For fun that spares no expense

Seventy-nine years ago in New York City there was a restaurant called the Palm. It’s still there, and there are now 25 Palms spread across the U.S. Their success begs the question: Do we have to eat badly to have fun?

It was downhill from the breadbasket in recent meals at L.A.’s two Palms, yet each time two distinct groups had phone-each-other-the-next-day-still-giggling fun, even if one of the messages was, “It cracked me up. Five hundred dollars for floury veal piccata.”

Nobody said fun was cheap.

As legend and the company website have it, the Palm in New York was founded by Italians, and the name was a corruption of “Parma.” It had such good-hearted owners, they used to feed cartoonists for free in exchange for a caricature on the wall. Somewhere along the line the Palm and its spinoffs became steak and lobster places, thence a chain whose outlets come largely pre-doodled.

L.A.’s first Palm is a venerable 30-year-old outlet in West Hollywood; then there is “Downtown Palm,” a newcomer near the Staples Center. The restaurant’s arrival there several years ago was one of the perennial events declared by developers to be the thing that would finally revitalize that blighted stretch of Figueroa. Mightier efforts have failed. The Los Angeles Convention Center was supposed to do it when the decision was made to dump thousands of disoriented conventioneers at a desolate corner of Pico Union. Most recently, the Palm has done its bit to jump-start Lazarus. It may take a second coming. Several weeks ago, a companion said that she found the intersection of 11th and Flower streets so desolate at 7 p.m. on a Friday night that she had a mild case of heebie-jeebies.

The place itself is a big chunky building, with the proportions of a converted bank. Inside, the dining room has such high ceilings that the decorator clearly had to levitate to apply the cartoon decals. The night of our first visit, a huge arc of red and gold balloons spanned the largely empty dining room; we’d either just missed a University of Southern California graduation party, or there’d been a mass vanishing of Trojans. But we didn’t need crowds, we needed liquor, and no sooner were we shown to a perfectly padded, well-proportioned booth than the Palm began working its magic. Name your tipple and both Palms produce good drinks. But if there’s one thing that improves every occasion except a driving test, it’s a martini. The Palm does something clever with its version: serves a moderate portion in a big glass. Stick to one, then find the wine list a no-go area and you get the buzz without the hangover.

Our waitress was wonderful, and all but her understated beauty was serious credit to the Palm. When a restaurant gets service right, it’s no small feat, and it’s never an accident. Our waitress was friendly without being cloying, smart without being smug and fast. She told us the Palm classics, and we ordered them: lobster, New York strip, onion rings and cheesecake.

As we ordered, there was no way of knowing that we were already eating the best part of the meal, the bread, particularly an unusual, delicate and entirely delicious raisin bread made with white flour. It turns out it comes from Il Fornaio.

As the food cooked on the premises started arriving, it should have been more disappointing. It wasn’t good. But we had been drinking gin beneath USC balloons. The three-pound lobster cost $72, and it was huge. At the West Hollywood Palm, the waiters will bring out your dinner live to pose for photographs. Downtown, we met ours after it had been cooked.

The cracking of claws at the table was deft and thrilling, but the meat was confusing. If somebody had told me it was canned crab, I’d have said, “OK. Got some lime, nam pla, chili, garlic and cilantro back there?” It was served with butter, but it needed Thai dipping sauce, or some other form of high-flavored help. It had none of the wonderful, squeaky texture and strange, fresh sweetness of lobsters from back East. The poor animal tasted tired and sad; it made you think it must have been relieved when someone finally threw it in a pot.

As the main courses came, it didn’t improve. A rare steak was medium rare, and fine for a Patricia Heaton special at Albertson’s. But for good meat, go to Taylor’s. The onion rings were the food version of a beehive hairdo: a tall mass of fried tendrils, but teased into such enormity, there should be a “do not touch” rule. They were curiously unsatisfying to eat, more batter than onion. Spinach was green, and fine, by all means order lots of it and skip dessert.

Other restaurants use trolleys to display desserts; the Palm elects to use the moment to test the strength of its waiters. After our waitress somehow lugged an enormous platter with different offerings to the table, we chose the cheesecake. We chose badly. Was it ricotta, was it whey? In either case, it was dry.

Wines. This is a place whose formula was perfected before we as a nation converted from cocktail drinkers to wine garglers. The martini was worth $9 -- Tanqueray is good gin. The wine list, however, is best left alone, unless you go on Mondays, when wines by the bottle are half price, and Frog’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon is a good choice (at what it should cost). Tuesday through Sunday, open it only if you need a cashectomy, or want to stay sober. Some of the wine is literally undrinkable. An $11 glass of “Dynamite” Cabernet Sauvignon was foul-tasting. Then a $75 bottle of Beaulieu Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon “Tapestry” came out of the bottle hard and opened up as a dysfunctional mob of competing, unpleasant flavors -- wood, fruit, tannins.

Leaving the restaurant, we should have been as sour as the glass of Dynamite. I’ve eaten better on an airplane, and we hadn’t gone anywhere. We were still standing at a stubbornly unrejuvenated corner in downtown Los Angeles, it was still bleak, the Lakers were still losers and we were each the equivalent of $134 poorer. And we were euphoric. We’d had a wonderful time; not good, great. We’d gone for the kitsch full-fun package: gin, balloons, surf and turf, cake, all served with a smile. On some very basic level the place knew how to push our party buttons. We’d focused on each other and not the food, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

The other fun house

Several nights later in West Hollywood, it was a replay, except our waiter was a He -- the name badge said Henrik -- and the surroundings were less bleak. We were Beverly Hills adjacent instead of Staples Center parking lot adjacent. The restaurant has an older, lived-in feel. It’s about as “historic” as the guys with big wristwatches at the bar. The bar is fun and has such a life of its own, diners have to pay for their gin before going to the table.

At the table, it was much the same drill as downtown, except we explored the salad courses -- everything seemed to be a variation of iceberg lettuce with chopped up things tossed into it -- and instead of New York strip, we had rib-eye. Steak-wise, we were still at Patricia Heaton’s house. As an experiment, we departed from steak. The lamb chops were fine, if strangely large, like they had come from Schwarzenegger sheep. The veal piccata was awful, as if it hadn’t been ordered in years. The sauce was thickly floury. Green beans with oil and garlic were al dente, and good; but the creamed spinach is not a compelling reason to risk a quadruple bypass.

Again, the choice to order wine here is a kind of intelligence test. By the glass, a Red Diamond Merlot was not much better than the Dynamite Cab Sauvignon served downtown, and an $83 bottle of Marchesi Barolo was fine, but at the price, a mistake all the same.

Henrik had an easier time with the dessert tray than our waitress downtown did, but even his athleticism couldn’t explain the dishes on the tray. A creme brulee for one was served in a chafing dish for vegetables; the resulting lake of caramelized custard could have served three. It was fine, if a bit too sweet. We passed on the cheesecake and ordered chocolate cake. This was served in a frightening portion, six inches tall, with thick crests of buttery icing and gratingly sweet sponge. Miss Piggy used to have a joke about eating as much as she could carry; in the case of this cake, it would be a mistake to eat what Henrik can lift.

This time, not including a $30 bar bill, but including a well-deserved 20% tip, it was $123 per person. We were a different group, it was a Tuesday night. Two of us had been quarreling furiously earlier that day; another had been in the hospital the day before. But after two hours in a place that understands how to prompt us to have fun, the power of a well-placed booth, friendly service, cold gin, we left the place laughing.

To test the correlation of bad food and good fun, we repeated the experiment with another meal downtown, another meal in West Hollywood. Oh, the stories we could tell about inedible prime rib, cardboard veal, crab cakes that even the management took away. Again we floated out, openly joyous in spite of our dinners.

*

Palm Restaurant

Rating: Half a star

Location: 9001 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 550-8811; and Palm Restaurant Downtown, 1100 S. Flower St., (213) 763-4600; www.thepalm.com

Ambience: Surf and turf

Service: Polite, fast, friendly, notably good

Price: Salads from $8; 3-pound lobster from $72; rib-eye steak, $35.50; French fries, $5. Think $100 to $130 a head for three courses with side dishes, lobster, wine, cocktails and tip; $75 a head if you avoid the lobster, wines and desserts.

Best dishes: Shrimp cocktail, creme brulee, lamb chops

Wine list: Wine by the bottle, half price on Monday nights. Other nights, stick to cocktails. Tanqueray martini, $9. Corkage, $30.

Best table: A booth

Special features: These restaurants are magical places where no matter what you eat or how much you pay, you have fun.

Details: West Hollywood: Open for lunch and dinner noon to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, noon to 11 p.m. Friday; for dinner 5 to 11 p.m. Saturday, 5 to 9.30 p.m. Sunday. Valet parking, $4.50. Downtown: Open for lunch and dinner 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday; for dinner 5 to 11 p.m. Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday. Full bar. Valet parking, no charge weekdays during lunch, $5 at other times.

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.