Party in a Palace

UPSCALE LEBANESE FOOD HAS BEEN HARD TO find since Al Amir closed on Wilshire Boulevard 18 months ago. The remaining Lebanese spots tend to be belly-dance showrooms or mom-and-pop places laden with nostalgia for the home country.

Glendale is full of Armenian and Armenian-Lebanese restaurants, many quite good, but most have that air of nostalgia. Now there’s Carousel, the local celebration restaurant in Glendale. On Fridays and Saturdays, it features rousing live Middle Eastern and international entertainment. Don’t even think about going on those nights without a reservation.

The room is in the Levantine Romanesque style, with blind arches hung with antique scimitars and chased-brass trays. It could be a room in the Beiteddine Palace, particularly when nobody’s singing “Happy Birthday.”

One of the glories of Lebanese cuisine are the little snacks called mezze (the menu lists them under the dialect spelling mezzas). You could make a meal of them, and you’d be wasting your time here without having at least a couple. The kind that are dips for pita bread are outstanding. Hummus--tangy with lemon and garlic, as it should be--can be eaten cold, in the usual way, or with hot toppings such as fried sausage or lamb. The best is the snobar (listed on the menu as snoubar), which is loaded with hot toasted pine nuts.

The eggplant-based cousin of hummus, mutabbal (baba ghannouj), is wonderfully smoky here; it couldn’t taste more authentic. Carousel’s thickened yogurt is unusually creamy. You can get it dressed with tomatoes, olive oil and a smidgen of red pepper (labneh Zahleh) or in two California versions involving jalapenos.

There are also savory pastries. Arayes has two layers of tortilla-thin bread sandwiching a beef filling. Fatayer, usually a miniature pie, is lengths of puffy piroshki-type pastry with a light filling of herbed white cheese.

The stuffed grape leaves, sarma, are densely packed but a little bland. The deep-fried stuffed meatballs, kibbeh maqliyyeh (kbbeh maklieh on the menu), have respectably thin crusts, though they’re made with beef, rather than lamb, pounded to a paste with bulgur wheat.

You can get the Arab lamb sausage maqaniq (maaneh), but Carousel’s heart is in a spicy Armenian beef sausage, sujuk (soujuk). It comes on hummus, or stewed with tomatoes (and some tangy pickled turnip), or even flambe, on a little brazier alight with brandy.

Sure, they eat chicken wings in the Middle East. In fact, jawaneh Provencal (Jhawaneh Provencial) --fried wings with lemon, garlic and cilantro sauce--are quite fashionable in Beirut just now. They won’t be to your taste, though, if your mouth is set for hot sauce and blue cheese.

The least-familiar appetizer might be ras asfour (ras aasfoor). The name means “sparrow’s head,” and the dish is coarsely chopped beef stewed with tomatoes and garlic. The meat is sweet and tender, and the effect is rather like eating Bolognese sauce by itself, without pasta.

The entrees are nearly all kebabs of one sort or another. You have dryish chicken, tender filet mignon, meaty and garlicky ground beef, skewered lamb chops, even pork and liver. The pork kebab is surprisingly tender and flavorful, but the liver is dried out from the grilling, which concentrates its bloody flavor, so it’s only for die-hard liver fans.

The kebabs come with rice or bulgur pilaf and a cabbage salad (you can substitute fattoush, a green salad with crunchy pita bread croutons and sprinkled with tart ground sumac berry). Khash-khash kebab is skewers of ground beef served on a bed of garlicky stewed tomatoes;

you’re supposed to make little tacos out of it using wedges of toasted pita bread smeared with mild red peppers. Yogurt kebab is even better; it’s ground beef kebabs dressed with tangy, garlicky yogurt, a really luscious combination. Any kebab--even the liver, theoretically--can be ordered in either khash khash or yogurt-style.

When Carousel serves fish, it doesn’t mess around--it imports Lebanese fish, either red mullets or sea bass. The latter is roughly slashed and fried in the manner of a Lebanese seaside fish stand and comes with tahineh in place of tartar sauce. Vegetarians can get a rather fancy falafel plate. The bean paste is fried in pillows--practically doughnuts--rather than in the traditional hockey puck shape, resulting in a particularly rich crust.

Pastries aren’t really part of a meal in the Middle East, but you can end with an Armenian-style walnut-filled baklava or basma, which is like a dark, crumbly cookie with a nut filling. Osmanliyyeh is a slightly soured cream filling in a few wisps of Shredded Wheat-like katayif pastry, and aish el-saraya (ash el-saraya) is a syrup-soaked cake thickly topped with pastry cream and pistachios. The most impressive dessert is foret glace, a basma topped with good vanilla ice cream and honey; it’s a sort of Lebanese sundae.

Carousel’s wine list is mostly California names plus a handful of French wines, but if you’re here, you might as well try the little-known wines made in the eastern foothills of the Lebanon Mountains. Cha-teau Ksara and Chateau Kefraya have French roots and emphasize Bordeaux varieties. Chateau Kefraya makes a nice, fruity white in the Graves style, but its red has a bit of the raisiny flavor you’d expect in a hot-climate wine. Both are available by the glass. The ’95 Chateau Ksara (only by the bottle) is a respectable Cabernet blend.

Carousel

304 N. Brand Blvd.,

Glendale,

(818) 246-7775

cuisine: Lebanese with Arabian overtones

rating: * 1/2

*

AMBIENCE: Party time in a Middle Eastern palace. service: SERVERS in ties and vests, eager to advise. BEST DISHES: Labneh Zahleh, hummus snoubar, soujuk flambe, yogurt kebab, falafel plate, foret glace. Appetizers, $5 to $13. Main dishes, $11 to $27. Corkage, $10. WINE PICKS: Chateau Kefraya “La Dame Blanche”; 1995 Chateau Ksara. facts: Lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Street parking. Valet parking Friday through Sunday.

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.