RESTAURANT REVIEW : In Search of Food on 3rd Street

Exploring the restaurants of a single urban neighborhood can be both pleasure and chore, as I found out recently, visiting two modest establishments on 3rd Street just east of La Cienega.

Here, with Cedars Sinai Hospital to the north and a quiet neighborhood to the south, the restaurants often have busy lunch hours, more sporadic dinners. Here, in the shadow of Locanda Veneta’s celebrated Venetian kitchen and Orso’s reliable elegance, I went hunting for a memorable, mid-priced sleeper.

I didn’t have the greatest luck, but Cucina Espressa, in a bright yellow house with a neon cappuccino sign blazing in the window, dishes up ample portions of simple, often delicious Italian food to take out at extremely moderate prices. A few tables inside and on a patio accommodate those who want to dine in or relax with coffee and the newspaper.

Nothing new or unpredictable flies out of this kitchen, but it’s a good place for those nights when you want to neither cook nor eat out. Not every item on the menu is dreamy: Choose the classic tri colore salad over a watery, eggless Caesar or a soggy vegetarian chopped salad.

Thin, bubbly-crusted pizzas are a bargain ($5-$6) and larger than most individuals can eat at a single sitting. I liked the Napoletana, for example, with mozzarella, tomato sauce and an intelligent, restrained amount of anchovies and black olives.

Two pastas in particular stand out: an excellent Penne alla Norma, with fresh chopped tomatoes, sauteed eggplant and fresh mozzarella, and a pasta con fagioli (as opposed to the soup pasta e fagioli), which is farfalle with lentils, cannellini beans and olive oil.

Grilled rosemary-infused chicken, the standby of such small Italian kitchens, here tends toward dryness, but one can almost overlook it for the golden roasted potatoes and a side of lightly sauteed fresh spinach.

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A few doors east sits Sushi Mon, a small, attractive Japanese restaurant with a pretty patio and sushi bar. In the spare, casual dining room, with its white walls and pale wood, chandeliers provide a surprising rococo flourish.

The two sushi chefs greet entering customers with traditional enthusiastic shouts. The more familiar the face, the louder they yell. One group of incoming hipsters occasioned such a commotion, they ducked and blushed with mortified pleasure.

Mon’s menu is short, limited: sushi and the usual teriyaki, sukiyaki, tempura and appetizers. Lunch prices are attractively low; dinner prices--and our standards--are higher.

As soon as we place an order, the waitress brings us an appetizer: two chunks of waterlogged, boiled kabocha squash.

After that, food can emerge from the kitchen in no apparent order. Although we ask to begin one meal with tuna sashimi, it arrives when we’re well into our entrees. And I must say, the long, strangely cut chunks of tuna, while fresh enough, are unpleasantly tough and tasteless. Yellowtail sashimi, cut in unattractive, awkward slices, is poorly trimmed, watery. Much of the sushi is equally lackluster.

Mon is the kind of sushi bar that offers a sizable variety of rolls. Mon Special Roll is a complicated roll cut into slices, each the size of a poached egg. At the core of this special roll is a deep-fried, breaded roll of tuna and yellowtail sausage, and encasing this roll-within-a-roll is rice, mayonnaise, asparagus and pickles, an outer wrapping of seaweed.

Mon allegedly serves food from Osaka, but I refuse to blame any region for greasy, heavy tempura and kyoja dumplings filled with a strange liver-like substance and cooked to toughness in dry heat. Salmon skin salad and rolls make use of a cured salmon skin that has the look of julienned jerky, the taste of luncheon meat and the texture of rubber bands.

Mon has lots of room for improvement--and until it takes advantage of it, I won’t rush back.

* Cucina Espressa, 8600-2 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, (310) 550-8957. Open Mondays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. No alcohol served. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $20-$38.

* Sushi Mon, 8562 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, (310) 246-9230. Open Mondays through Saturdays for lunch, Mondays through Sundays for dinner. Beer and sake served. Visa, MasterCard and American Express accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $14-$56.