It’ll leave you purring

I feel like a hungry cat, eyeing the platter of raw clams on ice the waiter has just balanced on a wire stand, the kind French restaurants use as a pedestal for sumptuous plateaux des fruits de mer. I slurp one down. Could anything be more inviting on a warm summer night?

The taste, briny and sweet with a distinct mineral edge, reminds me of the first time I ever tasted a raw clam. A friend had invited me for dinner and three of us, all women, squeezed into her tiny kitchen in Paris. She opened a bottle of Chablis and set out a bowl of clams in their shells. Talking and laughing, their French racing ahead of mine, my friends kept an eye on that bowl. Whenever one of the clams would open just a crack, one of them would deftly plunge her knife into the gap and wrest the shell open. Primitive, but effective -- if you were fast enough. I wasn’t.

But at the Hungry Cat, an East Coast seafood cafe in Hollywood, the kitchen shucks the clams to order. And I’m taking every advantage of that fact. Bring on the littlenecks by the dozen. These are the real thing, flown in from the East Coast every day. They’re terrific just as they come from the ocean, or, if you like, with a drop of lemon juice or a dab of the spunky and irresistible cocktail sauce.

I’m in heaven. So is my friend Missy, who between gulps tells me she lived on Cape Cod as a kid and remembers going out with her little bucket at age 4 or 5 to dig clams with her mother. Sometimes, they’d eat them right there on the beach, but more often they’d take their finds home with them and eat their fill, just the two of them, at the kitchen table.

With the clams, we’re drinking Hungry Cat’s signature Bloody Marys, potent as all get out, tasting of lime and liquor, and jauntily garnished with a skewer of pickled vegetables. Make that okra, Brussels sprouts and pearl onions. How, well, sophisticated. And a delightful match for raw clams. Who knew? Actually, chef-owner David Lentz and his wife, Suzanne Goin of Lucques and A.O.C., have been perfecting the recipe for months.

I suspect that the Bloody Mary, like the Pimlico or the classic Baker’s Manhattan, here garnished with a blackberry, are made exactly the way the couple like to drink them. And that the menu is just what they might crave after a night behind the stoves. Since Hungry Cat stays open till 1 a.m. most nights, it’s one of the few places restaurant people can go after service and get something good to eat. For the rest of us, it’s a godsend too, still open when we emerge, bleary-eyed from the latest blockbuster at the ArcLight, or after we’re shooed out of Amoeba Records at 11.

Tucked in a passageway behind the Borders bookstore at Sunset and Vine and next door to Schwab’s restaurant (which re-creates the fabled lunch counter in name only), Hungry Cat has an edgy, urban vibe. It’s tiny. A zinc-topped bar seats maybe five or six, with a direct view into the kitchen. There are eight or so tables inside and a handful more outside, sheltered beneath two impressive umbrellas with center poles as big as masts.

Premium space

The kitchen consists of Lentz and his sous-chef, Kris Longley, with the occasional helper. Nobody else could fit. Storage is at a premium, so wineglasses are mostly bistro tumblers because they can be stacked, though a few stemmed glasses can usually be found lurking somewhere.

Pretty much everything on the one-page wine list is available by the bottle or the glass, which is nice. And I love the fact that they offer a glass of Bodegas Hidalgo “La Gitana� manzanilla, a light, dry sherry that makes an excellent aperitif.

The space’s limitations bring a focus to the menu that Lentz rarely found when he was chef at Opaline. Hungry Cat is smart and different, a combination of straightforward, impeccably sourced seafood and more inventive dishes that sing because they’re both delicious and well-executed. It’s easy to see why it’s catching on fast with a young and eclectic Hollywood crowd.

Lentz always has great oysters on the half shell, and a dynamite Chincoteague Island oyster chowder, in a light broth loaded with clams, potatoes and swatches of greens. The heat that lingers after each bite adds an interesting dimension. I like the clams braised with chorizo and garbanzo beans too, served with thick rafts of toast to soak up all the juices.

And I can’t get enough of the meaty peel ‘n’ eat shrimp. They’re $16 per half-pound if you peel ‘em, $2 more if you want the kitchen to do it. But why would you? They’re gloriously messy and fun to eat and these are so good, they make every other version around town taste like sawdust.

Originally from the Baltimore area, Lentz really knows his crab. His crab cakes are made from a 100-year-old recipe, but it mustn’t be a long one, because these are basically pure crab, sweet and delicious. At brunch, served on the weekends, he makes them the base for a crabby Benedict that puts the ordinary version to shame, seeing as it’s made with Nueske bacon, which is practically a cult among bacon lovers, and a perfectly rendered hollandaise.

Sunday mornings, after the Hollywood farmers market, walk your shopping bags over to Hungry Cat for brunch. In addition to that crabby Benedict, you can order “tweety’s scramble,� eggs with jack cheese, masses of soft herbs and a dollop of creme fraiche. Or le Pug a cheval, that is, topped with a fried duck egg. Oh, baby.

Now that the restaurant has celebrated its third month, Lentz is busy coming up with new dishes to cycle onto the snappy dinner menu. That could be a perfectly lovely frittata. At first he was doing a lobster frittata, but most recently it was one perfumed with green garlic and dotted with Dungeness and a dollop of creme fraiche. It’s terrific.

Recent additions include beautifully seared tuna sashed with a band of house-made harissa and served with lovely baby artichokes and slippery fava beans. The tuna was cooked to a bruised pink, halfway between raw and cooked. Lentz has also been serving halibut cheeks with flaps of fresh Oregon morels. No wonder everybody who has found the way to this out-of-the-way spot looks like the cat who swallowed the canary. Or the fish.

Worth every penny

And that’s despite the fact that Hungry Cat is not inexpensive. But it’s far from unreasonable -- there’s no way high-quality seafood is ever going to be cheap. Twenty dollars might seem a lot for a single Alaskan crab leg, but it’s a gigantic 2 inches in diameter, and big enough to give four people a generous taste of the sweet meaty crab. And the bottom of the bowl is a lake of svelte mustard butter sauce that begs for slabs of toasted bread to parade through it. Fortunately, you don’t have to ask.

Funny thing, though: There’s just one dessert. (Small kitchen, not much room for baking?) It’s a chocolate bread pudding, a recipe that Goin gleaned from a Boston restaurant where she used to work. It’s so rich, one will do nicely for the table. Or go for the St. John Commandaria, a dessert wine from the island of Cyprus that tastes of honey and figs.

The beauty of Hungry Cat compared with more ambitious seafood restaurants is a tightly edited menu -- fewer choices, but almost all of them good enough to make you feel like you’ve won the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks.

Which leaves me torn. This is one restaurant I really hate writing up, because right now it’s still possible to get in on the spur of the moment if you’re willing to go late. But once word is out, I may be relegated to going early -- gulp, before dark -- in order to get a table.

So be it.

*

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The Hungry Cat

Rating: ** 1/2

Location: 1535 N. Vine St., Hollywood; (323) 462-2155; www.thehungrycat.com

Ambience: Clandestine Hollywood dive with courtyard dining, an eclectic Hollywood crowd and great, fun atmosphere. East Coast seafood with a California twist.

Service: Charming and attentive

Price: Oysters and clams on the half shell, $2 each; peel ‘n’ eat shrimp, $16 per half-pound; starters, $7 to $14; entrees, $18 to $22; brunch items, $3 to $22; dessert, $8.

Best dishes: Oysters and clams on the half shell, peel ‘n’ eat shrimp, frittata, Alaskan king crab, oyster chowder, Baltimore crab cake, seared tuna with harissa, halibut cheeks, le Pug a cheval, Pug burger, chocolate bread pudding, crabby Benedict, sticky buns.

Wine list: Short, but sweet. Terrific cocktails. Corkage, $15.

Best table: A perch at the bar or one of the corner banquettes

Special features: Outdoor patio

Details: Open 5:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. daily (till 10 p.m. on Sundays); brunch 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Full bar. Street and validated lot parking.

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