Enter Limbo and Hang Onto Your Tastebuds : Mobay restaurateur spreads tropical roots to site near Beverly Center and adds elegant flavors.

When you see Limbo, you’ll think Mobay--it’s the same sort of busy, cheery riot of hot colors as that Jamaican place in Venice. With voodoo sculptures scattered here and there, and a skylighted back room in a gold-orange color scheme that practically vibrates, you can tell Limbo and Mobay are bi-syllabic sibs.

One meaning of the name, of course, is Limbo, the Caribbean dance (the place has Calypso music Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays). But this restaurant is in a sort of limbo too: a 3rd Street location near the Beverly Center where restaurant after restaurant has sunk without a trace. One reason is the tight parking. The area may look like a suburban shopping street, but it’s valet park or spend 10 minutes hiking to your dinner.

Since opening his original Mobay five years ago (in Malibu; after the fires he moved it to Venice’s Abbott Kinney), owner Erroll Gardner has been known for a sort of nouvelle Jamaican cuisine: sophisticated versions of traditional dishes. But that’s not what’s going on at Limbo. There’s no curried goat here, no ackee and codfish or black cake. This isn’t even Caribbean Rim cuisine a la Cha Cha Cha, but a more elegant and cosmopolitan style that still gets to have fun with its tropical roots.

Nevertheless, the most impressive appetizer and one of the best entrees are clearly in the Mobay tradition of presenting a Jamaican specialty in an unfamiliar context. The appetizer is jerk chicken ravioli; the jerk chicken entree, which has the same irresistibly tangy mango chutney sauce, is served with risotto (and plantains, which are otherwise rare on this menu).

By the way, this jerk sauce is hotter than you might expect. And you can ask for it even hotter--one of my dinner guests did. Within a couple of bites, he was panting and loosening his collar and showing all the other desperate signs of chile-head ecstasy.

The lobster and Dungeness crab cakes are nice in their tamarind lobster sauce, though not, let’s say, as memorable. There’s also curry chicken taquito appetizer, which seems to prove that corn trumps curry. These taquitos taste pretty much like any others.

The rest of the appetizers are salads. Mixed baby lettuces is a tasty haystack of greens and sliced carrots (like Mobay, Limbo is into Tall Food) in a vinaigrette with a hint of coconut. A similar salad with a couple of seared scallops has an orange vinaigrette, and the goat cheese salad is said to have a guava dressing. The basic impression of all three is California Cuisinesque.

The entrees run strongly to seafood. Coconut shrimp is not the old Mobay dish of shrimp with grated coconut on top but a terrific four-layered construction: a rich three-bean pancake, some slightly salty greens, the shrimp and finally a crown of fried sweet potato threads, all in a luscious coconut curry sauce. By contrast, the plantain-crusted seabass is subtle and restrained. The crust is like a light breading and the beet-basil sauce quite delicate (though vividly colored).

The seared ahi is the sort of thing you might find at any hip restaurant except for its Champagne-mango sauce. Likewise the vegetarian dishes, a risotto with grilled vegetables and a pasta with mushrooms, corn and dried tomatoes, which make scarcely any reference to the Caribbean.

There are red meat dishes, though, and very good ones, similar to a couple served at the original Mobay (not coincidentally, those were Mobay’s most sophisticated dishes). One’s a filet mignon with vegetables, garlic mashed potatoes and Cabernet sauce, the other a rack of lamb Tall Food style, the chops arranged around a mountain of coo-coo (fried polenta cake), ratatouille and baby bok choy with their ribs pointing up, like a parade of quote marks.

The desserts are made by Robert Diaz, an alumnus of Citrus and Patina. The warm apple tart can be a little chewy, but the others are just great--banana cream pie dribbled with caramel, a range of tropical fruit sorbets, a very creamy banana-mango creme bru^lee and a chocolate mousse cake shaped like the mystic flat-topped mountain in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

There are also dessert wines, including four Ports. In fact, the wine selection is unusually sophisticated, international but leaning to Sonoma and the South Central Coast. And if you don’t feel like being sophisticated, there are rum cocktails--garnished with little plastic monkeys in place of paper parasols. More tropical, you know.

BE THERE

Limbo, 8338 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles, (213) 866-8258; fax 651-1488. Full bar. Valet parking. All major cards. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday, dinner 6-12 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 6 p.m.-1 a.m. Friday-Saturday; brunch 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday. Dinner for two, food only, $44-$56.

What to Get: jerk chicken ravioli, lobster and Dungeness crab cakes, coconut shrimp, plantain-crusted seabass, banana mango creme bru^lee, chocolate mousse cake.

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This restaurant is in a sort of limbo: a 3rd Street location near the Beverly Center where restaurant after restaurant has sunk without a trace.