RESTAURANT REVIEW : Kafe Kafka: A Palatable Slice of Hollywood

To love Hollywood, as we know, is also to loathe it. So behold Kafe Kafka, a Hollywood restaurant that sounds like an anthology of all the most overwrought, loathable things about our capital of the arts.

Item: There is a dove cage in the garden patio because five minutes of watching doves is claimed to be “as good as an hour of meditation with a great master.”

Item: Some of the waitresses are said to work in ballet tutus. I haven’t actually seen this, but I have been served by a waiter in some sort of naval costume.

Item: On Monday nights, the restaurant is a theater where the only play performed is Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” the one where a guy turns into a cockroach, with an all-female cast.

Item: For dessert, you can arrange to be served a Bavarian cream encased in edible gold leaf for $180 or a perfect strawberry accompanied by a gemstone (Kafe Kafka offers to dispatch a Tiffany lapidary to help with your selection), price apparently negotiable.

At the same time, Kafe Kafka also reeks of Hollywood diet mania. The owner, a former fashion photographer, says he devised a pioneering sort of spa cuisine for his models while on shoots.

In short, this is a self-consciously, over-the-edge place where you’re liable to be offered an old issue of “Vanity Fair” to while away the time until your order is ready, but with a menu full of American Heart Assn. shields and recommendations of cruciferous vegetables.

Loathsome, disgusting. Fortunately, the reality is more agreeable than I’d have expected because Kafe Kafka has a sense of humor. A note on the menu reads: “We Do Not Serve California Cuisine” and there is a sign on the wall: “Spoiled Movie Stars Will Be Escorted Through the Back Door.” The place is more low-key, even raffish, than the gems and gold motif suggest; the floor is cement, the zebra-stripe cushions are covered with clear plastic covering, and the garden patio is actually rather ramshackle, cluttered with polo field posts and such.

And, most unexpectedly, the food is not at all bad. Some of it could hold its own anywhere, like the swordfish corn chowder with its strong fish stock flavored with tomato (there’s actually more potato than corn in it).

The menu runs largely to salads, which, to the place’s credit, are tossed, as a salad should be (the menu forcefully recommends that diners not ask for the dressing on the side). Typically, a salad is a mixture of half a dozen greens with a topping. The hunter’s chicken salad is chicken mixed with zucchini, celery and Dijon mustard; “Harlot Europe” is a light chef’s salad with artichokes, ham and Swiss cheese, with pesto dressing. The best of them may be the wheat and country chicken salad with linguine, pesto and Parmesan, and it rates the AHA shield.

Surprisingly, this place gets away with serving beef. The Bavarian meat loaf, flavored mostly with marjoram and a bit of meat glaze, actually tastes of beef, while getting an AHA shield. The beef stroganoff, which doesn’t get the shield but does use low-calorie sour cream in the sauce, is really richly flavored, served on green linguine.

Lots of pasta, of course. Angel Hair Now is a decently light little thing flavored with garlic, chopped tomatoes, Parmesan and a few pine nuts. I haven’t had many of the fish items, though the smoked salmon on zwieback appetizer is certainly delicious, and the seafood ragout, in a somewhat thin lobster stock, is certainly OK. The tiger prawns in coconut sauce (no AHA shield, natch) are faintly spicy and relatively rich for this sort of cuisine.

The gimmick to making the desserts tolerable is apparently the practical one of leaving out egg yolks, using low-fat milk and sometimes replacing butter with gelatin. This makes for a nearly convincing chocolate mousse cake (in a rather clumsy fruit sauce). The creme caramel, however, is spoiled by a cherry sauce of peculiar nastiness. I can’t imagine these are canned cherries--are they dried and reconstituted?

There are spa cuisine dishes, running 103 to 175 calories, but I can’t report on them because the waiter virtually refused to let me order any. I suspect the worst. On the whole, though, this is Hollywood made palatable.

Suggested dishes: swordfish corn chowder, $3.50; wheat and country chicken salad, $5.75; beef stroganoff, $5.50; chocolate mousse cake, $3.

Kafe Kafka, 6069 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 464-3938. Open for lunch 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday; dinner 6 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. No alcoholic beverages. Patrons can bring their own wine, and there is a $3 corkage fee. Street parking. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $21 to $31.