No Fusion Confusion Here

Zicca is a stylish place of glass and chrome and white walls, a sweet, dainty place with a serene Asian feel. Above all, it’s a very intimate place, and when I say intimate, I mean it has about five tables.

The whole effect is so charming that it goes a long way to make up for the accumulated sins of fusion cooking. That’s right, Zicca’s full name is Zicca Fusion Cuisine. But have no fear; this is not Zicca Flashy Lunatic Cuisine. What fusion there is mostly takes place within the family of Asian cuisines, with just a few careful European elements.

For an appetizer, you can get Vietnamese wokked ribs, which are a bit like the familiar lacquered Cantonese barbecue ribs but with a particularly attractive scent of star anise. Endive filled with minced chicken is a sensible variation on the familiar lettuce-wrapped chicken deal, because an endive leaf is a sturdier thing to wrap with. It comes with same sort of sweet bean sauce that you’d expect on moo shu pork. Shrimp spring rolls include some green leaf (spinach?) and are served with a green salad.

To tell the truth, the rest of the appetizers are so far from being flashy that they’re too plain for my taste. Firecracker chicken is bits of white meat stir-fried with sweet peppers, not hot ones. The green papaya salad is just some shrimp and julienned green papaya in lime dressing.

After that, though, there’s scarcely a dud. Five-spice beef is a big bowl of noodles in a meaty broth, topped with sliced beef and fried onions. Even chow mein is worth ordering here. It comes with a mixture of plum sauce and hot sauce.

Sichuan spiced smoked sea bass is delicately cooked but good and smoky--some of its smoke flavor is picked up by the matchsticks of sliced zucchini that it comes on (like several other entrees). Seared salmon filet comes with an Asian ratatouille of tomatoes and eggplant; the menu refers to a Thai curry sauce, but as I had it, the excellent salmon was covered with whole-seed mustard.

One of the best dishes is Chinese spice-crusted lamb chops--sweet, delicate chops accompanied by corn kernels, cherry tomatoes, braised daikon and a faintly sweet rust-red sauce fragrant with fresh ginger and star anise.

Here comes the fusion part. The sauteed duck breast rubbed with tapenade seems totally European, with the flavor of black olives and capers as a nice, subtle match for the dark meat. Sliced filet of beef comes with a richly aromatic ragout of mixed dried mushrooms that might have a whiff of bean sauce in it. In any case, it’s a very meaty effect, and not at all the crazy sort of fusion.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Dessert, the weak suit of most Asian restaurants, is actually one of Zicca’s best parts. One night it was a cream puff--one big cream puff with some sweet spices in the filling, surrounded with chopped fruit (which play the same decorative role here as the greens that ornament a lot of the entrees). Another night there was a yellow-orange mango custard, which lacked a little variety--it was all one flavor the whole way through, but a very pure mango flavor.

The best was the strikingly handsome red-bean cheesecake, marbled with purplish red beans. I suppose it was a cheesecake--it had a bit of tart frosting like a cheesecake--but what I really tasted were the sweet beans. Of course, if you don’t like this stuff, there’s an ice cream and candy shop in the same mall.

This location has seen a million eateries over the years, from Hot Dog USA to L.A.’s only heart-healthy Albanian restaurant, and they’ve all had to wrestle with its parking problem. Any restaurant on this spot has to share its mini-mall lot with several other businesses, the side streets have parking restrictions, and there’s no parking on Olympic Boulevard until 7 p.m. If you get there at the stroke of 7, of course, there’s parking aplenty. And it’s just a short walk down Olympic to a large liquor store, which will be handy for dealing with Zicca’s other problem, until it gets its wine license.

Zicca Fusion Cuisine, 9123 Olympic Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 246-9178. Lunch, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday; dinner, 5 to 10 p.m. daily. No alcohol. Small parking lot. MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, $29-$35.

What to get: Vietnamese wokked ribs, endive with minced chicken, Sichuan spice smoked sea bass, Chinese spice-crusted lamb chops, filet of beef with mushroom ragout, red bean cheesecake.