RESTAURANT REVIEW : Just for Fun, Kokomo Serves ‘Modern Food’

Stray food odors: seafood, fresh-made peanut butter, a whiff of burrito. People are wandering around carrying health-food drinks and wearing humorous T-shirts. A crowd of teen-aged Japanese tourists seems to be having a laughing contest. What fun to be in the Farmer’s Market.

The latest bit of fun is Kokomo, a surprisingly spacious lunch counter that in a way epitomizes the Farmer’s Market all by itself: ethnic food, health food and weirdness. They call this “Modern Food,” though in some senses it’s quite the reverse. The malts and shakes are the old-fashioned foamy kind, and I have noticed actual seltzer bottles for making egg creams.

The weirdness consists of wisecracking waiters and cooks in baseball caps, plus odd touches like potato chips made of sweet potato spiked with cayenne. There are salads in the salade nicoise/ curried chicken line but also an odd and really quite good one of hot grilled steak (marinated in jalapeno vinegar) tossed onto a bed of lettuce with lime juice vinaigrette and some fried potatoes.

Sandwiches, which mostly come on a delicious bun of egg bread with sweet caramelized onions on it, are things like excellent charbroiled fish or chicken breast. Both come with sweet peppers, lettuce and tomato, except that the fish has a lime mayonnaise dressing and the chicken has mustard mayonnaise and some toasted sesame seed. The burger, though, tends to be a little stiff and the delicate bun consequently tends to fall apart. One of the few sandwiches not served on this bun is “the second best B.L.T.”: a really excellent bacon sandwich with spectacularly smoky bacon on good sourdough bread.

Breakfasts are largely the layered egg dishes they go in for in New Orleans, like eggs Benedict but more complicated, such as eggs Sardou (beautifully poached eggs set on artichoke hearts topped with hollandaise sauce, with rather tart creamed spinach on the side--I think it must have sorrel in it), or eggs Hussard (poached eggs on a crusty biscuit with tomatoes, ham, mushroom wine sauce and hollandaise). Breakfast dishes come with either dull bananas in sherried cream or a wonderful simple buttermilk coffee cake, dry and crumbly and not too sweet.

The health food angle consists of the use of organic lettuce and a couple of vegetarian dishes, all very pious, but I have to complain about the vegetarian black bean chili. It must have looked good on paper (black beans! vegetarian!) but it has the usual failing of vegetarian chilis: the beans and the peppers are both bitter, and without the richness of meat, the combination is painful to eat. Kokomo is incomprehensibly proud of this stuff, putting it into the vegetarian huevos rancheros and something called “wet shoes” (curly French fries topped with black bean chili), which sounds quite hideous.

I also have to say that the red flannel hash, which they are proud enough to serve both as breakfast and lunch, is pretty hard to eat. Ground beef mixed with red beets, wild thyme and red pepper may sound kind of interesting, but the mixture is surprisingly uningratiating, harsh and dull. Still, I give Kokomo an 8 because everything else is good and it’s . . . fun.

Kokomo Cafe, Farmer’s Market (3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue), Los Angeles. (213) 933-0773. Open Monday - Saturday, 8 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. No credit cards. Lunch for two, food only, $14 to $23.