Polska Party

“SO HEALTHY NUTRITIOUS,” shouts Polka’s window sign. “Fine dining in a cosy, romantic ambiency,” whispers the menu.

Polka, a sweet Polish restaurant near where Eagle Rock fades into Glendale, is that rarity in Los Angeles, an authentic, home-style Eastern European restaurant of the kind so common in Cleveland and Chicago. Some afternoons, the Polish-speaking customers seem out of Central Casting, with a turtle-necked intellectual look straight off the screen of Kieslowski’s “Decalogue.”

Whoever decorated the place has the ‘70s down in a way the designers of Cheech and Chong movies can only dream about--bulbous soup mugs with recipes on them, nubbly upholstered rolling chairs, biomorphic pink water glasses and wooden wall hangings, a nostalgic fondness for Sears. An easy-listening tape repeats so incessantly you feel as if Johnny Mathis’ life is passing before your eyes. (To tell the truth, polkas might be a little peppier.)

As served at fancy restaurants--the restaurants called Warszawa in Santa Monica and Berkeley come to mind--Polish cooking is almost baroque, all dusky essences of mushrooms, textural contrast, countless variations on sweet-and-sour, and spicing as complex as anything this side of Malaysia.

At Polka, and I imagine in most Polish families, Polish cooking is honest, fresh and homely, based on good meat and fresh vegetables, one of the least exotic cuisines in the world. You won’t find Poland’s rich game stews here, or wild mushrooms, or roast duckling with apples, but you will eat simply and well--soup, salad, entree, creamed carrots and peas, sauerkraut, dumplings or potatoes and dessert--for about the price of a drive-thru hamburger meal: $4.99 at lunch and $5.99 at night. It’s like eating at someone’s mom’s house, only quicker and with more gravy.

To start, there is a bowl of lettuce salad, a bit of shredded red cabbage and grated carrot added for flavor, tossed with a sweet dose of the sesame-tinged stuff they put on Chinese chicken salad or maybe the bright orange creamy French dressing they used to serve in junior high. And then there’s soup: definitely homemade, though probably from canned tomatoes, and garnished with chopped scallions. (For an extra $2 you can have a polka-dot bowl filled with dense, herb-flecked flaczki , something like a mild Polish menudo and probably the best food in the restaurant if you fancy tripe soup.)

Kielbasa , soft, juicy boiled sausage, is heady with garlic, served with mushroom-spiked mashed potatoes and a little pot of mustard. Kotlet is an oniony ground-beef patty, breaded, fried crisp, and glazed with a brown mushroom sauce. Gulasz is a brown, plainish beef stew, hearty if bland, served with a heap of slippery, dense potato dumplings about the size and shape of your ring finger, perfect for soaking up the gravy. Pierogi are the large, floppy kind, dumplings stuffed with ground beef and flavored with something like pie spice; golabki is cabbage stuffed with pretty much the same mixture. An extra buck gets you gulasz , pierogi and golabki on a combination plate, but you probably won’t go hungry either way.

Dessert is pretty much limited to little goblets of chocolate pudding topped with swirls of canned whipped cream. Try the Polka tea, flavored with a dash of fruit brandy instead.

* Polka

4112 Verdugo Road, Eagle Rock, (213) 255-7887. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Lunch for two, $10; dinner for two, $12-$14.