RESTAURANT REVIEW : Sandwiches, Salads, Wise Chips at Nosh

Q. How can you tell if you’re at Nosh in Beverly Hills?

A. Wise potato chips.

New Yorkers may take exception to this, but Wise potato chips are not an especially intelligent form of potato chip, or even, as far as I can tell, an exceptional potato chip. The dark aqua bags packed in Columbus, Ohio, under the aegis of Borden are an anomaly in Southern California. “If you see Wise potato chips west of the Mississippi, you’re here,” one of the Nosh’s managers says. “We’re the only place west of the Mississippi that carries them.”

The Nosh is a small, unpretentious New York-style deli packed with small tables, wooden chairs, a baking zone, a takeout counter and a cold case. It has a clean, quasi-industrial look with wrap-around plate-glass windows, quilted stainless-steel walls behind the takeout counter and carpeting imprinted with the pattern of textured sheet steel. At lunchtime the place is bustling with local merchants, office workers and older folk. The takeout counter does a brisk business, and no wonder--sandwiches fly out in less than five minutes.

The Nosh’s menu is, at first glance, less extensive than many deli menus. But closer scrutiny reveals a rather clever compaction. One small line under Sandwich Additions, for example, indicates that all cold sandwiches can be made into sky-highs (add cole slaw and Russian dressing) for 75 cents. And rather than listing all the combinations for Deli Meat Platters, the customer is simply instructed to pick three meats and two salads.

According to the menu, all of the deli meats--the pastrami, the lox, the corned beef--are brought in from New York or Florida. There is a great selection of soft drinks, including some cream sodas generally found only in Brooklyn. Bagels are baked on the premises. They’re fat and chewy and pretty darn good, especially toasted (I know, I’m not a purist). However, the toppings--whether poppy seeds, salt, onion or whatever--are applied awfully sparingly. The corn rye, also baked in-house, is great.

Portions are generous, but not all the dishes inspired me to respond with prodigious eating.

The chopped chicken liver is fabulous on that corn rye, and the homemade chicken noodle soup is destined to cure many common colds in Beverly Hills (I especially liked the parsley-flecked matzo balls).

But then there’s the Noshey Cristo, described on the menu as a monte cristo made with an egg bagel--that is, a bagel with ham, turkey and cheese dipped in batter, fried, then sprinkled with powdered sugar and served with jam. I had never seen a deep-fried bagel and was looking forward to the experience. But the sandwich arrived on square bread. If you pressed the top of the sandwich gently with a fork, hot yellow grease oozed out like water from a sponge. A friend of mine bravely took a few bites then said, “They should call this the Gnarly Cristo.”

Another friend tried the restaurant’s Dairy Plate--blintzes, a potato latke and half a farmer’s salad, traditionally radishes, onions and cucumber mixed with sour cream and cottage cheese. Here at Nosh, the salad has a California twist: Raw squash, carrots, cauliflower and broccoli are added. It’s like a raw vegetable party platter all tumbled up in a bland dip, which isn’t particularly pleasant; after a few woody bites I found it too hard to eat. The cheese blintzes--supple crepes filled with good, slightly sweetened cheese--were delicious. And the latke was a thick patty of reasonably tasty, reasonably crisp potato.

That day, I lucked out with a LEO, a plate of lox, eggs and onions. Everything was great: The eggs were full of grilled onions, the lox was tasty, the home-fries crisp and the bread nicely toasted.

Another day, I breezed into the Nosh during a brisk lunch rush to order a pastrami on rye and a bagel with lox and cream cheese to go. The food was ready in a heartbeat and, I thought at the time, extremely reasonably priced. I was 30-odd miles away when I discovered that the lox and cream cheese on the bagel was actually lox spread . It tasted OK and was a bargain at $2.75, but it wasn’t what I wanted. The pastrami was excellent.

In the evening, after 7 or so, the Nosh is very quiet--it closes at 8. Maybe that’s because dinners here, though huge, aren’t very good. On my visit, salads were plain, the short ribs hadn’t been warmed all the way through and the meat on the brisket plate was dry. A juicy roasted chicken, half of a very large chicken, was the best thing.

I’ve found, however, that no matter how the meal goes at Nosh, there’s always a good ending--if you get a hunk of its very rich, very wonderful cheesecake, one that I can say is almost as good as my mother’s.

The Nosh of Beverly Hills, 9689 Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 271-3730. Breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $12 to $40.