RESTAURANT REVIEW : A Mix of West-Southwest Cuisine at the Mesa Grill

What we have here is a “California, seafood, Southwestern cuisine, beer, wine and champagne bar,” which makes Mesa Grill--how many? Three of our favorite restaurants, or six?

A heck of a deal, anyway, and the natural question of whether you can really be all these things at once is partly solved by the looseness of the California category. As is well known, California allows unrestricted immigration of culinary ideas from anywhere south of about the 42nd parallel.

Perhaps this is why Mesa Grill is such a bleak little place, as if it were a sort of culinary Ellis Island. One wall is decorated with a few paintings that look like undistinguished old snapshots gauchely rendered in oils, and the other wall is blank. It does not look a whole lot like a champagne bar.

What it tastes like is California-type experimentalism, sometimes in a Southwestern key, sometimes not, and often quite good. “Southwestern pot stickers” are the sort of clever variation both schools are noted for: six Chinese-style dumplings with hot Chinese mustard on the side, half of them filled with ground turkey and the other half with pureed black beans.

Among the appetizers there are a couple of savory little pies, the one with sweet red peppers and corn kernels being Southwestern, I suppose, and the one with pine nut pesto Californian.

The red pepper fettuccine is what we expect of an exotic pasta these days, faintly peppery in a light oil dressing, mixed with chicken, asparagus, baby carrots and tomatoes. Another bright Californian idea is the crab meat and shrimp in filo, with a sweetish red pepper sauce of somewhat Vietnamese character.

A surprising amount of mediocre Mexican-style seafood gets served in Los Angeles, so the shellfish soup called caldo marino is particularly welcome for its better-than-usual tomato broth made slightly crunchy with onions. However, the “Mesa prawns” earn their name by being as dry as, well, the top of a mesa.

Come to think of it, so is the crab meat sausage, though it does manage to taste like crab and sausage, which the chicken jalapeno sausage that is the foundation of sandwiches and enchiladas does not. And the shrimp soft tacos in blue-corn tortillas are rather uninteresting, though they come with a refreshing salad of red cabbage, onions and mandarin orange slices.

The seafood side of things, apart from some straight raw shellfish appetizers, usually seems annexed by either California or the Southwest, though neither the spicy salmon nor the three-pepper mussels is fearfully spicy (the three peppers are merely red, yellow and green mild ones). There is, however, a respectable Chinese-style steamed fish with the traditional ginger, green onion and sesame oil treatment.

Desserts are few but rather good. There’s a really excellent Kahlua cheesecake, good enough to convince people who deeply believe that cheesecake should not be flavored with anything; it’s rich, elegant, mysterious.

A couple of clever quasi-Southwestern desserts actually work pretty well: a “quesadilla” --a chocolate-flavored tortilla (rather like a crepe) wrapped around some pastry cream with raspberries and chocolate sauce--and a “taco,” a batter of ground pine nuts fried crisp like a taco shell and filled much the same except with strawberries and no chocolate.

But a raspberry tart has layers of chocolate and marzipan before you reach crust. Here is a definite illegal alien from someplace north of the 42nd parallel, doubtless Vienna.

Mesa Grill, 1447 2nd St., Santa Monica . (213) 395-2932. Open for lunch Tuesdays through Fridays; for dinner Tuesdays through Saturdays. Beer and wine. Street parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $42 to $59.