A HOLLYWOOD OASIS

I GET A KICK OUT OF TAKING VISITORS TO LES Deux Cafes, designer Michelle Lamy’s indoor/outdoor Hollywood restaurant. After paying $5 to park the car myself, we stroll toward a wall softened with masses of flowering oleander. “This is the entrance?” the newcomer beside me wonders. Yes, it’s that gap in the hedge. I love the surprise when we emerge from a narrow corridor into a full-blown Provencal garden, surrounded by a high wall covered with blooming climbers and scented with rosemary, lavender and sage. We find two of our guests ensconced at the small outdoor bar, enjoying an aperitif and the wildly eclectic scene. Welcome to L.A.!

Food has always been second to scene at Les Deux Cafes, which Lamy opened in 1996. It was just a garden, a kitchen across a courtyard and a derelict Arts and Crafts bungalow she had moved onto the site to restore as the second of the deux, or two, cafes. The concept has always been relaxed South of France cooking. Much of the produce came from the farmers market, and still does. The ideas behind the dishes were good, but the kitchen never could execute them consistently or get the food out in a reasonable time. The dawdling pace drove A-types crazy.

They didn’t belong there anyway because, in a way, Les Deux Cafes has dual citizenship. The intoxicating mix of Hollywood types, young talent, intelligentsia and expatriates is distinctly L.A., but the pace is definitely European. You can linger at a table for hours, talking, drinking wine or sipping tea poured from an antique silver teapot. It is very civilized. No one is standing behind you, panting for your table.

The garden is perfect and the place to be, even in winter, except when it’s raining. Long tables set out with linens and wineglasses give it a festive look. Eating outdoors is one of life’s great pleasures, and it has always puzzled me why there are so few restaurants in L.A. where you can dine outside comfortably. Of course, the French are still ferocious smokers, and the garden is a haven for the unregenerate, who luxuriantly lean back in the metal garden chairs and blow smoke into the beleaguered olive tree.

Until recently, I would have advised ordering frugally at Les Deux, cautioning diners not to expect too much from the food and to just enjoy the interesting scene. If a grand bouffe was in order, Les Deux would not have been my choice. But in recent months, I’ve had meals that were better than average. Under the direction of James Grey, the food is coming into its own. Even on one mobbed Saturday night, when the kitchen was hit hard, the cooks get everything out in a relatively timely fashion--and more important, it’s all pretty good. It was no longer amateur hour at Les Deux Cafes, I’m happy to say.

The first thing that comes out is a complimentary plate of radishes and miniature carrots for diners to nibble while perusing a menu that, on every night but Sunday, includes an entire page of specials. I’ve had good luck with oysters on the half shell and first-course salads. Of those, I like one of slivered smoked trout with mache and coins of waxy potato. The best part of the lobster salad is the fluffy couscous, crunchy with cucumber and fragrant with lemon. Grilled quail is appealing, too, but I cast my vote for the delicious, dark-fleshed squab salad offered one night as a special. Sometimes there’s a vichyssoise, a thick, chilled leek and potato puree smoothed with cream, or a summer green zebra-tomato soup with fresh herbs.

The dish of stuffed zucchini blossoms is more problematic. Goat cheese and crushed hazelnuts make a lovely filling, but just three or four bites seems too meager a portion. During tomato season, you can get a small plate of green and red and striped heirloom tomatoes dressed with good olive oil, dots of fresh chevre and a sprinkling of fleur de sel, the premium sea salt from Brittany. Oh, and anyone who loves mussels should like the steamed ones here. They’re big and plump, and the juices are laced with the anise taste of pastis. Soak up every last drop with a baguette.

Some of the second courses are endearingly homey, such as roasted leg of lamb--cut in juicy pink slices and served with a spring onion ragout, each sweet bulb trailing its stem like a train--or the braised short ribs with organic root vegetables. (The short ribs could have been braised longer, though.) The coq au vin is the coziest of dishes, with the chicken napped in the velvety sauce laced with mushrooms, but it has none of the requisite lardons, those lovely little bits of bacon that give the sauce a warm, burnished taste. Another of this coq au vin’s eccentricities is that the sauce doesn’t have as much wine as is traditional. But if you think of the dish as chicken with gravy, it’s satisfying.

Those dishes go well with wine, but there’s one offering that’s terrific with a bottle of red. It’s not something you see very often on L.A. menus: veal kidneys, roasted and cut in thick slices.

What detracts from many of the main courses is the saucing. Everything on the plate swims in sauce, which tends to muddy the flavors. It’s just too much of a good thing. Maybe that’s why the rib-eye, the best of the steaks, stands out. It comes plain, with a crock of bearnaise on the side. Filet mignon, about the slimmest cut I’ve ever encountered, comes with a welcome knob of bone marrow on top that slowly melts into the steak, anointing it with a rich, indulgent flavor.

If you’re drinking white, you won’t go wrong with the baked salmon. It’s as fragile as custard, cloaked in a light, lovely beurre blanc festooned with ribbons of sorrel. Another good white wine dish is the special of sea scallops with chive creme fra’che and three caviars. The other dish I liked was the fish of the day, in this case halibut, baked in parchment paper. The fish is moist and perfumed with the musky scent of wild mushrooms.

The service is harried on a busy Saturday night. It takes a while to get menus, and even then we get just two for six diners. The server, one of the coterie of sylphlike women in black vinyl pants, does the best she can under the circumstances, bringing us two more later and then finally catching up with the rest, and with wineglasses, all at once. But she gets our large and confusing order just right.

We finish off our bottle of Burgundy with a plate of “five ripe cheeses,” ranging from a raw milk Reblochon and a Morbier to a pungent Alsatian Muenster. Does anyone realize how rare it is to be offered cheeses that are what the French call a point, at their perfect stage of ripeness?

The restaurant’s Achilles’ heel is the indifferent wine list, which is no worse than the normal wine list in France. It’s just that Lamy is missing a big opportunity here to introduce her guests to all the exciting wines coming from newly emerging regions, as well as from the Rhone and Alsace. Her choice of Burgundies and Bordeaux doesn’t begin to address the possibilities of good, affordable wines available here now.

For dessert, I have two favorites. The first is chocolate pot de creme, a dreamy chocolate pudding slumbering beneath a fluffy coverlet of softly whipped cream. Dig deep with your spoon so that you get both the cream and the chocolate in one bite. The other is the lime gratin, which is wedges of fragrant lime with a light sabayon poured over and baked just enough to set the custard.

As an antidote to restaurants where you’re rushed and crowded elbow to elbow, Les Deux is a haven of comfort. I simply can’t name that many restaurants where it’s possible to have a leisurely dinner and meandering conversation. It feels like dining at a friend’s table--one who has been to the farmers market and is cooking French.

Les Deux Cafes

1638 N. Las Palmas,

Hollywood,

(323) 465-0509

CUISINE: French

RATING: **

*

AMBIENCE: Eccentric outdoor/indoor restaurant with spacious garden and bar. The Arts and Crafts-style dining room has a fireplace and another bar at the back. SERVICE: Varies from slow and amiable to frosty. BEST DISHES: Oysters, smoked trout salad, seared scallops, squab salad, roasted leg of lamb, braised short ribs, veal kidney, coq au vin, chocolate pot de creme, lime gratin. Appetizers, $9 to $11. Main courses, $18 to $32. Corkage, $15. WINE PICKS: 1993 Kalin Semillon, California; 1998 Ken Wright “Canary Hill” Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley, Ore. FACTS: Dinner nightly. Self parking, $5.

*

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.