Making a Statement

I can just about count on it. every time I persuade my geographically unadventurous friends to venture far from home, someone will inevitably voice the sentiment at night’s end: We’ve got to get out more.

So do we all. But most of us stick close to home and go back to the same familiar restaurantsagain and again, forgetting that greater Los Angeles has little gems tucked away in other neighborhoods, too.

Monrovia, a tiny community at the bottom of the San Gabriel Mountains, just 10 minutes or so east of Pasadena and about one mile north of the Foothill Freeway, has a surprisingly good one, for example. Restaurant Devon is in a Victorian brick storefront on Lemon Street, just off the town’s historic main street. Opened in 1996 by Richard Lukasiewicz, a former medical benefits administrator who collects California Cabernets; his son Gregory, who worked at Shiro in South Pasadena as a waiter; and Shiro’s longtime sous-chef Pedro Simental, Restaurant Devon (now doubled in size) is known mostly to wine buffs other than people in the neighborhood.

With three hands-on owners, Devon is a very personal statement. Lukasiewicz welcomes guests and offers wine suggestions, and his son waits tables. Gregory’s abstract oil paintings decorate the walls. Tables are draped in crisp white tablecloths. Napkins are folded into peaks. And the stemware is designed for serious wine drinking.

The food is the real draw here. It can’t be the ambience. Instead of playing up the Victorian storefront’s old-fashioned look, the owners have chosen to go hard-edged modern. Copper tubing snakes across the painted black ceiling, each strand ending in a tiny, but glaring, halogen light. Carved cinnabar-colored chairs look as if they belong in a Chinese restaurant. Though tables are widely spaced, and even two people get a generously sized table, it’s not exactly a comfortable restaurant. And if there are more guests one night than expected, service can be quite slow. The only thing to do is to sit back and savor dining at a snail’s pace.

Simental was schooled in the Franco-Japanese cooking espoused by the chef at Shiro, but he has developed his own style as he’s gained more confidence. The partners’ vision of fine dining includes starting with a little amuse-gueule, which could be anything from a lightly smoked scallop to a taste of tuna tartare. Between courses, the chef will send out a sorbet to cleanse the palate. A ruby-stained pomegranate-mint sorbet recently was so powerfully dosed with mint, though, that its taste lingered longer than it should have.

Some of the first courses are wonderful. Simental’s dainty crab cakes, each barely larger than a silver dollar, burst with fresh shredded crab meat. The accompanying salad is not just decoration: it’s a beautifully dressed fluff of baby greens. He makes a lovely mushroom salad of shiitake, enoki and oyster mushrooms finely julienned and tossed in a fragrant walnut oil dressing scattered with walnuts. Steamed black mussels are always good here, too. He gets those small glossy black ones, doesn’t steam them too long and leaves them bathed in their juices and perfumed with white wine, butter and garlic. It’s very French and, yes, very Californian at the same time.

I love that he’ll have grilled quail one night on the menu, brilliantly paired with a caramelized reduction of the pan juices livened with a splash of vinegar. Or that he might consider a few slices of roast duck and a little braised red cabbage with a swirl of red wine sauce suitable for a first course. Sometimes he’ll devise an appetizer that’s interesting, and just this close to working, such as a salad of steamed asparagus stalks stacked like a tepee andpeppered with hazelnuts and crumbled feta cheese. I’m not sure hazelnuts and feta are a combination for the ages, but I liked trying it.

As for the main courses, I’m very attached to the calf’s liver sauteed with capers and shallots in extra virgin olive oil, which nicely sets off the richness of the liver. There’s a tender poussin, or baby chicken, in an orange glaze that sings

with the taste of fresh oranges. And a gorgeous piece of prime dry-aged rib-eye steak. Devon may not be a steakhouse, but Simental knows how to cook a steak. This one is charred on the outside, a deep rose-red inside, and the sauce is a particularly skillful Port reduction, as transparent as a watercolor wash, that cloaks each bite in a veil of winy flavor.

Again, there’s the occasional dish that doesn’t quite come together: I wasn’t crazy about a roasted rabbit in mustard sauce with blue cheese. These two strong flavors came to blows and flattened the delicate taste of the rabbit. Simental is unusual, too, in that this non-Italian treats pasta with such respect. His linguine, a proper-sized portion as a first course, comes twirled in the middle of the plate, draped with big, meaty shrimp and lightly sauced.

When it comes to fish, it’s clear he learned to cook it from someone Japanese. A plate of Hawaiian blue shrimp arrive heads on, barely cooked past the sashimi level, delicious in their beurre blanc and white truffles.

After dinner, Simental may make an appearance, just to say hello. (Shy and unassuming, he’s disinclined to do anything that resembles a star turn.) His broad face topped with a pleated toque, he admits he’s working harder than ever now. He’s not only doing most of the cooking, he’s also the pastry chef--running back and forth between the two cooking areas. Simental doesn’t change the main menu that often, but he does try to offer a handful of specials every night.

One of his new desserts is a bread pudding turned out of an individual mold. Very tender, not at all sweet, it sits in a shallow puddle of apricot sauce scribbled with cream. A fragile fluted pastry shell is filled with palest yellow lemon curd that has a bright snap of citrus. And his creme brulee, freckled with vanilla bean and layered between puffs of mille feuille, is terrific. He says he doesn’t try to copy anybody else’s desserts. It’s like a singer singing somebody else’s song. Why? I study what to do; it keeps me busy, he shrugs.

Service at Devon is more assured now than it was in the beginning. But because it’s virtually a one-man kitchen, and the dishes require finesse, Devon is more suitable for a leisurely dinner than a quick supper before a movie. That’s probably something only fanatical culture-hounds would attempt anyway.

Here, the pace of the city feels so far away. By the time we leave after 10, it seems that everyone in the houses on the quiet streets surrounding the old-fashioned downtown are already tucked in their beds, dreaming. Here, close to the foothills, the sky is dark, trembling with stars. We stand in the moonlight, breathing in the scent of pines, and turn, reluctantly, to our cars, and the drive back into the wide-awake neighborhoods of the metropolis.

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RESTAURANT DEVEON

AMBIENCE: Small, casual restaurant in historic downtown.

SERVICE: Personable, but can be slow.

BEST DISHES: Steamed black mussels, crab cakes, mushroom salad, linguine with shrimp, rib-eye steak, poussin in orange glaze, bread pudding, creme brulee. Appetizers, $5 to $12; main courses, $11 to $27. Corkage, $10. wine PICKs: 1998 Mason Sauvignon Blanc, California; 1994 Remirez de Ganuza Rioja, Spain. FACTS: Dinner Tuesday through Sunday; lunch Tuesday through Friday. Parking on street and nearby lots. *

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.