RESTAURANTS : Cafe Mambo : Oasis in a Rock ‘n’ Roll Neighborhood

Try to imagine a better breakfast than Cafe Mambo’s, fabulous huevos negros and chilaquiles served with fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice in a sunny Victorian house that is rumored to be haunted by a bona fide Hollywood ghost. You are kitty-corner from the galleries, thrift stores and avant-garde rag merchants of Lower Melrose, Los Angeles’ newest hot shopping district, and after your third cup of rich, brewed decaf you can walk out among the blue-haired teen-agers and look around for a goat skull, a Fred Flintstone miniskirt or a pair of magenta patent-leather go-go boots. A Boogie Down Productions hip-hop tune pounds from the open doorway of a record store that caters to rappers and club DJs. It’s calm inside the cafe, where polite tourists mingle with Los Angeles City College students and the sort of bleary-eyed locals who stay up past dawn on Tuesday nights--this is a neighborhood restaurant in a rock ‘n’ roll neighborhood.

Day for night.

Crisp tablecloths are laid over granite-textured Formica, yellow paper napkins are whisked away and replaced with starched cloth ones, gleaming chrome chairbacks are sheathed with cotton duck. In the distance, a motorcycle roars onto the freeway. Somebody flicks a switch: a pink-pink Allee Willis painting glares with the harsh, white light you associate with the insides of antique Frigidaires, and her motorized collage on the far wall jiggles and whirs. Through the bay windows, you see an owner of the post-mod boutique across the street bar her shop with an iron gate. The sound track abruptly shifts from gentle merengues to the sort of sweet, mid-’70s soul you hear in nightclubs with names like Boys and Girls or Alcohol Salad, and candlelight illuminates the baby-blue room. After nearly a year in business, Mambo is serving dinner.

Cafe Mambo is, of course, the second restaurant of Cha Cha Cha owners Toribio Prado and Mario Tamayo, the chef and host of the reasonably priced Caribbean-food mecca that helped make East Hollywood into a glamour zone for Westside BMW owners and New York nightlife groupies, and whose terrific corn chowder and pizza Latina is still daily fare for those who aspire to see their names boldfaced in gossip columns. Cha Cha Cha is a destination restaurant in a desolate neighborhood: dinner and an evening of guerrilla theater rolled into one tropical tour-package. Mambo was opened as an informal, quasi-Mexican breakfast-lunch place cheap enough to attract the dark-shades set and nice enough to attract their parents. Now, at dinnertime, suddenly expensive, Mambo is relaxed.

After you have relinquished your car (valet parking is a good idea after dark), the maitre d’ unlatches the door and lets you inside. You are seated, and the waiter leaves to ice down the bottle of fruity Chilean Sauvignon Blanc you bought at the South American delicatessen down the block (the tiny restaurant has, as of yet, no liquor license). You nibble on a smoke-blue wedge of dense, chile-studded cornbread and study the menu--it differs from the daytime menu completely, and from the spirit of Cha Cha Cha’s chiefly by the few Indian-influenced Caribbean dishes that are thrown in.

There are fried, golden-crusted empanadas, fragrant with corn and spices, stuffed with a curried vegetable mash and served with a little paper cup of curried cranberry chutney, a relish that also appears with the Salvadoran-style meat-stuffed banana appetizers called pasteles de platano. There is a ruddy chicken filet that tastes like tandoori chicken might if it were cooked on a mesquite grill instead of in an earthen oven, and sticky curried chicken that tastes pretty much like an excursion-class entree on an off-season Air Jamaica flight--one of Prado’s few misses, along with a minuscule $5.25 plate of crudites that might remind you of frat-party leftovers. Lobster salad is oddly spiced, sort of like falafel.

For the most part, though, Prado’s updated Caribbean cooking speaks with a Latin accent. A classic salad of chilled chayote squash chunks dressed up with papaya and a sweet hazelnut vinaigrette is luscious as ripe melon; a refreshing jicama salad is tossed with coarse-grain mustard in place of the traditional hot chile powder and lime. Snails sizzle with onions and black mushrooms, a tapa from heaven, perfuming the room with their delicious excess of garlic.

The tiny masa basins called sopes overflow with their filling of black beans and firm, sauteed shrimp; the marriage of cornmeal and shrimp is a revelation, and though the pairing is commonplace in what’s known as “Southwestern cuisine,” it has never tasted quite this good. A soup of pureed black beans is bright with chile and lime. A freshly fried tostada is laden with fresh corn kernels, a crunchy dice of peppers and more black beans. And the peppery chicken gumbo, more Merida than New Orleans, is still the best in town.

A thick, grilled veal chop, which must have been marinating in red wine for days, comes juicy and crusted with charred spices, garlicky cylinders of the Cuban tuber yuca alongside. A tasty, Cajun-esque filet mignon girdled with bacon comes with yuca and a ramekin of solid sauce raifort that is nearly as rich in butterfat as, well, butter. Poached salmon trout is a little overcooked and mushy, but shrimp--in an unremarkable though tasty amalgam with pineapple and especially in a wonderful, fiery-hot saute with chiles and onions--are crisp and as sweet as the cakes and pastries are not. Cha Cha Cha’s world-class tarte tatin would make it a night.

Cafe Mambo, 707 Heliotrope Drive, Los Angeles, (213) 663-5800. Open for breakfast and lunch Wednesday-Monday, for dinner nightly. Valet parking. No alcohol. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $28-40. Recommended dishes: Mambo gumbo, $4.75; chayote salad, $3.75; sopes de camarones, $6.75; braised shrimp with peppers, $14.50; veal chop, $18.50.