With a side order of stardust

WE rush in, late, through the tall orange doors, past the suits of armor standing sentry in front of the bathrooms, barely taking in the spangled Moroccan cushions on the sofas, the oversized lamps and the stacked art and architecture tomes in the Parker Palm Springs hotel lobby.

I check the cozy bar and the lounge at the back, where assorted lounge lizards are sipping cocktails around a fire pit and two giggly newlyweds swing in basket chairs. “It’s a shoe obsession, not a shoe fetish,” one woman barks into her cellphone.

Maybe our friends aren’t here yet. Maybe they’re in the garden. I take a sashay out in the vast jardin that once was part of Merv Griffin’s tony Givenchy spa. Now there’s a sort of campfire in the middle of the lawn with canvas butterfly chairs pulled up close in the cool desert night. Not there.

Where’s Mister Parker’s? I ask the desk clerk as I headed back the other way.

There, she says, and I see we’d rushed right past the entrance. A gaudily painted sandwich board with a stylized hand indicates this way to Mister Parker’s, pointing through midnight blue velvet curtains. It looks like the entrance to a carnival or a magic show, not the fine dining restaurant of this completely done-over hotel and spa, now part of the French-owned Le Meridien hotel group.

What fun. Mister Parker’s feels dark and clandestine as a speak-easy. There’s nobody at the maitre d’s podium, a gleaming white baby grand, so we stand around and wait. A couple of other groups crowd in. One guy I had noticed, fleetingly, at the bar. He’s in a retro-style argyle sweater and jaunty striped fedora. Funny how vintage now connotes cutting edge. The women sparkle like ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll babes. Is that fashion or a Palm Springs time warp?

Suddenly the curtains part and the suave, pompadoured maitre d’ in an immaculate white linen jacket sweeps in. I love it. They couldn’t have cast the part better. Snatching up the menus, he leads us to a choice banquette where we can take in the entire main dining room.

There’s a lot to take in, believe me. Fabulous brass chandeliers that look like stylized dandelions reflect their twins in the low, mirrored ceilings. Chairs are oddly mismatched, all with the same upholstery, but some tall-backed and rectangular, others, right beside them at the same table, squat and curvy. Mr. and Mrs. chairs, one presumes.

Art covers practically every square inch of the room: kitschy paintings, clowns, even ‘70s posters, a Vargas-style vamp half clothed in a candy bar wrapper. It could be thrift shop art; it could be incredibly valuable. It’s hard to tell. It all comes down to the wacky aesthetic of New York designer Jonathan Adler. The entire hotel, in fact, is a theme park to bygone eras, sprinkled with the stardust of nostalgia.

The food, however, is up to date. By and large, it’s in the French comfort vein and, for the most part, quite well done, especially considering that this is Palm Springs, which until very recently, has been decades behind the rest of Southern California.

*

Aromatic moment

TO start, I’d go with the mussels steamed in pastis. They come in an adorable egg-shaped mussel pot with a divider that keeps the mussels on one side, the sauce on the other.

When the waiter takes off the lid, you can smell the salt of the sea along with the anise of the pastis and fennel. The broth is robust and creamy. Dip the mussels in it, and your bread too. The bread, incidentally, is house-baked. You get a round yeasty loaf, served on a wooden board with good butter. It’s a telling detail.

Tarte flambee, the Alsatian equivalent of pizza, doesn’t show up on menus very often, so it’s a surprise to see it here. Traditionally it’s a thin-crusted dough covered with a smear of creme fraiche, onions and lardons and baked in a wood-fired oven. Here, the dough is incredibly thin and almost cracker crisp, dotted with fresh goat cheese, the onions and lardons, and broken into pieces, it’s more hors d’oeuvres than first course. The original is better, but this one is appealing if you think of it as a sort of canape. The salad mounded in the middle of the plate doesn’t add anything, though, and the balsamic dressing is too sweet.

A perky mache and beet salad another night features pretty pink beets. They’re so tasty, you end up wishing there were more than just a few slices. There’s also an excellent salad made with pale, slightly bitter frisee in a delicious mustardy dressing garnished with quail eggs and smoky lardons. This, I’d come back for, on its own.

To go with that bottle of Champagne, the menu offers oysters on the half shell, but also half a dozen meaty oysters baked with spinach and mild chorizo sausage blanketed with a Champagne hollandaise. This dish is less rich, somehow, than oysters Rockefeller because the hollandaise is so deliciously delicate.

For something even lighter, get the panache of salmon and scallops, thinly sliced salmon arranged like a flower on the plate, with fine slices of raw scallop in the middle, the whole drizzled with olive oil and lime and sparked with a touch of green peppercorns.

I’m entertained and distracted just watching the other guests make merry, but once my duck confit arrives, it gets my entire attention. This is the real thing, two thigh and leg pieces, the flesh dark and moist, the skin crisp and golden. A bite of duck, a bite of rich, tender potato gratin and then some green beans.

The 14-ounce veal chop, a special, is tender and juicy, perfect with a wild mushroom souffle, which is something like a bread and mushroom pudding. Braised beef short ribs with fingerling potatoes and baby carrots are decent too, but the steak au poivre is a big disappointment. For $42, you’d expect something terrific. The black peppercorn sauce is excellent; the problem is the steak. It doesn’t taste like prime and it’s overcooked.

*

Crazy, cool and sexy

I like that the menu includes a couple of retro dishes such as the Scottish salmon en croute, a fancy dish for fish lovers, basically salmon wrapped in a pastry crust with a layer of spinach. When you slice into it, the colors are beautiful. But cooking the salmon in a crust is tricky; the fish can end up overcooked, as it was on one of my visits.

The vegetarian among us orders the gnocchi. I feel sorry for her because this is a truly awful dish. The gnocchi have the texture of mochi and are served in a big Parmesan tuile cup the size of a coffee filter, along with a mishmash of vegetables. She picks at it gamely, but I suspect she’ll go home a little hungry. Roast chicken passes muster, though, and chops cut from a rack of lamb are nicely cooked.

The wine list is zippy and fun, divided into categories called “crazy,” “cool” and “sexy,” each of which includes sparkling, white and red wines. It’s less intimidating than traditional wine lists; it fits all on one page essentially, and picking the wine seems more like a game than something that merits agonizing. We found a Riesling from Domaine Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace and a nice Sancerre from Lucien Crochet in the Loire Valley, but few real bargains. Mister Parker’s is part of a hotel, and as in most hotels, markups are high. I guess they figure if you’re spending $400 plus on a room, you won’t mind spending for a bottle of wine. And corkage is a whopping $35.

For dessert, I thought the deconstructed profiteroles, a ball of ice cream flanked by two tall rectangles of pastry, were kind of fun, especially considering the quality of the dark, warm chocolate sauce. The rest of the sweets, though, didn’t measure up.

The best strategy is probably to skip them and save your calories for an after dinner drink or cocktail taken outside in the exotic sprawling garden.

Make mine a martini, very dry, very cold, with a twist.

*

Mister Parker’s

Rating: * 1/2

Location: 4200 E. Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs, (760) 770-5000; www.theparkerpalmsprings.com

Ambience: Retro-mod French restaurant inside the uber-hip Parker Palm Springs, a Le Meridien hotel. Mirrored ceilings, a white baby grand as the maitre d’ podium, and kitschy art make this place a magnet for the younger Palm Springs hipster set.

Service: Enthused and attentive without being overly stiff.

Price: Appetizers, $12 to $24; main courses, $29 to $42; dessert, $12.

Best dishes: Black mussels steamed in pastis, baked oysters in Champagne hollandaise, frisee salad with quail egg and lardons, panache of salmon and scallops, duck confit, veal chop, braised short ribs, profiteroles.

Wine list: Quirky little list with wines organized under “crazy,” “cool” and “sexy.” Some good picks though. Corkage, $35.

Best table: The corner banquette at the far end of the room.

Details: Open from 6 to 10:15 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Full bar. Valet parking, complimentary.

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.