The Tower Stands Taller : With a new chef, that former downtown dinosaur makes an impressive case for the dining room with a view.

My first real date took me to the Copacabana. I was impressed. Being taken there made me feel very grown up. A man in a tuxedo led us to our table, walking us past ladies in low-cut gowns who smelled of perfume and leaned towards their companions whispering sophisticated words. Everybody was beautiful; there were buckets of Champagne on all the tables. I don’t remember what we ate, but I do remember looking down at my plate, gazing lovingly at the food, and thinking that this must be what the people up in heaven had for dinner.

I thought about the Copacabana the other night. I was sitting 32 floors up watching the traffic turn into rivers of pure light. From my perch the Santa Monica Freeway was a wave of white, a smooth curve that flowed into the Harbor Freeway. I knew that down there people were swearing and honking, but from where I sat they were no more than fabulous winking specks of red and white. I felt blessed--and slightly smug--to be where I was.

I’d been feeling that way from the moment I’d walked into the cool, empty lobby of the Transamerica building, navigated the red carpet and been whooshed up in the elevator. I liked getting into another elevator for the short ride that took even me higher, and exiting to find the city at my feet. A maitre d’ bowed and said, “I’ve saved a very special table for you,” and although he didn’t know us from Adam any fool could see that this is a restaurant with no bad tables, I liked the theater.

The theatrics never stopped. A pianist sat down and began to play in the darkened room. A full moon got brighter in the sky. The waiter conspired with us, acting out a role somewhere between proper butler, old family retainer and warrior in the battle between the customer and the kitchen. He lauded us on our wine choices (“ah, you’ve found the bargain”), tried to steer us away from certain dishes (“don’t order it rare unless you want it cold”), and then worried over the food we didn’t eat (“was there something wrong with the pasta?”).

Everybody wants to feel special now and then, and most people love a view--but this sort of restaurant is an endangered species. These days, few of us are willing to pay the price--which is a matter of both food and money. For restaurants like the Tower almost invariably serve very old-fashioned food at very modern prices.

Indeed, the last time that I dined at The Tower, it was a dinosaur of a restaurant. But things have changed. A new chef has breathed life into the menu--and while the prices are high, they aren’t outrageous.

You’ll see the change immediately. Appetizers include Louisiana crab cakes, endive salad with lobster and apples in a coulis of sweet tomatoes, and a mesclun salad. There’s an array of exotic pasta dishes (black linguine with Sonoma goat cheese), lots of fish in esoteric sauces ( mille-feuilles of halibut, smoked salmon and sorrel in a sea urchin sauce), and that very modern notation on the menu that most entrees can be served grilled. There is also, for the traditionalist, a list of old favorites: escargots , lobster bisque and tournadoes of beef with black truffle sauce.

If the waiter seems eager to help you negotiate this list, there is a reason: the quality of the cooking is wildly erratic. Some dishes are quite wonderful; some are truly terrible. It is entirely possible to be sitting at the table exclaiming happily over your meal while your companions give you sidelong glances indicating that you have lost your mind.

The night of the full moon I began with crab cakes. Or, to be exact, crab cake. It was an impressive bit of cooking--the cake itself was light and tasty, lots of crab lightly bound with none of that bread filling that so often masquerades as crab. It was sitting in a rather sad sauce (billed as “extra virgin tomato basil sauce”), but I ignored it; a good crab cake needs no sauce.

“This is wonderful,” I said; my companions gave me baleful looks. And no wonder: one was eating what had been touted as “corn blinis with Osetra caviar and sour cream” and turned out to be a big salad with three minuscule corn cakes, each topped with a dab of caviar. The other was struggling with that endive and lobster salad, which for all its talk of coulis and apples tasted like nothing so much as Lobster Louis. And the fourth was in the strange position of having the good/bad combination presented on one plate. The “rosette potato salad with goose liver and red onions in black truffle vinaigrette” was a perfectly nice salad of curly endive and thinly sliced red onions in a vinaigrette that was generously endowed with black truffle; but it was abundantly topped with slices of goose liver that had all the appeal of liverwurst. “Voila,” said my friend, “I simply remove the liver, and I end up with a delightful salad. I’m happy.”

He was equally pleased with a veal chop that arrived sitting on a fine puree of celery root. The grilled skinless breast of chicken was moist and delicious. And peppered salmon in red wine sauce, served with a little corn flan and sauteed spinach, was wonderful. John Dory in pesto sauce, however, was just plain dreadful, the poor fish drowned in an overpowering sauce.

But the portions are so large that we simply shared our food, watched the traffic fade from the freeways, listened to the music and felt very happy. If the desserts weren’t very good (and they weren’t), none of us cared. We had a good bottle of wine, a good waiter, and enough good food to keep us happy. And when the elevator deposited us on the ground floor we discovered that the maitre d’ had called down and that the car was waiting. As I got in I realized that I felt almost as good as I did on my first date.

I’ve been back--a few times. This is a very likable restaurant. I can recommend Caesar salad, rack of lamb, the grilled rare ahi tuna (although I don’t think the spicy black bean ginger sauce does a whole lot for the fish) and Chateaubriand in a red wine sauce of such intensity it threatens to leap off the plate.

Intensity is actually one of the hallmarks of this menu. At lunch (when there is live harp music) the menu lists a salad of arugula and shrimp in a smoked red bell pepper vinaigrette that is so smoky it takes your breath away. The grilled chicken salad is intense in a different way: it sits on a serious bed of julienned vegetables (long strings of daikon, carrot and cucumber), topped with pine nuts and served in a radicchio leaf. This is the cooking of Axel Dikkers, who was once the chef at the Regency Club, went on to Jimmy’s and then to Camelions. I remember thinking that the food at Camelions under Dikkers was also erratic, a mix of the weird and the wonderful.

But here you have a waiter to guide you. To watch over you. To worry about you. One day at lunch my waiter came out, looked at my plate and wondered why I hadn’t touched my pasta. That was easy: Although it contained huge succulent chunks of lobster in a creamy sauce, it also contained a mountain of undercooked fettuccine in an acrid tomato sauce. The waiter was worried. He removed the dish from the bill--and then insisted on serving dessert to the entire table. It was definitely the best dessert I’ve had here--white chocolate ice cream topped with white Kahlua, lots of raspberries, whipped cream and little bits of chocolate.

But even if the dessert had just been one of those dreary pastries from the cart, I would probably have left happy. There just aren’t a lot of restaurants around any more that make you feel grown up, comfortable and cared for.

The Tower Restaurant 1150 S. Olive Street, Los Angeles. (213) 746-1554. Open for lunch, Monday-Friday; for dinner Monday-Saturday. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for 2, food only, $45-$90. Recommended dishes: Louisiana crab cake, $9; Caesar salad, $6.50; peppered Atlantic salmon, $22; rack of lamb, $24; berries and cream, $6.50.