RESTAURANT REVIEW : Puck Tries Fast Food With Taste

On the Third Street Promenade, next to the Mann theater, on the second floor of a new corporate-looking food corridor, one finds Wolfgang Puck’s fast-food adventure: Wolfgang Puck’s California Express.

Open for four months now, this small bright place serves fast food made to order, concocted right there, before your eyes, as you stand there with your small pink cafeteria tray. Of all of Puck’s various establishments, this venue has the most limited menu and staff. There is no table service--you pick up your own silverware, carry your own food. Salt and pepper come in packets. The average bill, according to an Express employee, runs around $15 per person, about what you’d pay at the Crocodile Cafe or the California Pizza Kitchen.

I first saw the Wolfgang Puck California Express with some relief--it is blissfully less hallucinatory than the large, overwrought cartoonish display at Puck’s City Walk Cafe in Universal City. The same graphic motif--wedges-o’-pizza--prevails in bright, playful, profuse broken tile mosaics and frosted into the glass. But the Santa Monica store is smaller, less cramped, exponentially less assaultive on the senses. The crowd: people who feel strongly about getting to a movie on time.

Early on a Saturday evening, the cooking area simmers with a full staff of energetic young men just champing at the bit. We’re greeted warmly, almost gratefully: These guys are ready to work. We order extravagantly. Two salads. Pizza, pasta, Pellegrino. The cashier calls out our order loudly, with gusto, echoed by the kitchen staff.

We pick up our trays, our drinks, silverware, napkins and start moving down the counter. Our salads are already waiting. Our pizza is just being slipped into the oven. Fresh angel hair pasta is bubbling in the pasta cookers and a small pan of fresh tomatoes and double blanched garlic is about to be fired. We take our salads and beverages, slip outside, choose a table, unload the first round, go back inside to find the angel hair and tomatoes finished and waiting at the pasta station. By the time we’ve brought that back to the table, the pizza chef is calling out our number.

*

Eight to 10 minutes, and we’ve got a tableful of fresh, hot food. Not bad. Two rolls are dry and tasteless, but everything else is fine. In fact, sitting outside on the balcony under umbrellas, in cool seaside air, the chill chased by heaters, the sky turning pink at sunset, with a very fresh chopped vegetable salad with a balsamic vinaigrette in early February, I think: This is one small reason one might continue to live in greater Los Angeles, despite its various devastations.

Another visit, on a rainy evening, there’s less impetus to chose Puck’s fast-food counter from among the dozens of other promenade offerings: The balcony is drenched and the eating area that is under the roof is still essentially unenclosed and unheated. Only a few of us brave the cold for a bowl of freshly prepared minestrone soup--you see the cooks toss vegetables, beans and broth separately into a pan and cook everything briefly--the vegetables still have a good crunch.

Salad ingredients are stunningly fresh although the salads themselves tend to be over-dressed--a concession, perhaps to the demands of fast-food palates. The Caesar, for example, is made with lovely crisp, pale, whole, inner leaves of romaine, and the dressing isn’t bad, but there is simply too much of it. Chinois Chicken salad is swamped in a gingery honey-mustard dressing; otherwise it’s a fairly faithful, if heavy-handed facsimile of the original salad, available at Chinois at a dinner time price of $12.75. Better to ask for dressing on the side--it will come in a tiny paper espresso cup.

Pizzas are simple to the point of dullness. The sourdough crust, made with honey and olive oil, is without discernible virtue; toppings (four cheese, vegetable, spicy shrimp) are oddly flavorless.

On the other hand, pastas are fresh and supple. Portions are generous. Linguine with chicken Bolognese is a clever take on the standard meat sauce; the pasta is tossed first with Parmesan and butter, and the meat sauce provides a spicy contrast. A small, selection of wine by the glass, beer, tea and coffee drinks are available, but if you want dessert, you have to go elsewhere--so far, no sweets on the premises.

* Wolfgang Puck California Express, 1315 Third St., 2nd Level, Santa Monica, (310) 576-4770 . Lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine. Visa, MasterCard accepted. Food for two, $12-$28.