Get on That Lumpy Gravy Train
It’s like magic. Stick your head into Lumpy Gravy; Beverly Boulevard disappears. Comfortable old El Coyote across the street is suddenly oceans away, and you’re in Europe--specifically, the Europe of the 20th century avant garde, that grimly glamorous land of angst, ennui and the absurd.
It feels a little like the devastation after a world war in here. The walls are covered with gritty, edgy art: industrial-looking bits of metal, paintings of people with thorns sprouting from intimate parts of their bodies, stuff like that. Over the stage (devoted to poetry readings, art events and ethnic and/or avant-garde music), a bank of TV monitors will be showing a movie or cartoon unrelated to the room’s soundtrack. From the bruise-blue ceiling hang a zeppelin, a mirror ball and a shark.
Upstairs in the back, there’s a Melrose Avenue-type bizarro gift shop and record store specializing in CDs of ambient and industrial music, especially the works of the late art-rocker Frank Zappa, whose spirit floats over Lumpy Gravy like, well, some kind of gravy. The shop features a theremin, an electronic instrument of the ‘20s that emits eerie sci-fi whoops and wails when you move your hands around in its vicinity. Go ahead, make a fool of yourself with it. Everybody does.
What would you expect to eat in a room of gallows humor and dubious lighting? The restaurant describes its menu as “a mixture of twisted and tasty versions of comfort foods and more experimental fusion dishes that combine Asian, Mexican and French influences,” and that sums it up pretty well, though it doesn’t prepare you for how shamelessly rich the ice cream desserts are.
In fact, most of the food is quite good. Something called an apple-wood smoked chicken spring roll includes poblano peppers and ranchero cheese in the filling--it’s like a rather stiff enchilada cut into three pieces and randomly pointed upward in the middle of a plate like a Frank Gehry construction. The Zombie Woof chicken wings have a smoky chipotle pepper sauce and a bit of cooling Hungarian cucumber salad. Some tuna-filled dumplings come with a sort of guacamole with hints of Asia.
There’s a nightly insert menu, and one night it listed a clearly experimental appetizer--vermicelli fried quite brown and topped with shrimp, corn kernels and evidently a bit of Asian fish sauce. But the Caesar salad is unusually classical--it’s just romaine lettuce, very buttery fresh croutons, grated Parmesan and a totally anchovy-free Caesar dressing (though there’s little, if any, of the canonical coddled egg in the dressing).
The entrees are less avant garde, on the whole, than the appetizers. The chicken paprikas is rigorously old-fashioned, just bits of chicken stewed with sour cream and paprika, served on spaetzle-like Hungarian egg dumplings (galuska). The New York steak (slightly seasoned salt flavor, lots of double-fried French fries) is quite tender and beefy. On the other hand, the crispy fried duck is scarcely crisp, but the meat is moist and flavorful and the bird comes with great cranberry mashed potatoes.
Humbler food is treated with respect. The hamburger is frankly a terrific one--a huge, thick patty with lettuce, tomato and 1,000 Island sauce, surrounded by a jungle of curly fries. A wrap sandwich has a chicken, spinach and Jack cheese filling garnished with fried onions and Dijon mustard. There are a half-dozen cheap Asian noodle bowls, such as Japanese buckwheat noodles with mushrooms in soy sauce goosed up with a little red pepper.
And the dishes listed as Starving Artist Fuel are filling meals for a mere $5. One is a bowl of rice topped with a big pile of thin-cut beef ribs and some turnip kimchi. The side dishes include an ominously spelled macaroni n cheez that happens to be very good. It’s a plate of elbow macaroni in a mild, white cheese sauce.
The paradigm of Lumpy Gravy’s desserts is the bananagasm: a frozen banana wrapped in a won ton skin and fried, then cut into four lengths and doused with bitter chocolate. It’s served with rich chocolate-swirl ice cream, randomly scattered almonds and evidently some butterscotch sauce. The peanut butter turnover is much the same, using puff pastry filled with peanut butter, chocolate chips and very creamy vanilla ice cream.
Whoosh. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem grim at all here, even if there’s no way you can follow that fever dream of a cartoon on all the TV screens.
BE THERE
Lumpy Gravy, 7311 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 934-9400. Dinner 6-11 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 6-midnight Friday-Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday. Valet and street parking. Beer and wine. Valet parking. Dinner for two, food only, $28-$56.
What to Get: apple-wood smoked chicken roll, Zombie Woof chicken wings, hamburger, macaroni n cheez, Korean short ribs, peanut butter turnover, bananagasm.