RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Food Roundup on Rodeo Drive

The Rodeo Collection, on the world-famous Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, brings together an alarming number of shops in a relatively small, concentrated area. Serious shoppers could spend the entire day and several entire salaries circumnavigating the three tiers of boutiques clustered around a central courtyard.

To fuel and abet such an activity, Burke and Burke, a well-loved take-out and catering concern in New York City, has set up a shop on the Garden level of the Collection and offers gourmet groceries, a take-out counter, a candy counter and a full-service restaurant with tables both inside and out.

Big bowls of decorative white curly kale flank the doors; in the grocery store are shelves of exotica: fine teas, marmalades, two-toned lima beans, sun-dried zucchini and popcorn-on-the-cob in cunning little crates.

The restaurant part of Burke and Burke is a pretty-enough lunchroom. There are panels of marble, yellow-orange faux-Florentine walls, a modernistic purple carpet with turquoise squiggles. Upturned over the door is a convex, Miro-patterned panel; elsewhere are the requisite visible pipes and ducts.

The service here is attentive and good-natured; order decaf coffee and various staff members will pour refill after refill until you beg them to desist.

Everything we tried was made with good, fresh ingredients, which gave many of the dishes a simple, unpretentious elegance. Fried calamari was lightly breaded, a perfect mix of crispness and chewiness, although the accompanying tomato sauce had been unnecessarily spiked with rosemary. A shrimp and celery salad had good shrimp and only the slightest haunting of mint. A warm spinach salad was too vinegary, and the bacon was more boiled and rubbery than crisp. But the split pea soup was smooth, lightly curried and perfectly good; the pureed potato soup was hearty, tasting like a great baked potato.

The roasted half chicken was perfectly cooked--crisp-skinned outside, moist inside. It was served with a basic mixed baby green salad, a cup of uninspired honey-mustard sauce and an utterly ridiculous little cube of overcooked potato strings that shattered at the poke of a fork and tasted like burnt potato chips.

The poached salmon was a wedge of good, dense chilled fish served with fragrant pesto mayonnaise and two cold salads: a delicious string-bean salad, made with wax beans, sweet red onion and haricots verts , and a potato salad that was so minimally dressed it was hard to differentiate it from boiled potatoes.

On a return visit, I asked the waitress to suggest a sandwich. She brought me smoked turkey with brie on a length of good baguette and it turned out to be an inspired combination. It came with another one of those potato-string cubes, but this time the cube was more lightly cooked and, I admit, I was beguiled by its crunchiness. A friend tried the roast chicken salad, which was almost as impressive as seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger on the streets of Beverly Hills. “He was driving one of those, those vehicles from Desert Storm--a Hummer,” said a woman at the next table, who’d also spotted Arnold.

Later, my friend and I split a wedge of apple tart. The crust was way too thick and tough, but the filling and the little knob of vanilla ice cream were some consolation.

Before leaving, we spent a few minutes browsing through the non-restaurant part of Burke and Burke. After a strenuous day of shopping, a few of the deli salads with some of that roast chicken would seem the perfect solution to dinner. And I was tempted by about a hundred items in the grocery section; if I’d been hungrier, or in a slightly more dangerous mood, I might have squandered a day’s pay on olive oil, chocolates and mustard.

Burke and Burke, 421 N. Rodeo Drive, Rodeo Collection, Beverly Hills, (310) 858-8095. Open Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. No alcohol. American Express, MasterCard, Visa accepted. Validated parking. Lunch for two, food only, $22 to $49.