The Steakhouse Goes Southwestern

Once upon a time, two women took over an old Hollywood rug store and turned it into City, the loudest--and to many tastes, the niftiest--restaurant in town. Then a little more than four years ago, Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken moved on to other projects, not to mention fame as the Too Hot Tamales of radio and cable TV cooking shows, leaving the ex-rug store on La Brea Avenue bereft.

So Ron Salisbury, whose family owns Los Angeles’ most beloved Mexican restaurant, El Cholo, took over the City location and moved his Sonora Cafe there. (In an odd act of urban recycling, the Tamales’ latest restaurant, Ciudad, opened in the original Sonora Cafe location in downtown L.A.)

Sonora Cafe has made the La Brea building its own. It’s almost impossible to recall City’s shiny, angular, cacophonous industrial space in this hushed room, with its flamboyant copper-and-wrought-iron chandeliers, pastel Southwestern mural and comfortable banquettes upholstered in a tasteful pattern suggesting Zuni pottery. An Art Deco-ish copper-balustered stairway coils up toward a private dining room, bringing it near the decorative wood beams installed in the ceiling where exposed air ducts once roamed. A couple of giant lizards are sculpted onto the big, adobe-look fireplace across from the imposingly stocked bar.

This isn’t a Southwestern restaurant for the adventurous, but for the successful. Sitting here, you’d think you were living large in some Western resort town. At a ski lodge in Scottsdale, Ariz., maybe, if there were such a thing.

The old Sonora Cafe was always an oddity, a half-hearted Mexican-Nouvelle hybrid that never came off quite homey or hip enough. But here, Sonora Cafe has happily become something in keeping with this room: an extravagant steakhouse. One with Southwestern touches, to be sure, but basically a restaurant where the real focus is big portions of major-league protein.

The trimmings, however, are mostly Southwestern. In the bread basket, you have blue corn bread baked in madeleine molds, quite good sourdough and huge, crisp sheets of cheese toast dusted with hot pepper.

One night the soup is a charming corn chowder that tastes as if it has been splashed with sweet wine. You can always get tortilla soup, a tangy tomato broth loaded with chicken, tortilla strips and avocado. The peppers are mild, like most of the peppers you’ll find here.

The crab cakes are one of the best appetizers, plenty of crab meat covered with a thatch of shredded potato. And there’s a ceviche with orange as well as lime juice in the marinade.

Since this is a restaurant in the El Cholo family, a sweet green corn tamale may show up as a special. The bizarre regular tamale, however, recalls the old Sonora Cafe’s fusion experiments. The filling is duck confit, and rarely has duck confit been drier, chewier or less flavorful. It’s a handsome dish, the tamale partly removed from its cornhusk, napped with a guajillo pepper sauce, mole sauce and a bit of sour cream, but the food is better looking than eating.

A rather drab chile relleno in blue corn breading gushes with more melted mozzarella, Fontina and Monterey Jack cheese than it needs. The garden salad is a very pretty plate of greens in a raspberry vinaigrette, mixed with bits of Stilton cheese and frivolous candied pecans.

When it’s steak time, you won’t think Southwestern cuisine when you see the 21-day dry-aged New York strip. It’s a big, flavorful piece of meat in a dark, tangy sauce of Port and balsamic vinegar, served with good garlic mashed potatoes. The rest of the plate is absurdly minimalist--two big spears of asparagus and one pickled cipollino onion. And while the tender filet mignon comes in a wisp of blackened tomato sauce, the rib chop brings to mind the phrase “totally over the top.” It’s not just an enormous “cowboy cut,” it also comes on a larger plate than any other entree. There’s no denying it’s a rip-roaring, satisfyingly beefy steak. It just happens to be a little embarrassing to order.

The rack of lamb and the “signature” pork chop are likewise generous. The lamb is tender and sweet, but it comes with gaudy nachos (well, wild mushroom chilaquiles) made with tortillas of several bright colors. The pork chop, a two-rib monster, looks like a skyscraper and tastes more like roast pork than a chop.

Big meat isn’t your only choice. You can also get nicely grilled sea bass as well as a couple of Southwestern entrees: giant grilled shrimp in a sweet mole sauce or a very rich chicken enchilada in tomatillo sauce.

I expect the ginger mousse to be the best dessert. In fact, I taste more rich chocolate than ginger. And the incongruous filling has the bland milky flavor of an Indian barfi. The capirotada, a bread pudding in caramel sauce, is better; so is the orange-mocha cheesecake, which is strong on the mocha flavor, subtle with the orange. The most distinctive dessert is the zuppa fruit: poached strawberries and boysenberries in a sauce of reduced berry juices hauntingly flavored with piloncillo sugar and Mexican cinnamon.

But come on. You got the cowboy steak; you have to end your meal with the Southwest sundae. Two scoops of creamy vanilla ice cream atop razor-thin glazed banana slices are served on a plate about two feet long. Everything is drenched with a caramel-like cajeta sauce and hot fudge, and you’ll find yourself fishing around for every last banana slice. After all, that’s what living large is all about.

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SONORA CAFE

CUISINE: Top-notch steaks and chops with souped-up Mexican trimmings. AMBIENCE: Grandly, comfortably Southwestern--the poshest ski lodge on the mesa. BEST DISHES: crab cakes, tortilla soup, rib chop, New York steak, rack of lamb, Southwest sundae, zuppa fruit. WINE PICKS: 1996 Kunde “Century Vines” Zinfandel, Sonoma; 1994 Chateau Saint Jean “Cinq Cepages” Cabernet, Sonoma. FACTS: 180 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles; (323) 857-1800. Lunch weekdays; dinner daily. Appetizers, $6 to $12. Entrees, $16 to $26. Corkage $10. Valet parking.

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S. Irene Virbila is on vacation.