Cowboy Roots

Look for Layne Wootten, the “cowboy chef” who runs the kitchen in the Country Star American Music Grill on the Universal City Walk, to play around with his menu a bit in the coming weeks.

“I have to say we deviated from our original menu a while back and tried to do a tourist thing here,” Wootten says, “and none of us was real pleased with the food.

“Now I’m bringing in a new general manager, Larry Meehan, who’s out of Las Vegas and who has run clubs in San Francisco and Hawaii, and we’re going to bring in more country music and even experiment with Norteno music--the country music of Northern Mexico.”

If they taught what Wootten knows about country cooking in college, this man could write “Ph.D.” after his name. Wootten cooked at the Beverly Hills place R.J.’s the Rib Joint, and he has prepared the menus for such events as the Emmy and Academy Awards shows and the Academy of Country Music Awards.

He also traveled with and cooked for the music group Alabama and for Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, Steve Martin, and Cheech and Chong.

So what does he have in mind for Country Star? He won’t fool with his signature barbecue sauce, which he calls “Rattlesnake Sauce,” or with his “Cowboy Salt,” a mixture of salt, red pepper, chili powder, garlic and paprika. But he will add some fish and shrimp dishes to his entrees, along with some meat dishes cooked Southern-style, and some blue-plate specials actually served on blue plates.

Prices won’t change much, either. They range from $9.95 for meatloaf to $19.95 for a one-pound “cowboy steak.”

“We’re going to change our menu back to real food,” Wootten says. “We want to take Country Star to the next level over the Palomino Club, the old country music club in North Hollywood that was active until about five years ago.”

* The Country Star American Music Grill is near the entrance to the Universal Tower in Universal City Walk. Open for lunch and dinner daily. (818) 762-3939.

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The Bistro Garden at Coldwater offers a prix-fixe wine-tasting dinner Nov. 20, featuring two Beaujolais nouveaux wines--a traditional autumn rite in France, and not a bad idea here either.

On the menu: split pea soup, a salad of beets and celery root, roasted country goose with potato dumplings, red cabbage and glazed water chestnuts, and a hazelnut souffle.

The wines: a 1997 Beaujolais Villages by Georges Duboeuf and a Beaujolais nouveaux by Chateau de la Grande Grange.

The price: $45 per person.

And if you are among those who consider Thanksgiving a fine holiday so long as you don’t have to cook for it, the Bistro Garden offers a Thanksgiving feast a week later that looks hard to beat.

For $35 a person, you’ll get corn chowder and a salad of baby greens and peppered goat cheese, plus your choice of:

* Honey baked ham, creamed spinach, glazed carrots and mashed potatoes;

* Traditional roast turkey with a harvest stuffing and gravy plus candied yams, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes with a celery root mascarpone, and cranberry relish;

* Or poached Norwegian salmon with a chardonnay dill sauce, boiled potatoes, and haricots verts.

Everybody also gets corn and pumpkin bread and, to top things off, a chocolate or pumpkin souffle with whipped cream, pumpkin cheesecake, or bread pudding with a rum raisin sauce.

* The Bistro Garden, 12950 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Reservations required. (818) 501-2244.

Juan Hovey writes about the restaurant scene in the San Fernando Valley and outlying points. He may be reached at (805) 492-7909 or fax (805) 492-5139 or via e-mail at JHoveycompuserve.com

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