Theme’s Like Old Times

To heck with Rebecca’s; fie on Rex: The most spectacular-looking restaurant in Los Angeles is that giant alien-looking thing that squats in the middle of LAX--the flying-saucer-shaped restaurant caught under the parabolic arches of the airport’s Theme Building like a many-eyed insect clutched to the thorax of a spider. The Theme Room Restaurant, apex of the Los Angeles Jet Age Terminal Construction Project, is the summit of Jetsonian futurism in the city of Googie churches and the Wich Stand: It’s the only restaurant I know in town that appears in plastic souvenir snowballs.

To untold millions of travelers, the Theme Building is more familiar than Spago, and if you like airplanes the view is even better. Plus, it has the only valet parking in the airport. Cool.

A friend of mine suggested that Mayor Richard Riordan invest some of those controversial surplus airport funds into making the Theme Room revolve, which would demonstrate to the world his commitment to making Los Angeles great again and draw untold amounts of capital into the region. (Of course, the same guy also holds dear a theory that nobody has in fact ever eaten at the Theme Room, that if anybody were to take the elevator up to the place he would find a maitre d’ frozen into position with cobwebs growing from his outstretched arm to his once-nattily polished shoes, and find cream sauce in the kitchen that had been reducing since early in the Kennedy Administration.) The Theme Room does sit high above the airport’s U-shaped drive, and the counterclockwise swirl of the traffic can make you a little dizzy, but the effect is nowhere near the same as if it actually revolved.

An improbable number of Europeans already eat here, perhaps looking for the L.A. equivalent of Train Bleu, the Paris train-station restaurant that makes a diner feel as if he is eating foie gras and entrecotes inside a Fragonard painting.

To be honest, the food is better in Paris. When it opened in the early ‘60s, the Theme Room was reported to have a weird international melange cuisine. For a time in the mid-’80s, the Theme Room was reborn as a restaurant with at least some gourmet pretensions--roe-garnished scallop mousse, sake-poached sea bass, duck terrines--though that cooking was soon replaced by what the concessionaire (Host-Marriot Corp.) does best: the cuisine you might expect in a chain-hotel restaurant somewhere in deepest Ohio.

Appetizers run to the goopy stuffed potato skins, the flaccid shrimp cocktails, the wan gazpachos of third-rate steakhouses everywhere; one dish, garlicky mushroom caps stuffed with snails, neatly combines the two most popular gourmet affectations of 1956.

Scampi a la Theme--which makes sense only if one realizes that the theme of the Theme Building may have originally been polar flight--is sauteed with garlic and tomatoes until tough and served over rice, sort of a polar Provencal. Seafood linguine, with shrimp, scallops and the usual hotel vegetables, is one of those cream-sauce pastas where you are at any moment in danger of having the entire plate of food come up on your fork. Baked mahi mahi, crusted with a thick, butter-soaked mash of bread crumbs and herbs, tastes precisely like herbed nothing. The Prime rib, USDA Choice would not be out of place on a Las Vegas buffet.

This isn’t to say there is nothing to eat here--a rare rack of lamb picked up some flavor without permission, though it might be best to ignore both the thick, brown sauce puddled underneath and the weirdly astringent mint sauce on the side. The cheese-filled French onion soup is as edible as most . . . but somehow one doesn’t need much assistance from the kitchen to have a splendidly entertaining evening here.

Tip: The house drink, something called Green Eyes, is stained leisure-suit green with Midori but tastes mostly of cream of coconut, and you get to keep the L.A. Bicentennial glass. The view is exactly the same from the bar.

* Theme Room Restaurant

Los Angeles International Airport, arrivals level, (310) 646-5471. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $25-$45.