Creme de la Crenshaw

Dulan’s might be the power center of the Crenshaw district, the genteel restaurant where politicians and local businessmen get together for breakfasts of fried apples and grits, a place of valet-parked Mercedes and Town Cars on weekend nights, of neatly pressed suits and spectacular hats and little kids pulling at their ties after church on Sundays.

Some area restaurants may be more expensive, others hotter spots for dates, but Dulan’s, near the southern end of the Crenshaw Strip, is the nicest restaurant in South Central L.A., the place where you’d bring your grandmother for lunch. Dulan’s owner, Greg Dulan, is the son of the guy who owns Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in the Marina, the other restaurant that’s usually brought up when somebody mentions African-American cooking in Los Angeles, and it’s obvious the two have got that Southern-heritage thing down pat. It feels like a privilege to be able to eat among the power brokers and families at Dulan’s, the way it feels like a privilege to be able to eat at someplace old like Mary Mac’s in Atlanta, or perhaps locally at the Musso and Frank Grill.

Dulan’s has an airy, high-ceilinged dining room with a couple of banquet rooms off to the side and a patio out back that feels like the site of a perpetual garden wedding. As soon as you sit down here, you are brought iced tea or lemonade, also dense, rich corn muffins whose springy resiliency builds to a crunch toward their outer edge, hot enough to melt a pat of butter in nothing flat, sweet enough to make a drizzle of honey irrelevant.

Dinners are massive things here, towering entrees that share the plate with rice or a mountain of crisp-edged cornbread stuffing, also with two little bowls of side dishes: pungent collard greens; pillowy, herb-redolent red beans; blandish macaroni and cheese with a crunchy cheese crust; green beans simmered with fatback; sweet, gently spiced stewed yams.

The dinner menu at Dulan’s, prix-fixe $10.95, is the eternal soul-food list without the various innards and tails: crusty fried chicken, fragrant with garlic; long-cooked pork chops smothered in brown gravy; big trenchers of meatloaf made delicious with peppers and herbs. Jambalaya is the good, dry kind, yellow with spice, studded with white-meat chicken and intensely flavored chunks of Creole sausage.

On Fridays and Saturdays, there are vast, thin fillets of catfish, dusted with peppery cornmeal and fried, the flesh moist and firm, the kind of catfish whose coating all but shatters under your teeth; on Fridays and Saturdays, there are also enormous slabs of short ribs braised to a rich, beefy tenderness.

Dulan’s serves what must be the best peach cobbler in Los Angeles, crisp leaves of pastry floating in hot, peach-studded syrup pungent with cinnamon, and a bundt-pan-baked version of the soul classic “sock it to me” cake that tastes like the world’s best coffee cake.

Sunday brunch, served buffet-style on the patio, is a fairly popular meal, all steam-trays filled with bacon and sausage, oniony home-fried potatoes, and waffles made to order. An omelet man chants “speak to me, speak to me” in the mornings like an outfielder trying to rattle the guy at bat. But the food here definitely tastes better when it is freshly made: Skip the brunch; come for Sunday dinner after 2.

* Dulan’s 4859 S. Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 296-3034. Open Tuesday-Thursday, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Takeout. No alcohol. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Valet parking Friday-Sunday. Dinner for two, food only, $21.90.