Beverly Hills Cod II

Coley’s Kitchen, on Crenshaw, is a brightly decorated family place--art on the walls and groovy music in the air--that pulses with the dance-hall beat of Leimert Park. Sometimes it seems as if the restaurant is a direct expression of the community, Caribbean cooking in an African-American context, and things like the crisp, green-filled turnovers called patties and the strongly flavored saute of akee and salt fish are wonderful, first-class. It’s probably the best sit-down Jamaican restaurant in Los Angeles, and it’s usually packed--with politicians, with college kids, with guys in cool knit hats.

The new Coley’s Kitchen in Beverly Hills has a different vibe--it may be the closest thing in the Southland to the dining room in a fancy Jamaican resort, all bright colors and rum drinks, waiters in Hawaiian shirts and customers in sports coats, and rustic, thatched accouterments toned down in an airy, expensive-decorator sort of way: “Lik Yu Finga,” a crudely painted wooden sign says in patois. Toward the front of the place, a keyboard player coaxes a realistic Trinidadian steel-drum sound from his synthesizer, then segues back to reggae. Where the Crenshaw place is sort of funky, the Beverly Hills Coley’s is uptown. It may be a better restaurant for taking a hot date, but despite similar preparations and a nearly identical menu, it’s just not quite the same.

That’s not to say there’s nothing good here: The meaty braised oxtails are terrific, subtly spiced, meltingly tender, the very essence of beef. Long-braised short ribs are delicious, the kind of thing your Aunt Sadie might make if someone forced her at gunpoint to throw a handful of spices into her Sunday-night pot dinner. Salt cod, cooked, shredded and sauteed with onions and tomatoes, is delicious, if pungent enough to wake the dead.

But, for example, where the relatively fatty kingfish takes well to being pickled in Coley’s oniony escovitch , the low-fat Beverly Hills-friendly halibut becomes dry and mealy. Curried goat is way too chewy in its hotly peppered sauce; salt fish with akee, a Caribbean vegetable that looks a little like scrambled eggs, spectacular at the other Coley’s, is pretty good here but somehow lacks the peppery punch, the freshness that pushes this dish over the edge. And it’s probably best to avoid chicken--including the wan chicken curry and the allspice-scented jerk chicken--because it has the flabbiness of reheated bird. It seems as if the cooks are still adjusting to the pressures of a larger restaurant.

You do get a lot of food, though: a basket of sweet, sort of doughnut-like Jamaican fry bread; a couple of fried plantains; a careful mound of rice cooked with beans; a pile of steamed cabbage, a bowl of soup. (Try the vegetable soup, which is like a good minestrone sent on a Caribbean cruise.) The patties are good, flaky and filled with well-spiced mixtures of greens, ground beef or ground chicken, though they are better when they come fresh from the oven. The house-made Jamaican juices include thick Irish moss (it’s made from seaweed, but mostly tastes of exotic spice), and ginger beer hot enough to pack a wasabi-style burn. This is pretty much as authentic a Jamaican place as you could ever hope to find on the Westside . . . and, unlike at island resorts, you don’t have to endure the inevitable grouper meuniere.

* Coley’s Kitchen

133 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 358-1300. Open Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to midnight; Sunday, 3 p.m. to midnight. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Full bar. Valet parking. Takeout. Live music weekend nights. Lunch for two, food only, $15-$30; dinner for two, food only, $22-$35.