More Than Meets the Eye

Chef Marilyn’s Place is just a plain little whitewashed room with a scattering of tables and a TV set for decor. Marilyn Cole, though, is not a plain little cook. She’s the official chef of a community mentoring organization, the 100 Black Men of Los Angeles, and that’s not a job you get just by putting on a chef’s hat.

Her operation is more than it might seem. It’s a subsidiary of a restaurant named Gumboz, and its business card gives a work number, a corporate office number and a pager number, each in a different area code.

Daily Specials: Oxtails to Gumbo

Chef Marilyn’s main business seems to be catering, but the restaurant (which does takeout as well as sit-down business and also delivers locally) is open from breakfast through dinner every day and has daily specials, chalked on the sort of chef-holding-a-blackboard sign used by neighborhood-type French restaurants. Some of the specials are just featured versions of dishes available on the regular menu, such as oxtails, but Friday, for instance, is gumbo day. On Monday, fried chicken wings are served with very flavorful red beans mixed with bits of ham hock and set on rice. You could make a meal of the beans and the rice alone.

The breakfast menu lists the usual omelets and other American breakfast items, though you can also get shrimp scampi, salmon croquettes or fried chicken wings with toast. The dinner choices run the gamut from hot dogs to fried oysters.

As a matter of fact, one of the best things here is the hamburger, which has the air of showing the world how a hamburger should be done. The meat is not neatly shaped but roughly clumped into a patty, which is the best way; the less you handle ground beef, the better it tastes. This is a meaty, soul-satisfying burger, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to know its fat content. It comes with lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles and mustard. There’s ketchup on the side, but you really don’t want to mess with perfection.

Moist Meatloaf in a Tangy Tomato Sauce

The moist meatloaf comes in a lot of tangy tomato sauce, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there was tomato and maybe bell peppers in the meatloaf itself. When I brought an order of this to a dinner party, it was the first thing to go.

The menu boasts it has “the best oxtails west of the Mississippi,” and they certainly are good. You get a good big helping of braised oxtail, full of the strong flavor of this hard-working part of the cow. If you order tail, I recommend macaroni and cheese as one of the side dishes to sop up the richly flavored juices.

Smothering is one way to keep a pork chop from coming out dry, and this place makes very good smothered chops, breaded in cornmeal and braised until they just about fall apart. Their gravy has a hint of red pepper and maybe a bit of tomato.

The greatest demonstration of skill here is the fried chicken, which is good and crisp on the outside but remarkably moist inside. The baked chicken with stuffing, which you expect to be moist, is just not as flavorful.

Two kinds of cornmeal-breaded fish are available every night: red snapper and catfish. My automatic first choice was red snapper, because catfish is so often disappointing--it rapidly develops an ammoniac smell. In fact, when I did order the fried catfish, it turned out to be better than the snapper: sweet and fresh, if a tiny bit dry.

Every entree comes with a choice of three side dishes. They include the usual Southern choices: candied yams, collards cooked with a bit of fat pork and so on. You can get corn with okra or tomatoes for a little extra.

The black-eyed peas seem a little less dry than usual, the macaroni and cheese a tad cheesier. The stewed cabbage includes some carrot slices for sweetness and color. The potato salad follows the school of adding minced pickles and pickle juice to the dressing, and the potatoes are cooked until fairly mushy--somebody called it mashed potato salad.

There’s a dessert list that mentions sweet potato pie and cakes, but the only dessert I’ve actually had here was peach cobbler. It was a pretty good cobbler, I guess, but to me this is still a place for meatloaf, oxtails and chicken.

BE THERE

Chef Marilyn’s Place, 2638 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 737-8101. Open 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. No alcohol. Street parking. All major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $12.50 to $28.

What to Get: hamburger, oxtails, smothered pork chops, meatloaf, fried chicken, peach cobbler.