Out of Time, Out of Place

Planet Hollywood, hah. Hollywood’s right down here among us, desperate for a trend to catch up with. Warszawa; now, there’s a planet for you.

There’s seemingly no Polish neighborhood in this entire time zone. We’re scarcely even aware of Polish food around here. Yet Warszawa continues in its orbit year after year, and right in Santa Monica, where the edible world seems to consist of Italy and the Pacific Rim.

Sometimes, Warszawa does make little ingratiating gestures. Right now, it’s throwing in soup or salad and dessert with a meal for $2 extra Tuesday through Thursday. It has been stressing the lighter side of the Polish repertoire. A while back it took the gigantic step of translating its menu from Polish, at the saving of a lot of eyestrain for its customers.

But basically, it remains what it has always been: a quiet, unhurried, unpretentiously cultured, thoroughly European restaurant. It’s located in an old house decorated with whimsical, mordantly witty Polish poster art. You can usually have an actual conversation here--and in Santa Monica, where restaurants prefer to make your eardrums bleed.

The menu has changed very little over the years, but the kitchen seems particularly on its game right now. The roast duckling, for instance, is nice and juicy. You just about can’t go wrong with this menu.

The hot dried plums wrapped in bacon, for instance: irresistibly luscious, like rumaki made from prunes, garnished with caramelized walnuts. Warszawa’s thin, perfectly round potato pancakes might be the most elegant you’ll ever see. They’re fried golden and slightly crisp and come with sour cream and spicy stewed apples and prunes (you can order them as either an appetizer or an entree). Sausage is available as an appetizer too, a deeply garlicky kielbasa in warm horseradish sauce.

The split pea soup, flavored with smoked ham and marjoram, is gratifying and surprisingly delicate. Warszawa’s borscht is basically diced cucumbers in sour cream, like something you’d get in an Indian or Middle Eastern restaurant--but dyed a startling Day-Glo pink with beet juice.

If we have any stereotype about Polish food around here, it probably doesn’t involve salads. But Warszawa has excellent salads: red cabbage with leeks and sweet peppers, sauerkraut with carrots and apples, tomatoes and Polish goat cheese, celery root with caramelized walnuts, cucumbers in yogurt and dill. You can get a combination of all five for $8, a terrific deal.

Warszawa also has a surprising specialty in pastas, particularly in ravioli-like dumplings called pierogi. They come with half a dozen fillings, including an earthy one of wild mushrooms and shredded cabbage and another of (no kidding) potato puree with caramelized onions, a real serenade to spudliness. The chicken-stuffed pierogi come in a tart sorrel sauce. You can mix any flavors you want in an order.

Lamb dumplings (the Polish version of the Lithuanian koldunai) are hexagonal ravioli with juicy lamb and caraway filling, served in a meaty sauce with a lick of mustard in it. There are other dumplings with salmon or asparagus and goat cheese fillings.

The meat entrees include more familiar Central European stuff--veal paprikash, chicken Kiev, beef rouladen--though these exact names are not used. The rouladen, for example, are called “scallops of beef roasted with a filling of braised mushrooms, celery and onions.” Fair enough, and they’re good and meaty (I’m sure there’s bacon in the filling too), with a fluffy, fragrant buckwheat pilaf on the side.

Beef stroganoff, stuffed cabbage and pork (or chicken) schnitzel do come under their own names. But I’d take the roast duckling with apples over any of them, for its crisp skin fragrant with sweet spices. The only entree I have a problem with is the juniper-flavored filet mignon with Cabernet Sauvignon and lingonberry sauce. Interesting idea, nice piece of meat, but the sauce is barely cooked, flooding your mouth with rackety hot alcohol vapors.

For dessert, there’s a perfectly poached pear with berry puree and vanilla cream sauces, a rich dark mocha torte for the chocolate addicts and a terrific warm apple tart with a crumb crust. But the one the waitress is likely to push, the vanilla crepe stuffed with a sour cream cheese, is truly outstanding.

Polish food will never, ever be the next trend around here, but Warszawa’s right on top of it.

BE THERE

Warszawa, 1414 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica. (310) 393-8831; fax (310) 450-3948. Open 6-11 p.m. Tuesday-

Saturday, 5-10 p.m. Sunday. Beer and wine. Parking lot. All major cards. Dinner for two, food only, $35-$58. What to Get: hot dried plums, potato pancakes, salad combination, wild mushroom and shredded cabbage pierogi, lamb dumplings, roast Long Island duckling, vanilla crepe, warm apple tart.