Dozen Roses or Egg Dishes?

Campanile, Ca’ Brea, Sonora Cafe. There are some heavy hitters on La Brea Avenue in the blocks north of Wilshire Boulevard.

But the neighborhood is also loaded with boutiques and antique shops--particularly antique shops. If you need antique door hinges, this is where you want to come. So while the big-name restaurants draw customers from all over town, a lot of locals and shoppers patronize the neighborhood’s own restaurants, particularly during the day.

A couple of these places are on the premises of other businesses. American Rag has Maison Midi/Cafe Midi, and the flower shop Rita Flora, a few blocks to the south, has Flora Kitchen.

You can actually eat on the flower shop side of Flora Kitchen, right there among the roses and zinnias, but adjoining it there is a real dining room, dominated by a huge, striking panel from an Egyptian festival tent, writhing with appropriately floral designs. It also has a few sidewalk tables.

Flora Kitchen clearly suits its neighborhood. You might see the same stylishly dressed women and men in Hawaiian shirts talking into cell phones at both breakfast and lunch (but not so much for dinner; this place closes at 7:30). Apart from the aesthetic environment, it offers the sort of light but diverting food that tea rooms of the 1920s did, only with a lot of Mediterranean touches, and crab cakes instead of chicken croquettes.

For breakfast you can get a hot couscous cereal with dried apricots, a house granola or various egg dishes. The omelets have generous fillings--the border omelet must hold three-quarters of a cup of pico de gallo, avocado and sour cream--making them like burritos with eggs in place of tortillas. This may be why the eggs are cooked to a somewhat leathery consistency.

But Rita Flora can do much better by its eggs. Eggs Florentine is crusty focaccia topped with smoked salmon, spinach, a poached egg and hollandaise sauce. It’s all excellent, and the egg is particularly fresh and deftly poached.

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At lunch, there are soups, such as cream of broccoli, and the usual range of salads: Caesar, Greek, ahi Nicoise, Dijon chicken. The place seems to specialize in unusual pasta salads, such as farfalle with feta in a bit of tomato sauce or vermicelli in a Southeast Asian peanut sauce. Maybe it would be better to call them cold pastas, because they tend to come with a green salad. There are fewer hot pastas than you might expect, but the penne with spinach, walnuts, shiitake and pesto is quite good (personally, I could do without the mushrooms).

A section of the menu headed Etcetera lists things like grilled ahi with grilled vegetables and cold poached salmon with dill sauce. Unfortunately, its crab cakes are nearly flavorless--only the aftertaste might lead you to guess there’s any crab in them.

Most of the menu is sandwiches. You can get a grilled tuna salad (like canned tuna, but chunkier) on wheat bread with whole-seed mustard, or either of two kinds of seared ahi sandwich. The more unusual one comes on somewhat porous, leaky olive bread with extremely peppery arugula.

The best I’ve had was the grilled Mediterranean sandwich, a crusty baguette filled with feta (which gave the impression of large-curd cottage cheese), sun-dried and fresh tomatoes, sprouts--and tahineh. I dare say this sandwich has never been made in the Mediterranean, that the world has never seen a more Californian sandwich. And it’s great. The tahineh goes very well with the cheese, and even with the sprouts, which tend not to go with anything.

All the sandwiches come with a little scantily dressed salad, perhaps shredded cabbage tossed with lemon juice or mixed with shreds of summer squash and zucchini. Among the daily specials rather inconspicuously listed on an insert menu you might find vegetables, such as a huge plate of intensely flavorful roasted beets, lightly dressed with vinegar.

For dessert, there are always a couple of bundt cakes--chocolate, lemon, poppy seed--and some pies. The cherry pie is OK, despite a somewhat perfunctory lattice crust, the apple good and tangy, and there’s a dense, cheesy New York cheesecake in a graham crust. Or if you want something lighter, various fresh cookies.

Now, refreshed, you can go out and chase down those antique lock facings.

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Flora Kitchen, 460 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 931-9900. Breakfast 8 to 11:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday, lunch 11:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Beer and wine. Street parking; also parking lot off 5th Street. All major cards. Breakfast dishes $5.95 to $9.95, lunch dishes $6.95 to $9.95.

What to Get: eggs Florentine, roasted beets, grilled Mediterranean sandwich, penne pesto pasta, apple pie, cheesecake.