A bustling brasserie: C’est chic

The specialties are listed in a slanting French script at the entrance to the new Brass.-Cap. (short for Brasserie Capo), just beyond the curtain closing off the dining room: escargots, moules (mussels), huitres (oysters), choucroute, cassoulet -- all the classics of French cuisine we could find at a brasserie in Paris.

Inside, banquettes are snuggled up against the walls. Yards of polished brass railing encircle the pillars. Tables are covered in butcher paper. The handsome room is a sea of saucy black-and-white bistro chairs imported directly from France. The art is well chosen, a Sonia Delauney here, a racy black-and-white nude there. And at the end of the long zinc bar framed in hand-set tiles, Ricard bottles line the shelves like soldiers, ready to be poured for hordes of pastis-drinking clients.

In the dining room, waiters in long white aprons ferry bowls of watercress soup or platters of iced oysters.

Yet as picture perfect as it is, La Coupole this is not. Very little, in fact, at this perplexing new brasserie is what it purports to be.

When one of my guests decides to order the frisee lardon salad, I feel I have to warn him it doesn’t come with an egg. “Doesn’t come with an egg?” he sputters. The waiter -- who is terrific by the way -- immediately offers to add a quail egg. Or two. Could I have a regular egg?, my guest meekly asks. That can be arranged, but more easily said than done.

When the salad arrives, the egg is virtually hard-boiled. The runny yolk is the entire point -- it’s better to mix with the mustardy dressing. And the lardons aren’t lardons at all; they’re ribbons of bacon.

One night, as we’re drinking a lovely white Rhone, someone at my table sees truffle omelet on the menu and pounces, remembering an omelet larded with roughly chopped black truffles that he was lucky enough to be served in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. But what arrives are dry curds of egg flecked with black and shaped into a small, flat cake. Nobody in their right mind would ever call this an omelet. Am I missing something? When is an omelet not an omelet?

Profiteroles are filled, not with ice cream, but a caramel mousse. Now, wouldn’t anyone who loves profiteroles have ordered them precisely because profiteroles are choux pastry filled with ice cream and napped in dark chocolate? Flattened, like napoleons, these look like mice laid out on the plate. Call it something else, but not a profiterole.

It’s hard to fathom how someone can get the decor so right, but the food so wrong.

But that doesn’t seem to stop the well-heeled crowd that follows Bruce Marder everywhere from flocking to this new spot at the beach, on the corner of West Channel Road and Pacific Coast Highway. Here they are, slathering rosy terrine de foie gras on mini-baguettes or dipping stubby breadsticks into the amuse he sends out to every table, a tepid cheese sauce the waiter calls fondue.

Brass.-Cap. is the latest in the ever-expanding and contracting Marder group of restaurants. The chef-entrepreneur, who started out with West Beach Cafe in Venice back in the ‘80s, when Los Angeles was just coming out of the culinary dark ages, has taken on American, Jewish deli, steakhouse, Mexican and Italian in various stages of his career, and this is his stab at traditional French cooking. It does concede an American bent -- the full name is Brass.-Cap. American Brasserie. But this is puzzling, because the menu is almost entirely French classics. And Marder’s take on these is even more perplexing.

When I order gougeres, the delicate little cheese puffs that cooks in Burgundy serve with a glass of rouge to round the edge off any sharpness in the wine, I bite into something cold and slippery.

“Oh, the chef fills them with mascarpone and blue cheese just before serving them,” the solicitous server explains. I turn it over and sure enough, there’s a big hole where the chef has piped in his “improvement” to the classic gougere.

Why cover the taste of the Gruyere in the dough with another cheese, and cold at that -- something that’s at war with the wine?

“Hey, there’s no snail inside,” one of my guests announces, poking his escargot fork into one of the dozen whorled shells on the plate in front of him. Plenty of parsley butter, but nobody home inside that borrowed shell.

“This one’s empty too,” he says. Fortunately, the rest of the shells turn out to have plump escargots inside, but still, at $16 per dozen (or $8 the half dozen), he felt he had to complain. No problem. Our valiant server, embarrassed, whisks away the plate of escargots and brings a fresh one, and this time there’s an escargot snuggled in each shell.

If you look hard enough, you can turn up a few decent dishes. Steak tartare, hand-chopped and nicely seasoned, makes quite a satisfying appetizer spread on one of those crusty mini-baguettes. And pissaladiere -- Nice’s famous flatbread covered with tomatoes, caramelized onions and anchovies and dotted with pretty little Nicoise olives -- has all the right elements. Except the crust, which is puff pastry rather than a pizza-like dough. I guess the idea is to make it seem fancier than the original.

I like the cheerful green watercress soup too, which I’ve hardly ever seen on an L.A. menu. Potato ravioli with truffles also makes a good first course, if you like truffle oil.

The rosy, sliced duck breast with French lentils or a moist Muscovy duck confit with a crisp skin and indifferent mashed potatoes are best bets in terms of main courses, but nothing to spark much enthusiasm.

The kitchen, however, takes a pratfall with two great French classics, choucroute and cassoulet. Choucroute is graced with just one bland type of sausage, and the sauerkraut tastes straight out of a can. Cassoulet arrives in a sorry, half-scorched state on top, with not enough beans to justify the title of the dish. You order either of these dishes because you know and love them. And instead, Brass.-Cap. delivers a half-hearted effort that doesn’t begin to resemble the real thing.

Even the steaks, which are usually excellent at a Marder-owned restaurant, are nothing special. OK, so they’re not as expensive as the ones at his other restaurants. But surely one of his suppliers has a good hanger steak or a skirt steak with more flavor than the cut the kitchen is using for the steak au poivre or the $32 steak frites.

The quality of another brasserie classic, fruits de mer, leaves a lot to be desired too. The oysters and clams on the half shell are pristine and delicious, but the cooked shrimp and lobster taste tired. It’s so disappointing, especially because the place has such a great atmosphere, you want to love the food.

You can drink well, though. I’d start with a pastis just for the ritual of pouring water into the anise-flavored spirit and watching it turn cloudy. But when I asked about all those Ricard bottles, the bartender told me hardly anybody ever orders it. Instead, he’s pouring glasses of Champagne and Chardonnay. There are some good Champagnes at elevated prices, and an eclectic list of domestic, French and Italian whites and reds. Look around the room. A lot of people have their noses stuck in their glasses. The wine buffs are out in force.

The one dessert to get is crepes suzette, tender crepes soaked in butter and orange, folded up and served with a little whipped cream. They’re wonderful, and they really do taste like the ones you’d get in France. Creme caramel is supposedly flavored with essence of oatmeal, which is so evanescent, I suppose it’s harmless enough. But why tinker with a great recipe unless it’s going to be better than the original?

That’s what I keep asking myself about Brass.-Cap.’s take on the French brasserie. To those who are coming for French classics, the execution is bound to be disappointing. For those who are coming because Brass.-Cap. is new and it’s there and it’s Marder’s latest effort, well maybe it falls just as flat, but they’re never going to say it. What works is the sense of place, the warm enveloping atmosphere of a bustling brasserie when you come in from the beach.

But if you love to eat, it’s not quite enough.

*

Brass.-Cap.

Rating: Half a star

Location: 100 W. Channel Road, Los Angeles; (310) 454-4544; fax: (310) 454-4425

Ambience: Glossy brasserie with woven cane chairs, banquettes along the walls, polished brass and a wall of Ricard pastis bottles. The mostly Westside crowd is well-heeled and ready to have fun. Eat in the dining room, at the long zinc bar or in a pocket patio in back.

Service: Crisp and professional, extremely solicitous

Price: Appetizers, $7 to $22; salads, $10 to $16; entrees, $16 to $32; sides, $5 to $8; desserts, $8 to $16.

Best dishes: Pissaladiere, steak tartare, watercress soup, potato truffle ravioli, artichoke salad, Muscovy duck confit, pintade fricasee, pommes frites, creamed spinach, crepes suzette.

Wine list: Fairly eclectic, with a nice list of champagnes and California, French and Italian selections. Corkage, $25.

Best table: One of the corner banquettes or a corner table in the bar

Details: Open Sunday through Thursday from 6 to 11 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. Full bar. Valet parking, $4.50.

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.