Rising to the occasion

THE model of the entrepreneur chef or restaurateur is so pervasive that someone who’s content to have just one restaurant could almost be considered a slacker these days. In the wake of L.A.’s original and famous global empires such as those of Wolfgang Puck and Nobu Matsuhisa, some smart local chefs have expanded while sticking much closer to home. Neal Fraser opened BLD just down the street from his restaurant Grace. Suzanne Goin has a five-minute drive between Lucques and A.O.C., and it takes Gino Angelini maybe 10 minutes to get from Angelini Osteria to La Terza. Mark Peel is opening a second restaurant this fall a few blocks north of Campanile.

Steven Arroyo, on the other hand, is expanding all over the place. He started with one Cobras & Matadors tapas bar on Beverly Boulevard, and now has a second in Los Feliz, as well as Malo, a Mexican dive in Silver Lake, Happi Songs Asian Tavern on South La Brea and something called Church & State in the works downtown. He also opened a wine bistro called 750ml in South Pasadena this spring.

Arroyo’s places, as different as they might sound, have had several things in common: killer locations; a distinctively urban, edgy look; moderate prices; and, except for Boxer (where, incidentally, Neal Fraser was at the stoves), food that is just OK. Only Boxer had any kind of culinary ambition. Mostly, the food is workmanlike, based on a menu that a decent line cook can execute.

But for 750ml, he hired Greg Bernhardt, who has worked at Grace, Vida and Le Dome. And guess what, it shows.

The concept is updated French bistro. And per usual, Arroyo has found a prime location, this one a corner space that was once part of the Mission Arroyo Hotel, on Mission Street across from the Gold Line station. From the big windows framed in dark brown you can see an old-fashioned cityscape of the streetcar stopping to drop off passengers or the barriers coming down to stop traffic as the rail cars pass by. On Thursday evenings, a farmers market takes up the broad avenue.

Inside 750ml (pronounced “Seven-fifty em el”) it’s very last century, with glossy burnt sienna subway tiles running halfway up the walls and Arroyo-designed industrial lighting fixtures fitted with clear bulbs whose filaments glow an eerie gold. Old-style Thonet bentwood bistro chairs are set around plain wooden tables covered in brown butcher paper. The look is dead on.

There’s not much of a bar per se, just room for a handful of folks who have stopped in to hoist a glass after work, choosing from a selection of about 18 wines by the glass. It’s not all California Chardonnay either. You can try a Vermentino, a grape normally seen in Sardinia or the northern coast of Italy, but here it’s from Lodi. Or a Cabernet Franc from the Napa Valley, or a Malbec-Merlot blend from Mendoza, Argentina.

By the bottle, wine buffs can find many more labels of interest. Though the frequently changing list is careful to include the familiar (Navarro Chardonnay or Ici/La-Bas Pinot Noir), more unusual bottles such as Josef Schmid Gruner Veltliner, Charles Joguet Chinon or Albino Rocca “Vignalunga” Dolcetto d’Alba are larded throughout its two pages.

The menu changes just about every week, and not by only a few dishes, which serves to keep regulars happy. One of the mainstays seems to be the arugula salad with quartered baby artichokes and either bresaola or Serrano ham with reggianito cheese, a cow’s milk cheese from Argentina that mimics Parmigiano Reggiano. The full-bodied cheese is an interesting choice, but the arugula is generic. Better though, is mache with juicy cherries, avocado, clementine segments and toasted almonds. It’s so delicious I could barely wrest a bite away from my dining companion.

Asparagus soup that same night is a puree of fresh asparagus with a smoked paprika cream that melds beautifully with the gentle taste of the green spears. It’s seasonal, and just the kind of thing you hope to find on a wine bistro menu.

Steak tartare is hand-cut and dosed on the night I try it with what tastes like practically a jar’s worth of whole grain mustard. I like my steak tartare punchy, but who could taste the beef through all that mustard? That, I have to say, was early in the restaurant’s young life.

A recent meal at 750ml is highly focused. Everything is spot on, from that mache and cherry salad to the first of the season’s soft shell crabs, pan-fried and presented with diver scallops, a few Manila clams and some red potatoes, a great match for a Chablis or Albarino.

Spring pig is tender and juicy, a lovely pale pink, served with fava beans and celery root, and a stack of curved bones to gnaw on. And for real carnivores, there is pork osso buco, the meat braised to a velvety softness. The round balls that look like giant tater tots are actually potato croquettes. Why don’t more kitchens make something like this?

Bernhardt is on the right track. What doesn’t tend to work are his more complicated fancy dishes. I didn’t like the dinky seared foie gras he served at the beginning, and find the foie gras torchon he’s offering recently mucked up with crushed huckleberries and other unnecessary (and sweet) stuff, which actually makes it less of a match for wine than a cool slab of plain foie gras would be. Frogs’ legs as a main course sounds intriguing, but the legs are big ones, and the overall effect is dull.

He makes a mean rabbit, though, part of it salted and cooked confit, the rest strewn with herbs and rolled up to form a roulade, with a lot of wonderful juices in the bottom of the bowl.

Er, but there’s no bread. There’s never any bread. For some cockamamie reason, 750ml offers only breadsticks. When we ask for bread one night, all our server can rustle up is a plate of stale bread. The next time , he knows what to do: toast it. But is it too much to ask for some good bread -- not toast -- to sop up the juices that so many of the main courses have? Where the wine service falters is in serving red wines at the proper temperature. Unless you speak up, your red wine will be served well above cellar temperature, i.e., too warm. Granted, this small restaurant can’t have all that much storage and what there is is probably too close to the kitchen. But if you bill yourself as a wine bistro, the minimum you can do is to serve the wines at the proper temperature. Come summer it’s going to be even warmer , so I hope somebody has the initiative to lay in more wine buckets.

What a perfect spot this will be if and when the permit comes through and tables can be set outside on the sidewalk. I can picture lingering well past dusk sipping a French-press coffee and digging a spoon into the perfumed lavender pot de creme or nibbling on a warm beignet with a dab of blueberry compote, which, by the way, is the stellar dessert here.

750ml comes just in time for a long, leisurely summer. Arroyo is stepping up to the plate with a real chef who’s committed to doing more than what’s required. And Bernhardt and his crew are working hard to make this bistro shine.

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virbila@latimes.com

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750ml

Rating: **

Location: 966 Mission St. (at Meridian Avenue), South Pasadena; (626) 799-0711.

Ambience: Sweet little wine bar with a small bar and tables covered in brown paper lined up against windows that look out on the Gold Line station.

Service: Friendly and unpretentious.

Price: Appetizers, $10 to $18; main courses, $18 to $30; desserts, $8.

Best dishes: (Menu changes frequently.) Asparagus soup, mache salad with avocado and clementines, pappardelle with chanterelles, soft shell crab with diver scallops and clams, spring pig with fava beans, rabbit confit and roulade, lavender pot de creme, beignets with huckleberry compote.

Wine list: A two-page list with more to drink than most such lists. Corkage fee,$10.

Best table: One by the front windows.

Details: Open from 5 to 11 nightly. Wine and beer. Street parking.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience; price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.