’t work--and in a great restaurant, they should, every time. It isn’t easy to run a serious restaurant in Los Angeles right now.

For example, Tlatlan painted-duck enchilada is basically smoked slices of duck breast, rather rare, arranged on top of a sweetish trated sauce based on tamarind. The richness of the chile-tinged sauce suggests almost a mole ; the sweet pepperiness against the smoke of the meat suggests barbecue; the sweet-and-sour taste suggests the classic Chinese duck sauce. The cultural resonances seem to clash with one another where you would want them to harmonize, and the dish--the “enchilada” part of the name seems to refer to a tortilla-type object emblazoned with a traditional Mayan design and perched atop a sweet vegetable puree--is more confusing than delicious.

And though most of the food here is terrific, sometimes when Sedlar roams the globe, the results can be all over the map. A “schnitzel” of whitefish, essentially a filet coated in bread crumbs, fried and served with little dumplings in tart lemon butter, is ironically heavier than the veal dish it’s punning on; an air-dried duck taco with radicchio and arugula in a red-chile tortilla had none of the crisp skin that you might be looking for when you order, say, air-dried duck.

While user-friendly to chocolate freaks, dessert can prove the oddest course of all: A chocolate-truffle “tamale” served on a plate emblazoned with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe might sit across the table from a round of molten chocolate cake on a plate with the word Lust stenciled in cocoa.

Bikini might be expensive--prices were lowered last year, a recessionary concession--but it tries hard to prove that it is not bourgeois.

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Restaurant Bikini, 1413 5th St., Santa Monica; (310) 395-8611. Dinner served nightly Monday through Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $67-$85.