Getting Tasteful in the Fashion District

In the Fashion District, one eats a lot of lunch-counter food. Of course, you could nip up to Cole’s P.E. Buffet for a dipped beef sandwich or head over to one of the seafood stands near the Produce Market. And there are a couple of other choices around such as a Russian-owned pizza hut at 9th and Santee streets, where you can get pelmeni (Siberian ravioli) in mustard sour cream sauce.

Possibly the last thing you’d expect to find in this bustling, gaudy-grimy, workaday part of downtown is a sweet little French restaurant, serving old-fashioned French home cooking without the slightest whiff of Nouvelle Cuisine.

Nevertheless, that’s what’s sprung up at the flatiron corner where Main and Spring streets run together just north of 9th Street. Because of the building’s odd shape, Angelique Cafe is exceedingly long and narrow, with a tiny outdoor patio at the tip, four or five tables inside and even more in the relatively spacious upstairs room, which has its own tiny patio. Angelique looks as French as it can manage (there’s grapevine-pattern wrought iron railing all around the exterior), and the upstairs is pleasantly cool.

This is a hard-working place that makes its own pa^tes and sausages and sells them retail (along with its creme caramel and chocolate mousse, plus cheeses, couscous and other French oddments) from a little deli case. It’s run by a genial bunch of young French people who dress in bluejeans and T-shirts and listen to French and American pop music all day as they work.

When I say “all day,” of course, I mean from early breakfast to late lunch. They may be new to our country, but the Angelique Cafe crowd isn’t naive enough to expect people to come to this part of town for dinner. Or on weekends, for that matter.

From the location, you’d expect something on the lunch-counter level. But the house salad (which comes with every entree, even the breakfast omelets) is mesclun greens with a little plastic container of Dijon mustard vinaigrette. And the salade Nicoise, made with the usual tuna and hard-boiled eggs, includes imported olives.

There are a few American touches: a Caesar salad (with a powerfully garlicky dressing) and a long list of sandwiches, among which you can find ham and cheese. More typical, though, is the goat cheese sandwich or the one of merguez, a dense, spicy Algerian-style beef and lamb sausage.

Rillettes are getting to be fashionable in Westside restaurants, but you can get a rillette sandwich right down here on Spring Street. This mixture of lean and fat pork, cooked together and then pounded to a paste is--how to put it?--like really rich Spam. All the sandwiches come on narrow, crusty loaves of ficelle bread with lettuce (the rillettes sandwich includes tart French gherkins).

The sandwiches are crowded onto the back page of the menu. The rest is standard French entrees, though not all of them are exactly common in American French restaurants anymore. There’s coq au vin, chicken breast cooked until quite soft with red wine and diced carrots, mushrooms and onions. Boeuf bourguignon is the red-meat equivalent: chunks of beef stewed with red wine, mushrooms and pearl onions. There’s always some sort of quiche. I’ve had one with tomatoes, eggplant and chicken.

Angelique also offers andouillette, a sausage stuffed with tripe, served with a pot of mustard. It has all the protein funkiness of tripe, and only a handful of restaurants in town serve this genuine bistro dish.

One of the best dishes is the turkey blanquette, big chunks of turkey breast stewed in a buttery cream sauce with carrots and mushrooms. The most impressive is a paupiette of salmon. This is a luscious piece of salmon stuffed with whitefish mousse, served in cream sauce with quite a bit of spinach. There are also several vegetarian offerings, including ratatouille and creamed spinach.

The dessert selection is small. I’ve had a very soft and creamy creme caramel with a luscious caramel sauce, a rather plain fresh fruit salad of strawberries, grapes and melon slices and a devastatingly rich chocolate tart.

The Fashion District is not a place for fashionable food. But, by golly, you can get good old-fashioned French food there.

BE THERE

Angelique Cafe, 840 S. Spring St., (213) 623-8698. Breakfast 7 to 11:30 a.m., lunch 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. No alcoholic beverages. Thirty minutes’ validated parking at United lot across Main Street (next to Ceduxion). MasterCard and Visa. Lunch for one, food only, $7.50-$10.

What to Get: merguez sandwich, rillettes sandwich, blanquette of turkey, paupiette of salmon, creme caramel, chocolate tart.