RESTAURANT REVIEW : Southern Comfort a la West Hollywood at Cynthia’s

I once spent a week with a friend at her parent’s house in Jacksonville, Ill. My friend’s mother devoted her entire day to cooking huge Southern-style home-cooked meals: meat, potatoes, fancy Jell-Os, rolls and pies.

Who cooks like that anymore?

But it was this woman and her cooking that sprang to mind when I got my first dinner at Cynthia’s: a huge plate of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, country gravy and fresh green beans. Overall, it was pretty good, especially the mashed potatoes. While the chicken was moist, the breading was so darkly browned some bites had a borderline-burnt quality. And the green beans had indeed been fresh, but they’d been cooked in authentic Southern style--i.e. forever, with bacon, to the point of mushiness.

I first spotted Cynthia’s a while back, as I was walking along 3rd Street after dinner someplace else. Inside a small storefront, people sat clustered around candle-lit tables with flowers on them; it looked quiet, simple, intimate. In the adjoining storefront was a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the restaurant’s inner workings: a bustling, well-lit kitchen and catering company where one woman did paperwork at a desk, two cooks arranged food on a plate, and something on the grill was being charred by a yard-high flame.

A few weeks later I took a seat along Cynthia’s banquette: a black built-in wooden bench along one wall. There were two lovely purple irises in a glass vase, and a candle on our paper-topped table. A bar, with an empty wine rack, took up the back third of the room. Prints by Dali, Chagall, and Miro were on the walls, each with a price sticker.

It was on this night, in these cafe-chic surroundings, that I ate the fried chicken. But Cynthia’s other dishes were less classic, less heavy, less . . . coffee-shop Gothic. The menu mostly offers what might be best described as California comfort food.

On one visit, we began by splitting a salad-of-the-day: a handful of spicy fried shrimp surrounded a great mound of lettuce with matchsticks of carrots and jicama and what tasted like mixed fruit nectar. At first, I just ate mouthfuls of the sweet salad and was not impressed, but once I included a piece of shrimp in the equation, the dish suddenly made sense. The shrimp was warm, spicy, crunchy, a perfect counterpoint to the sweet juicy greens.

We tried grilled chicories another time--the reason behind those occasional, impressive flare-ups at the grill. This was a pretty plate of frisee, radicchio and endive. The delicate frisee was great; its curly little leaves were all crispy and nicely bitter in the vinaigrette. But the radicchio and endive were disappointing, since except for a few wilted outer leaves, they were still quite raw, even cold when I cut into them.

Fried calamari came with a delicious chipolte mayonnaise that, after a while, seemed extremely rich and filling. A pizza with three cheeses and tomato was large and tasty with a good thin chewy crust.

A thin but flavorful rib eye steak came with nicely grilled vegetables and a good baked potato. Although we loved a cinnamon-spiked homemade applesauce and some crispy potato pancakes, the roast pork it came with was dry and hard. An enormous slab of grilled tuna, ordered rare, came out thoroughly cooked, but was still moist and topped with a restrained and intelligent salsa made from some good, fresh tomato and red onion. The accompanying yellow rice was very ordinary. And while the warm herb bread served at every table may have looked good, all thick-crusted and flour-dusty, it was actually a little salty and disappointingly heavy.

Given the generous portions, it was hard to save room for dessert, and I only managed to do so once. As a fan of tart citrus flavors, I tried Cynthia’s lemon-lime pie, which was among the creamiest, coolest, most deliciously tart citrus treats I’ve met.

The service at Cynthia’s, consisting of one waiter and one busboy, was adequate; we felt neither coddled nor neglected, neither befriended nor snubbed.

As we left after our last visit, I gazed back into the little storefront with a bit more knowing eye. Guests’ faces glowed in candlelight. The busboy was resetting our table. In time, I thought, Cynthia’s food will evolve into good, down-home comfort cooking--the kind of food that usually only comes from a full-time mother.

Cynthia’s, 8370 West 3rd St., Los Angeles, (213) 658-7851. Lunch Monday through Friday, dinner Monday through Saturday. Beer and wine license forthcoming. Street parking. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $36 - $60.