Fast Food Fusion

Ever since I ran across a fast-food restaurant in Culver City that was serving sushi and Mexican food 15 years ago, I have been slightly obsessed with the possibilities inherent in blending the two cuisines--carne asada sukiyaki, refried natto , smelt egg tortas , burritos stuffed with machaca made from about 300,000 yen worth of sun-dried abalone. But although I’ve postulated the existence of a sashimi taco for more than a decade, I never imagined it would be made by a Persian guy.

Across the street from Pasadena’s old steam plant, where affluent west Pasadena meets the no man’s zone of the city’s industrial corridor, Gerlach’s Grill is a newish takeout joint built into a drive-in liquor store, a few tables in a parking lot, some plastic chairs and a lot of people slouched on their cars. Here are the swells from San Marino eating shrimp tacos on the hoods of their Jaguar coupes and the buzz-cut guys in No Fear muscle shirts scarfing scallops in their trucks; crusty kids blasting Slayer and clean-cut South Pasadena families on the way back from soccer practice; construction workers and nuns.

If you linger by the pickup window, the owner may try to ease your wait with an appetizer in a plastic foam cup: cucumber in herbed yogurt, perhaps, or zucchini smeared with the sesame paste tahineh, or an Asian seafood salad that conjures visions of the Straits of Hormuz more readily than it does the Inland Sea, or a spicy take on the bulgur wheat salad tabbouleh, with raisins and scallions instead of the usual parsley.

Like Netty’s in Silverlake or Rosti in Brentwood, Gerlach’s approximates in a fast-food setting the food you might have gotten around to making if you only had the time--grilled salmon instead of Chicken Supremes, angel-hair pasta with mussels instead of Big Macs with fries--and is just expensive enough to assuage the small amount of guilt you might feel for not actually cooking dinner for the kids. (Once you’ve been here a couple of times, you discover that an entree for one here, which comes with a big salad and a mountain of rice, will feed two.) But where Netty’s at its best leans Salvadoran and Rosti Italian, Gerlach’s is run by a Japanese-influenced Iranian chef taking on an Italian-tinged California grill menu that happens to include tacos.

What could be simpler?

Grilled fish--Atlantic salmon, Alaskan halibut, ono, tuna--is generally pretty good here, not overcooked or anything, sauced maybe with a white wine reduction or maybe a pat of lime butter and served with a mountain of rice and a big salad.

You can get a straightforward grilled T-bone with seasoned fries, rice-stuffed peppers in tomato sauce as homey as a grandmother’s, grilled pork chops in a red wine reduction. The whole roast chicken is just mushy, but the roast leg of lamb--garlicky, powerfully tart, seasoned with herbs to bring out the pungency of the lamb--is the best food in the place.

Beyond all the multi-culti stuff, Gerlach’s has a fairly standard Iranian menu: grilled kebabs of lamb, chicken and beef, the minced-meat kebab called kubideh , the soltani combination plate that is apparently the No. 2 Dinner at every Persian restaurant in the world. Almost everything here comes with a massive serving of white basmati rice, gilded with a vivid stripe of fragrant, yellow saffron rice, nestling a grilled tomato and a charred hot pepper or two.

Gerlach’s is pretty specifically Persian, and food from other parts of the Middle East often don’t come out so well. Felafel is a little like the dry, mealy stuff you may have had on Middle Eastern night at your college dorm; the sesame dip hummus tastes like the grainy, over-garlicked health-food store kind.

The fish tacos are pretty much what you’d expect from a Persian guy who’s cooked a lot from the recipes at the back of Sunset Magazine: seared tuna, left sashimi-raw in the middle, folded into corn tortillas and splashed with a blistering chile sauce closer to a North African harisa than to any salsa you’ve ever had at a Mexican restaurant--a clear, four-cushion shot as inter-ethnic as anything this side of a pastrami burrito.

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WHERE TO GO

Gerlach’s Grill, 1075 Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena, (818) 799-7944. Lunch and dinner daily. American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa and ATM cards accepted. Takeout and delivery; limited outdoor seating. Parking lot. $5.95 lunch specials. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$21.

WHAT TO GET: leg of lamb; grilled Alaskan halibut; stuffed eggplant.