RESTAURANT REVIEW : Planet Earth: Low in Fat, Low in Taste

The national obsession with low- and nonfat food is breeding a new crop of specialty restaurants where portions are large and the calorie count’s small. One of the latest is Planet Earth, which offers 100% natural, low- and nonfat reduced-calorie food made with no refined sugar.

Tucked a few steps below street level, this modest lunch, dinner and takeout cafe has sparkling, spare, contemporary good looks, --white walls, lots of glass and a logo of bent silverware as might have been designed by Yuri Geller. Diners can eat inside, by the bakery case of low-fat desserts, or outside, amid shrubby ficus, tame sparrows and effective gas heaters.

Planet Earth has attracted its own neighborhood contingent: Rail-thin women wander in to splurge on guilt-free air fries and nonfat cheesecake. Here, older gents watching their salt and cholesterol intake don’t have to pick their way carefully through the menu; most everything is safe. Attractive Westside couples pull tables together to accommodate their families. Children abound. Never mind that one of the skinny women stands to lecture a nearby table about not feeding crumbs to the birds.

At dinner, a friend of mine says, “I like this crowd. It’s so relaxed, familial, and there’s none of that . . . that driving, Hollywood edge.” She no sooner speaks, of course, than who should drift into Planet Earth but the personification of Hollywood edginess, Oliver Stone. There’s a brief star-alert startle, before customers refocus on egg-white omelets and butterless brownies.

The food brings to mind low-calorie, low-fat diet days, when I was willing to sacrifice certain qualities in food in the name of svelteness. Indeed, to enjoy this “planetary cuisine,” eating low- or nonfat food must be a priority, because only a few things on the menu are in any way exemplary. The Caesar salad can only be appreciated if you really really really want a Caesar salad but you really really really don’t want to eat any oil, so you don’t mind a water-based dressing that gives the lettuce an odd crunch and leaves your mouth a bit puckered.

Crab cakes may have less than two grams of fat, but the bland, limp cakes and the sweet mango chutney have little else to recommend them. And who wouldn’t go for faux fries? They look enough like French fries and everybody has to order them because, well, what if they were even half as good as French fries?

The truth is, they’re probably only one sixteenth as good as French fries. Baked in a special air oven, dusted to a rusty brown with paprika, the first few pieces are impressive: good crunch, fresh potato flavor. Instantly, they cool off, become true bores: saltless, tasteless, limp. We drag them through the house-made ketchup to no avail: the ketchup’s dull, slightly bitter.

I realize that I love French fries because they are so salty and greasy, because they summon all the spare blood from the brain to the stomach, producing a sleepy je ne sais quoi . No matter how many air fries you chomp down, that delicious fuzziness never comes. No, air fries leave one stone cold sober. Oh well, it was worth a try, just in case they really could satisfy. We eye other tables. Nobody else has finished their bowl of air fries, either.

I’d come back to Planet Earth for the house-smoked marinated salmon sandwich. And the turkey burger, plump and juicy, has a lot of flavor--for a turkey burger. Angel hair pasta with tomato, basil and garlic has a respectable, al dente noodle; a splash of excellent olive oil would brighten it considerably.

Scrape off a bitter paste of ground herbs, and half a roasted free-range chicken is moist and flavorful in a full-bodied, clean reduction sauce. Garlic mashed potatoes are decidedly uncreamy.

Although Planet Earth uses no refined sugar, the cookies, pies, cobbler and cakes here have a cloying super-sweetness. Low-fat pastry crusts are tough to cut, turn gummy in the mouth. That rosette of whipped topping is closer to industrial-strength marshmallow cream than any dairy product. Nonfat cheesecake has a deplorable graininess. I’d take a teeny sliver of a buttery tarte tatin any day over the massive slab of too-sweet, gluey apple cobbler.

* Planet Earth , 1512 Montana Ave . , Santa Monica . (310) 458-3096. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner. No alcohol served. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $24 to $56.