Old-Fashioned French Menu--With a Sprinkling of Vietnamese Cuisine

Let’s just cut to the chase: The chocolate mousse at Au Fontainebleau is one of the two or three most chocolatey things in this town. It has a messy look and none of the light texture of a real mousse, though on the other hand it’s not stodgy and candylike either, and there’s also a bit of orange liqueur flavor in it. Essentially, this is an awe-inspiring jolt of pure chocolate, a black hole of chocolate flavor, something chocoholics would arm-wrestle over.

I’m convinced that Au Fontainebleau could make a living selling nothing but chocolate mousse, but it insists on being a grand, rather old-fashioned French restaurant, with a huge menu of other non-chocolate things. You wouldn’t at all guess this from its drab exterior, which suggests a dry-cleaning establishment or maybe a delicatessen rather than a pretty little restaurant with huge, shimmering chandeliers. Understandably, regular customers seem to think of Au Fontainebleau as a secret club.

The owners, who once ran a restaurant near Paris, are a family proud of their French and Vietnamese descent. At one time, they apparently inserted a special Vietnamese menu into the regular one, but now the Asian dishes are mixed right in with the French ones, not specifically earmarked in any way.

For instance, filet mignon with five spices doesn’t sound particularly Vietnamese and, in fact is not very spicy, but the huge skewer of tender beef is sprinkled with chopped peanuts and comes with a little bowl of what the waiter disingenuously called “lime sauce”; it’s nuoc mam, the usual Vietnamese fish sauce.

On the other hand, when steak comes with what the menu calls oyster sauce, it’s nothing Asian but rather, a French sauce of reduced red wine and oyster juice. It’s pretty good. There is a definite affinity between oysters and beefsteak, though the particular steak I had with this sauce was as tough as the five-spice filet mignon is tender.

Puzzling. And it doesn’t necessarily do any good to ask what to expect, because I’ve found unexpectedly great language problems at Au Fontainebleau. Once I asked for curried shrimp soup and got spicy shrimp soup instead. An excellent Vietnamese sweet and sour shrimp soup it was, peppery and full of pineapple, with the luxurious addition of saffron.

Another time, somebody ordered poulet a l’antillaise , chicken in a tomato and red pepper sauce, and the waitress said we couldn’t have it because it was after 7 p.m. and the Early Bird Menu (a bargain: soup, entree and fruit for $10.50) was no longer offered. So we asked for curried chicken instead and got chicken in a rich Southeast Asian curry and peanut butter sauce. This was puzzling, because, while poulet a l’antillaise is clearly available on the regular menu, curried chicken is not on the dinner menu.

Despite the Southeast Asian touches, this is basically a very old-fashioned French menu. Snails come in shells with garlic butter and a full complement of surgical equipment for removing them. Duck liver pat e is slices of pink, cylindrical pat e with truffle chunks in the middle. There’s an oddball onion soup, heavy on the bread rather than the cheese, as is usual in our part of the world. It looks sort of like a bread pudding that has fallen into a bowl of chicken broth and onions.

In short, nothing nouvelle. Swordfish, sprinkled with thyme and grilled, is served with a strongly tarragon-flavored sauce, choron, rather than, say, pureed peppers of unusual hues. The officially designated specialite du chef is fish, shrimps and scallops in a pleasant saffron cream sauce. This chef’s specialty is not to be confused with the two house specialties, one being frog’s legs.

The other house specialty, though, diced filet mignon a la Provencale with green lettuce (the menu has a quaint, quasi-French habit of spelling lettuce as laitus , is a bit unusual: The meat is covered not with something with tomatoes or garlic, as the Provencale designation might suggest, but a meaty sauce somewhat like Oriental oyster sauce. For me, the real house specialty is lobster baked a la Corse (the family is also proud of having Corsican ancestry); that is, lobster gratinee with a tomato cream sauce. The melted cheese is oddly harmonious with the lobster.

As for desserts, the list is a lot of antiques like crepes suzette and souffle Grand Marnier, which is baked good and high. Plus, of course, the black hole of chocolate. But you already know about that.

Recommended dishes: spicy shrimp soup, $6.50; lobster baked a la Corse, $22.50; diced filet mignon a la Provencale , $12.50; chocolate mousse, $3.

Au Fontainebleau, 12130 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A. (213) 826-8177. Open for lunch from noon to 2:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, for dinner from 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 5 to 9:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Beer and Wine. Parking lot in rear. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $36 to $83.