Isn’t it romantic? Mais oui

Dinner at L’Orangerie inevitably evokes a sense of occasion. The French restaurant, which is 27 years old now, has the elegant thing down cold. That moment when you step from your Chevy or your Corniche onto the candlelit terrace is sheer magic.

Orange blossoms perfume the air. Through the window you can see wineglasses laid out on the bar, sparkling in the soft candlelight. At the grand piano, a heartbreakingly young pianist in a demure cloche dashes off showers of notes. Flowers erupt in an extravagant arrangement. The mood is high romance, which calls for Champagne. And foie gras. And lobster. Possibly truffles.

It’s a brilliant setup. Before you’ve ever stepped inside, you’ve fallen under L’Orangerie’s familiar spell. Hostesses, maitre d’, waiters and sommelier in full regalia call out a chorus of bon soirs. If Gerard Ferry, who owns the restaurant with his wife Virginie, is in the house, he may slip in a “good evening” as well.

A new chef, Christophe Bellanca, has just debuted at L’Orangerie, and among fans of the restaurant, anticipation is running high. He comes from the Michelin two-star Pic in Valence in the northern Rhone and has just introduced a new menu. The place is packed, the dining room humming with energy. As waiters circle back and forth, offering menus, water, bread, the sommelier hovers solicitously, ready to pounce with a wine suggestion. And the service seems crisper than it’s been in a while, now that longtime maitre d’ Stephane Clasquin is back on board.

The dining room sparkles. Another of those astonishing flower arrangements anchors two back-to-back banquettes, where lovers are seated side by side. Women are coiffed and rouged, bejeweled and perfumed. It’s impossible to be overdressed at L’Orangerie; seeing what everyone is wearing is part of the fun. Just look at the crowd: 70s-era rockers with barely legal girlfriends, industry insiders courting a potential hire, well-heeled tourists following the Relais et Chateaux circuit, aspiring gourmands splurging on dinner. The young couple seated next to us, however, seems immune. They stare straight ahead, hardly eat a bite and exchange barely three words.

Everyone else that night has fallen head over heels for L’Orangerie’s grand illusion. But is it all set dressing? Or does L’Orangerie still deliver as a serious French restaurant and one of the most expensive -- if not the most expensive -- in the city?

It is certainly the most French restaurant anywhere in Southern California. Through chef after chef, L’Orangerie has remained remarkably unaffected by what’s going on in the rest of the city’s kitchens. The Ferrys always look to France for their chefs, usually hiring some young talent away from a Michelin-starred kitchen. They’re not encouraged to go native. Despite the examples of Wolfgang Puck and Michel Richard, California-French cooking will never issue from this kitchen, though Asian spices and influences via the mother country are certainly welcome.

L’Orangerie’s chefs tend to stay for no more than a few years before making their escape into the wild. Some go back to France. A few have stayed in L.A. to open their own restaurants. Jean Francois Meteigner has thrived at La Cachette. Ludovic Lefebvre is now behind the stoves at Bastide. And just Tuesday L’Orangerie’s last chef, Christophe Eme opened his own restaurant, Ortolan, on West 3rd Street in Los Angeles.

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New chef from France

AT 33, Bellanca is a kitchen veteran who came up through the French restaurant system, the most rigorous in the world. He can make a sabayon or a svelte veal reduction with the best of them. And his pommes souffles are so light someone across the room could whisper and they’d sail right off the plate.

As an amuse, the chef sends out a fetching glass cup layered with stripes of orange, crimson and beige -- a delicious mousse of cumin-scented carrot, a beet gelee topped with a cloud of eggplant mousse. That pale blade of grass that garnishes it is actually a popcorn shoot, and it really does taste like corn, but with an intriguing bitter edge. The assemblage of flavors is delicious. But I had the very same amuse or a similar one every time I went to L’Orangerie over a period of a couple of months. No other tricks up his sleeves?

The chef has one stunning first course: a foie gras creme brulee that’s really a subtle and silky foie gras custard covered with a lacy sheet of burnt sugar and crowned with a gossamer green apple mousse. The juicy acidity of the green apple plays brilliantly against the rich, smooth foie gras and the sugar. The old reliable, of course, is L’Orangerie’s signature soft scrambled eggs put back into the shell and served with a spoonful of osetra caviar. It’s a wonderfully festive way to begin a meal, especially with a flute of Champagne.

Instead of the usual escargot in parsley butter, Bellanca serves the snails out of the shell, arranged on top of a shortbread crust like so many fat blackberries. The look of the snail tart is helped along by lots of parsley and a svelte garlic emulsion. The snails themselves are earthy and tender, but the incredibly short pastry crust makes this almost as rich as the classic escargots dish.

Though the restaurant makes a point of proclaiming that most dishes are lighter because, in place of butter, the kitchen uses the olive oil from the Ferry’s estate in the south of France, most of the dishes are still awfully rich. Among the first courses, the one exception is a lovely medley of winter vegetables -- baby leeks, carrots, green beans, sprouts -- in an Asian-accented broth with rice noodles and toasted vermicelli.

Others are just plain dull. A spiny lobster salad is tasteless and rubbery. Foie gras au torchon is curiously bland. Fricassee gnocchi with chanterelles is an oily mess. Though I love the drama of sea urchin presented in a huge sea urchin shell with those purple spikes going every which way, I didn’t much like fishing through a little sea of fennel foam to find the uni roe. It seemed, like so many dishes on the new menu, an intellectual exercise rather than a sensual experience. And if food isn’t sensual, memorable in each bite, what is it? All form, little content.

No doubt every chef L’Orangerie has hired has done good work in France, but somehow when it comes to cooking here, their food ends up remarkably similar. It’s as if they’re all working from the same fashion book, rifling the pages for ideas. Asian spices. Foam. Deconstructed something or other. But the ideas rarely coalesce into something alive and twitching. I don’t know whether the kitchen is simply dysfunctional or whether the chef is not allowed the resources he needs to cook the way he was trained to cook. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to find a truly memorable dish on L’Orangerie’s menu. No matter who’s cooking, the food has a dispiriting sameness to it: fussy and over-manipulated without the shock of something so pure and delicious it rivets your attention.

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Keeping it contemporary

To their credit, the Ferrys have always focused on contemporary French cuisine instead of re-creating the cliches. (Some would call them the classics.) And while the atmosphere may recall Les Crayeres in Reims or another temple of haute cuisine, the food at L’Orangerie doesn’t match the level of a top two- or three-star in France. It just isn’t exciting enough. (That said, though L’Orangerie is quite possibly the most expensive restaurant in L.A., it’s cheap compared with restaurants in France these days, because of the weak dollar.)

It’s curious that the best main course we try is the most classic: a superb beef prime rib for two. At $75 per person, it’s presented with all the suitable pomp and circumstance. Before carving the prime rib off the bone, the waiter shows off the gorgeous charred chop in a copper skillet with a bouquet of herbs tucked in beside it. The meat, which comes from a farm in Pennsylvania, is marvelously tender and full of beefy flavor, perfect with those airy pommes souffles and a fabulous bearnaise sauce made with olive oil. Heaven.

The quality of the pigeon is excellent, too, cooked perfectly rose, but the surface is covered with what tastes like crushed toffee -- incredibly sweet and a sure killer of any great Burgundy you might be drinking. Steamed cod is delicious, about as moist and flaky as you could want. I’m less enthused by its “sauce,” a Champagne emulsion, another word for the foam roiling around the poor fish, not to mention the garnish of caviar dosed with white truffle oil. Put a Champagne beurre blanc next to a Champagne emulsion and which would win? The beurre blanc. Foam is the curiously unsatisfying sauce. Enough with the foam already. And the idea of white truffle oil is wrongheaded enough, but ruining good caviar with it is criminal. Wild turbot one night fares better, simply grilled and presented with little nuggets of salsify.

The wine list is impressively large, covering all the usual bases, predictably heavy on the Bordeaux and Burgundies. It’s just as impressive for its breathtakingly high markups. However, the corkage fee is relatively reasonable: $25. There’s a catch, though. Any wine you bring has to be something that’s not on the list. It’s posted on the Internet, but just to be sure, it’s a good idea to call ahead. I’ve had letters from people who went to the trouble to check in with the restaurant beforehand, only to have their treasured older vintage refused because the wine list did have the same label, but a different (younger) vintage. This seems like splitting hairs.

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Sweet treats

Pastry chef Christophe Grilo turns out sophisticated, mannered desserts. Some of them are really delicious, like a tart of thinly sliced bananas or his creme brulee scented with verveine (lemon verbena) and served with a lemon sorbet. Even if you don’t like white chocolate, you might appreciate his napoleon of white chocolate and praline. But my favorite is still L’Orangerie’s apple tart baked a la minute, a swirl of finely sliced apples on a wisp of crust, served warm with softly whipped cream and a fine vanilla ice cream. Another taste of French heaven.

But that young couple who ate so quietly didn’t order the tart or the cote de boeuf. Too boring. Instead, they picked the more unusual-sounding dishes and must not have gotten the transcendent meal they’d counted on. The chef didn’t ride in on a white horse and save L’Orangerie from itself. Or at least not yet.

Behind the smoke and mirrors, it’s still the same L’Orangerie. Which isn’t all bad. You get what you always get: a sense of occasion and an enchanting setting for dressing up and going out with friends. The fact that it has survived for 27 years through ups and downs in the economy and fashion is a feat in itself. It’s the last of the haute cuisine restaurants still standing.

If only the food delivered as much magic as the setting, it would be a safe bet that the orange blossoms and candlelight would be easing romance for another quarter of a century.

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L’Orangerie

Rating: **

Location: 903 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 652-9770; www.orangerie.com

Ambience: A vision of an 18th century orangerie with flowers, candlelight, and a solemn crowd of Francophiles, romantics and big spenders. The garden room’s roof opens to the stars on balmy nights.

Service: Attentive and professional.

Price: Appetizers, $15 to $110; main courses, $32 to $75; desserts, $15; chef’s tasting menu, $88 per person.

Best dishes: Eggs in their shells, escargot with parsley, foie gras creme brulee, pan-roasted breast of squab, beef prime rib for two, Santa Barbara spiny lobster, apple tart, banana tart, chocolate trio.

Wine list: A stodgy, mostly French list that’s overpriced. Corkage, $25.

Best table: The back-corner round one.

Special features: Takeout. Call for dinner selections of the day.

Details: Open Tuesday through Saturday from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday. Full bar. Valet parking $4.50.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience; price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.