RESTAURANT REVIEW : The World on One Large Plate

Driving to Pangaea, the restaurant replacing Matrixx at the Hotel Nikko, we find ourselves speculating about the mysterious name.

“It’s like panacea ,” says one friend.

“Sounds like medical terminology to me,” I say.

“I could be mistaken,” another friend puts in. “But wasn’t Pangaea the world before it blew all apart?”

“That sounds so beautiful,” the first friend says.

Pangaea does not look significantly different from Matrixx: swank, private, gleaming. I remembered the split-level layout, amorphous laminated glass sculptures, purple tulip-shaped globes clasping halogen bulbs. The clientele is largely hotel folk, business folk, a few young hip couples and Sting--the wrestler, not the singer.

There is more art than before: tall, elongated figures that seem to be made out of painted peat moss, some with hemp ropes extruding from their navels. But the tables are luxuriously large, the chairs commodious. On the center of each table, glittering under the light, a large amethyst geode sits like a small sample of the Earth’s crust.

“Do we get to take these home?” one of my friends wistfully asks our smart, efficient waitress.

“No. Too many people have taken them,” says the waitress. “We’re low on geodes.”

“You have to make a trip to the geode store,” says my friend.

“We have to keep going to the center of the Earth,” sniffs the waitress. “It’s hot down there.”

Our menus have cardboard covers with the front cut out to reveal a vague gray-green swirl with the word Pangaea written in ancient lettering. And right there, on the third page, all in lower-case letters, we read, “before there was europe, the americas and asia, there was pangaea . . . when all was one.”

Pangaea’s concept, then, is to reunite the continents on each plate of food. In doing so, the kitchen isn’t entirely unsuccessful.

In fact, Pangaea’s kitchen, under chef William Dertouzos, is more successful than many others that have tried such a pan-continental approach (Itameshi Ya, Ciao Chow Express and Melrose Place come to mind), and certainly more so than Matrixx, an earlier experiment in multicultural cuisine.

Pangaea’s small, wide-ranging menu emphasizes seafood and Japanese specialties. An auxiliary sushi menu is also available.

Sushi is generously cut, attractively arranged; maguro (tuna) and yellowtail are cool and smooth as cream. Otherwise, my favorite appetizer is the crisp, deliciously seasoned Asian squid, which comes on a bed of wilted bitter greens and sauteed baby bok choy. Ahi poki , a kind of raw tuna tartare, is served on fried won-tons with chuka , a novel gelatinous stem, the gummy of green vegetables. Seared scallops are disappointing, more like blackened scallops, and gratuitously over-spiced.

Presentation here is often splendid, sometimes silly. Most splendid are the Japanese specialties, served in lovely ceramic bowls and lacquered boxes. Kinoko udon is a clear, nourishing broth with wild mushrooms, slightly overcooked udon and a thin, perfectly round disc of plain omelet. Sauteed, gloriously rich freshwater eel is served on rice in a pretty box on a tray along with slices of cantaloupe, some wonderful fresh salty pickles and an acorn-shaped covered cup of miso soup in which floats a soft-boiled quail egg.

Entrees, called large plates on the menu, tend to be beautiful, enormous and muddled. There is a big, juicy rack of lamb artfully arched over a too-rich, intensely flavored, mysteriously dark mixture called “Oriental ratatouille,” with fat slabs of rich quiche-like sweet potato-daikon cake stuck in the display at angles: too much mooshed onto one plate. Seared salmon is lightly, expertly cooked, but its bed of butter-drenched soba noodles is a mistake.

I remembered the rotisserie chicken plate from Matrixx: The meat is slightly overcooked, as ever, but the herbed spaetzle are chewy and flavorful and far more satisfying than before.

Seared pineapple is both temperature- and chile-hot: in a word, weird. The silliest presentation belongs to the firecracker dessert: Fruit and custard are rolled in a “broken” tube of undercooked filo dough with “BANG!” stenciled in cocoa over the break.

The big bang?

* Pangaea at the Hotel Nikko, 465 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 246-2100. Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. Full bar. Major credit cards. Valet and self-parking. Dinner for two, food only, $35 - $76.