Dinner in the hot seat

People talk about restaurants as theater, and more Los Angeles restaurateurs are making it happen. Some of the most talked-about new restaurants around, including Meson G in Hollywood, Pecorino in Brentwood and Orris in West Los Angeles, have put their chefs in the spotlight by seating diners at counters facing open kitchens.

Nowhere, though, does the stage show match the drama of the original. For 21 years, during more than 7,500 running performances, Chinois has been serving up the most extravagant cooking theatrics in town. It’s Broadway on Main Street. Flames, footwork and flashing cutlery in an arena of peened copper, mosaic tile, brick and stainless steel.

The dining counter at Chinois on Main in Santa Monica has stools for only nine.

These are not seats you choose for easy conversation or courtship. This is not a place to unwind, nor to wheel and deal. Here you won’t find the best line of sight to scan the well-attended room for famous faces.

These seats are for serious kitchen voyeurs. Here you’re as close to the burners of the stove as to the restaurant’s other patrons. No need to ask what looks good tonight.

Turn on the spotlights; crank up the fires. This is industrial strength, Bessemer furnace, scorched-iron and scalding-caldron cooking for those who lust after the for-est-fire roar of chopped spinach leaves fed into volcanic oil, or the cauterizing heat of a wok that renders whole catfish into instantaneous catfish sculpture. This is where you are reminded to say your thanks, because we omnivores live by the grace of other living things -- a fact witnessed as your lobster is transformed from life to life-giving with a struggle of legs and claws against the sear of a skillet. If you want to talk to your spouse at the counter, you’ll have to raise your voice over the cymbal clang of spatula and ladle or wait for that order of duck fried rice to come out of the pot.

This is not a solo performance, such as chef Nancy Silverton’s weekly “mozzarella nights” at the cocktail bar of Jar in West Hollywood. It’s a team pro show: six men and a woman cooking in a U-shaped arena precisely compact enough for, well, for seven. Anything more than a step in either direction requires someone else to make way, a fast-paced chain reaction that keeps the white-jacketed kitchen crew moving in a perpetual line dance.

Even money says that half the patrons here have been shooed out of more spacious kitchens in private homes because the host needed room to work.

Then you eat.

Three-way lobster: salad with plum dressing, potsticker with a sticky glaze of dark honey, and spring roll dressed with plum sauce. A sweet, curried deep-fried oyster topped with salmon roe alongside a dollop of cucumber sauce. Stir-fried leg of lamb in a radicchio-leaf taco crowned with a tempura onion ring. A buttery braised short rib on a spoonful of mashed potato splashed with a Port wine reduction.

And don’t miss Shanghai lobster. The regal Maine shellfish is sliced in half, alive, at the kitchen’s “lobster station,” seared and then broiled, while an Asian ginger-curry sauce is swirled over flames to the consistency of chocolate; a velvety union of East and West, of white and dark, finally to be assembled on a platter -- there is a crowd working the lobster station now -- with the shell aimed skyward, beside a mound of meat, a moat of sauce and a forest of flash-fried spinach leaves.

Ah, the spinach. You just might find it a tough choice. Do you grab for a plump slab of lobster tail or for an ethereal snowflake of spinach?

Come, now. Lobster or spinach -- really?

Really.

Established by Wolfgang Puck and Barbara Lazaroff in 1983, the year they wed, Chinois is now the longest-running restaurant in the Puck empire. The open kitchen of his original Spago Hollywood was one of the city’s first for fine dining. Chinois followed, and from the beginning it proved a step forward in revealing the thrills of the kitchen to diners.

All these years later, though, the “reality” part of kitchen theater isn’t for everyone’s tender eyes.

This night, a woman at the counter in a faux snakeskin blazer is unnerved to see a dish towel used to shape the mounded presentation of her fried rice.

“It tastes fabulous, and it’s fun to watch,” she confides. “But the rag thing ... “ She shakes her head, failing to answer the question of how she would prefer her rice to be mounded except with a towel dedicated to the purpose each night.

Protecting such sensibilities may explain why most restaurant kitchens still have doors, and why even open kitchens are chiefly for glancing.

“It’s a different feeling,” executive chef Louis Diaz says about working just inches away from an audience, alongside sous-chef Rene Mata, night after night since the earliest years of Chinois. “It’s a little like doing a cooking show, without the TV cameras.”

Cooking show?

Well, OK. But don’t blink if you’re taking recipe notes. Tonight’s lobster goes from whole to halves to skillet to oven to plate, gets sauced and meets up with the spinach crisps with roughly the intensity and orchestrated effort of a NASCAR pit stop.

The simpler lesson from Chinois, and from the newcomers in town, is that when you need a night out, the kitchen is where you’ll find the action.