Popovers and Panties

Still, the smoked fish is the draw. Salads (beet and spinach, a boring Caesar) are average. The borscht, with a dollop of sour cream, is a good cool summer dish, and a mere $4.50. But desserts disappoint; they’re overdone, fussy, diffuse. A seasonal peach cobbler with blueberries? A chocolate martini with espresso ice cream, brownie and chocolate sauce? Rich cherry and white-chocolate-chip cookies are too soft and not that tasty. Yet the view, to the east and the south and within, is lovely. The terrace is the prime real estate; ask to be seated there when making a reservation, or you’ll be stuck inside the terribly noisy room yelling and craning halfway over the table just to hear your friends complain about their meals. But maybe you’re just supposed to sit back and admire the abundance of Jil Sander and Zegna seated at tables all around you.

Shoppers at Fred Segal on Melrose are fed by Mauro’s Café and ristorante, a busy and efficient operation that simultaneously functions as a coffee and juice bar, a fast-food takeout café, and a sit-down restaurant with table service. Again, lunch is the main order of the day, and the salads, sandwiches and pastas are very good and reasonably priced. In a nice way, the food is on the light side; nobody who buys here wants to go up a size at lunch.

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Barney Greengrass Restaurant

9570 Wilshire Blvd. 5th floor
Beverly Hills, CA 90212

Category: Restaurant > Deli

Region: Beverly Hills

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Mauro's Cafe

8112 Melrose Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Category: Restaurant > Coffeehouse

Region: West Hollywood

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More About

• Marion Cunningham
• Mariposa
• Beverly Hills (California)
• Eating Out
• Foods

The pastas are simple and some of them handmade: try the checca, the spaghetti with sautéed chicken, spinach and chopped tomato. Caesars can come with a whole pile of anchovies on request. My favorite menu items are the hot vegetable dishes “all sautéed in your choice of olive oil and garlic or tomato sauce.” These are delicious, the vegetables cooked al dente in combinations that include asparagus, spinach and mushroom, and mushroom, broccoli and zucchini; chicken or shrimp can be added for a few dollars more. This is the best way to eat, and it’s not expensive (vegetable dishes run from $5.50 to $9.25 with shrimp). Fresh fruit and vegetable juices are made on the spot; also fresh fruit shakes. Don’t miss the simple watermelon slush; a sip is light and cooling on a hot day. Chocolate-chip cookies are especially tasty.

The scene is a far cry from Barneys’ high-altitude diners. Outfits seem more beachy and casual, if no less pricey: sarongs, jeans, scant tops, flip-flops — this is sunny Southern California dressing at its highest end. Many bare midriffs and pierced things. Only in Europe have I seen more people on cell phones. A personal assistant near our table consults her shopping list and speed-dials for important clarification: “What kind of nail brush did you want?” Well, there are all different kinds. “Natural bristle? Nylon bristle? Nylon’s stiffer.”

Of all the high-end department-store restaurants, I’d have to say Mariposa in Neiman-Marcus is my very favorite. Not to be confused with the bar on the fourth floor, where each seat has it own tiny television set (a horrifying proposition!), or with the tiny crowded café on the third floor alongside ladies’ more casual ready-to-wear, Mariposa is an actual sit-down restaurant in the basement, tucked in a cove off housewares. Windowless, the space has a slight subterranean feel, despite design elements obviously meant to counter this effect: a glass wall of bright butterfly silhouettes and an extravagant number of framed Calder tapestries on the walls. The décor is impressive, but not what beguiles.

The crowd is another distinctive â and fascinating hodgepodge of rich and materialistic; the cosmetic surgery at one table of six lunching ladies would buy my house. There are mothers with daughters — now that the Bullocks Wilshire tea room is gone, where else can they go? There are lone shoppers settled among piles of bags, one picking at a salad and talking on a cell phone, another eating tortilla soup and reading Jackie Collins. The room is filled with an uncanny number of grand dames and queens of every gender.

The showstopper, the seducer, the allurer, the item that will drag me and many other consumers back to this pricey cave, is the glorious, enormous, fully-puffed popover. Nearly the size of cabbages, these are crunchy and buttery on the outside, moist, eggy, even custardy within. They are distributed as made, carried fresh from the oven to you. These small, discreet caverns of fragrant steam don’t really need the butter and jam provided, but heck, why not slather it on? The food is otherwise prohibitively expensive, but the $24 lobster cobb salad is wonderful, the lobster fresh, sweet, tender and heaped on in profusion. And I haven’t had better crab cakes in L.A.

High-end department stores are not the only entrepreneurs that endeavor to keep their customers on the premises by keeping blood-sugar levels up. Nordstromhas a coffee bar and a café; the café in the Glendale Galleria is a bright room with many windows overlooking an intersection. There’s plainness to the utilitarian blond-wood tables and all that light. Shoppers and clerks, mostly women, duck in here to take a load off their feet, eat a decent Gorgonzola and pear salad with lots of addictive candied walnuts, or a Chinese chicken wonton salad with mandarin oranges and a gingery dressing. Really, it’s a quiet, often underpopulated place to slip into between the shoe sale and the MAC counter for a quick chapter of Mansfield Park, washed down with a cup of coffee and a slab of potent chocolate layer cake.