RESTAURANT REVIEW : At Trilogy, Problems Occur in 3s

Unless you thought of visiting the Warehouse for the first time in 15 years, or thought the Apache Club West was still happening or you have a hobby of driving around light industrial zones looking for places to eat, you probably won’t come across Trilogy, a new restaurant in an old club space right off Olympic Boulevard on Stoner Avenue in West Los Angeles. You’ll recognize it by a well-lit logo painted on an outside wall: three buff, naked angels behind a strategically placed banner.

Named for the number of its owners, Trilogy has low ceilings and the slightly closed-in feeling of a vast underground chamber. Thick impasto stucco walls are pistachio and mustard colored with a few gold stars and the occasional, enormous looming angel. Plain columns have been given faux flutes. With palm fronds and wrought-iron furniture, the look is part decorator-celestial, part tacky Romanesque garden. The room seems at least double its size, thanks to a wall of mirrors in the back.

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One of Trilogy’s owners is a woman who patrols the dining room, introducing herself to diners and staying for a chat. Another owner is chef David Danhi, who comes to Trilogy after cooking at Roxbury and more recently at Georgia. Danhi has won good notices and a prestigious Mondavi Rising Star Chef award. I was curious to see what kind of cooking he’d do in his own place.

Indeed, he’s devised his own brand of regional California cooking--fresh, regional ingredients prepared with the no-holds-barred eclecticism endemic to what is commonly dubbed “California cuisine.�

Danhi, clearly, can turn out a good plate of food: Blue crab cakes are sweet and subtly spicy; a grilled half chicken is beautifully prepared: succulent, well-seasoned, slightly smoky from the grill. No complaints on a generous, tasty roast rack of lamb, either.

In much of the cooking, however, there is a recurring trilogy of problems: Some dishes are ill-conceived; the kitchen is not always careful; and prices are not low enough to forgive these lapses.

The ill-conceived include shrimp breaded in sweet coconut and fried to a near-burnt brown and served with a cloying blood orange and horseradish sauce that tastes like a child’s food experiment. Similarly, thresher shark “crusted� in crushed fluorescent red tortilla chips, seems like a child’s idea of fancy cooking: how to make fish taste overwhelmingly like chips. And salmon buried under tomatoes and melted mozzarella seems like another kiddie plot--this time, to make fish taste like pizza.

A “Napoleon� made with thin slices of portobello mushrooms layered with spinach, tomato and cheese should be much better, but somehow, whoever cooked it made it bland as plain boiled vegetables.

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A weakness for fava beans led me to order the $6.50 Trilogy salad; alas, we found not a single fava amid lettuce, cucumbers--only a few starchy sprouted peas. The waitress asked how we liked it. “It’s OK, but where are the favas. . . ?�

She drew back in comic outrage. “Oh!� she exclaimed. “What is he doing to me now?� She marched off to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she returned. “We’re out of favas and nobody told me,� she said.

A New York steak is cooked medium well rather than medium rare. Vegetarian winter stew is too salty. The “vegetarian banquet,� described as an “assortment of grains, sauteed vegetables and polenta� on the menu, looked like a plate run through a military mess line: There was a scoop of the house rice pilaf, a scoop of sauteed, mixed vegetables, and a huge sticky blob of black bean polenta, a substance that bears an uncanny resemblance to mortar.

I can’t decide if Danhi who, after all, gave us a “Napoleon� for an appetizer, intentionally brings breakfast flavors to his desserts. Poppy-seed cake with fresh fruit tastes more like pancakes.

A plate of goat cheese, honey, fruit and nuts tastes like a gourmet hippie breakfast--not bad, just, well, peculiar. More conventional desserts--an intense bittersweet chocolate torte and quite a charming chocolate apricot pecan pie--are, however, quite delicious.

* Trilogy , 2214 Stoner Ave., (310) 477-2844. Open for lunch Mondays through Fridays, for dinner Mondays through Saturdays. Full bar. All major credit cards accepted. Valet parking. Dinner for two, food only, $42-$67.