STYLE : RESTAURANTS : GARLIC GIMMICKRY

La Cienega’s Restaurant Row has a new resident: The Stinking Rose. Actually, it’s a San Francisco import. The original in North Beach usually has a knot of Italian tourists out front, snickering in disbelief as they read the menu. An entire restaurant devoted to garlic? Yes, indeed.

“We Season Our Garlic with Food” is the motto. Call for reservations and a disembodied Bela Lugosi-like voice intones, “Good ev-e-ning. Welcome to the Stinking Rose, a garlic restaurant. For reservations, press one.” Who knew vampires had cutting-edge technology? The tape ends with a suggestive giggle. After my experiences at the Stinking Rose, I know why.

The laugh is on us.

This is a restaurant that is all gimmick. The garlic hype begins with bagna calda (“garlic soaking in a hot tub,” reads the menu) and ends with garlic ice cream. Like Dive!, Planet Hollywood and other theme-restaurant chains, the Stinking Rose is more about entrepreneurial ambition than anything to do with food.

The 370-seat restaurant, site of the old Lawry’s, is divided into several dining areas, which include a make-believe Sistine Chapel, a Chianti cafe decorated with straw-wrapped flasks labeled “P.U.” (Get it?), and a more formal vampirish room with a vaulted gothic ceiling. Lawry’s semicircular booths are still there, too. “That’s where I used to sit with my parents and wait for the prime rib cart to roll by,” one of my garlic-loving friends remembers.

The waiters brag about the tons of garlic the kitchen goes through, which, I’m pretty sure, arrives already peeled (and oxidized). You can detect it in the caramelized, slightly scorched smell of garlic that hangs heavy in the air.

“Welcome to our stinking restaurant!” says our black-clad waiter, pulling out what looks like a pocket calculator. “Are you folks rookies? Never been here before?” Most of us hadn’t. (I wasn’t about to say a word.) OK, we sign on for the bagna calda , which he assures us will transport us to garlic ecstasy, describing it as a build-your-own garlic bread.

And presto. There it is, summoned by electronic command without his ever leaving the table: a soggy log of house-baked baguette and a small iron skillet bubbling with tan whole garlic cloves and oil that tastes old and slightly rancid. The leathery cloves have an unpleasant metallic aftertaste. I know and love bagna calda, the Piedmontese “hot bath” of garlic and anchovies cooked in olive oil until soft and fragrant. This is nothing like it.

We try a tongue-numbing relish of pureed garlic, parsley and vinegar. By the time we sip Chateau de Garlic (a garlic-infused white wine that bears no vintage year), none of us can tell whether it really tastes of garlic or not. Already we’re proving the truth of what Thomas Nashe wrote in 1594, “Garlicke makes a man winke, drinke and stinke.”

When we ask the waiter to advise us on appetizers, he reels off a list of numbers, which does not exactly inspire confidence. Garlic chowder resembles garlic-flavored glue thinned with a little cream. Icy slices of roasted eggplant are doused in industrial-strength vinegar. A tough-crusted calzone is filled with molten Brie, paired undercooked roasted garlic. Grim, very grim.

For our main courses, we pick what look like the best bets. Chicken with 40 garlic cloves, a famous Provencal dish, is half a chicken, roasted until it’s falling off the bones, covered with a brown sauce that scums over after a few minutes and strewn with more of the tan garlic cloves. Garlic mashed potatoes, however, which come with almost every meat entree, are pretty decent.

Braised lamb shank is cooked to rags and arrives with a knife stuck into it vertically. Bony, braised rabbit is another brown dish laden with olives, onion, pancetta --an unappetizing mess. Each dish is worse than the next, including the dish of the day: baccala con polenta , extremely salty nuggets of salt cod cooked with garlic polenta. About the only thing any of us would consider coming back to eat is the juicy, thick-cut pork chop, served with caramelized apple slices and the garlic mashed potatoes.

“They have no recipes!” a friend is moved to exclaim after dinner. Not true. The food just tastes that way. In fact, the restaurant’s “The Stinking Cookbook” is for sale at the garlic shop up front, which is also stocked with T-shirts, garlic dog biscuits and even garlic condoms.

The restaurant is memorable all right. Memorable for what it does to innocent garlic. The final insult? “Thanks for coming to our stinking restaurant. And now here’s your stinking bill,” says the waiter. Whatever it is, it’s too much. If they continue doing what they’re doing, they’ll keep more than just vampires away.

I thought back over all the wonderful garlic feasts I’ve savored in Provence, in Piedmont, in Catalunya, in California. And I couldn’t let this last unfortunate garlic meal linger in memory. As it happens, the next night Ken Frank was cooking his annual cure d’ail (garlic cure) at Fenix. Four courses, all garlic, and none of them were overkill, from the salad of cannellini beans, kalamata olives and roast peppers in a garlic dressing to the superb rack of lamb a l’ail. And no garlic dessert. What a difference. It was like going from garlic hell straight to garlic heaven.

THE STINKING ROSE CUISINE: California-Italian. AMBIENCE: A garlic-themed restaurant with several dining areas including a vampire room, the Chianti cafe and a make-believe Sistine Chapel. BEST DISHES: Garlic-steamed clams and mussels; thick-cut pork chop with garlic mashed potatoes. WINE PICKS: Husch Sauvignon Blanc, Guenoc Zinfandel. FACTS: 55 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 652-7673. Open daily. Dinner for two, food only, $32 to $64. Corkage $7. Valet parking.