Kings of the Road
Cool Is the Rule at These Trendy Eateries

KINGS ROAD CAFE, 8361 BEVERLY BLVD. (213) 655-9044. DAILY '30 A.M.-11:30 P.M. RESERVATIONS NOT NECESSARY. MC. V. ABOUT $15 PER PERSON.

By Merrill Shindler

The Kings Road Cafe, which seems to be taking over much of its block along Beverly Boulevard, is so cool it doesn't even have to try to be cool. If it were a person, it would be Keanu Reeves or Johnny Depp, hipsters for whom being hip is an entirely unconscious statement. Kings Road also manages to be the best coffee house and cafe combo in town, a hot spot with a fine espresso, cappuccino, and double latte, prepared by folks who know what they're doing rather than clueless drones who are more concerned about keeping their piercings from falling off than getting the foam on the half cap to stick around for more than a nano-second.

It's one of the few survivors of the Great Coffee House Panic of the early nineties, when a downright plethora of really scary coffee houses with horrifying names popped up on every trendy street corner, peopled by otherwise unemployables for whom words like service were unpleasant bourgeois concepts. Kings Road has survived for reasons that transcend such basics as service, which actually has something to do with taking orders, and getting food and beverages from the kitchen to the customer within something that can be described as an appropriate amount of time.

Which is to say that the food at Kings Road is very good. By tradition, coffee house food not only isn't very good, it isn't very existent. But along with serving a fine cuppa joe for the various poets and dreamers who infest the place, they also do a nifty keen omelette filled with fine runny fontina cheese and lots of herbs, reddened with a nice spicy pepper sauce -- a swell dish. They like their eggs here done in exotic ways -- like braised eggs, seared eggs (is that like seared roebuck?) with fontina and Black Forest Ham, soft-boiled eggs with Black Forest Ham and mozzarella, chili poached eggs with Romano cheese. You know you're at a Major Trendy when you glance at a menu and breakfast risotto with dried figs, honey, and nutmeg leaps out at you, and a line not far below declares: "Egg Whites Only, Add 75 Cents." In the hood, they don't know from egg whites only; around here, it's a mantra for the nineties.

Lots of well-prepared buzzwords fill the menu throughout the rest of the day. The nineties love of chevre is manifested in the gentle plate of rosemary-marinated goat cheese, and pizza topped with goat cheese and basil. Roast chicken, which we all love not wisely and far too well, is found in the rotisserie-roasted chicken salad (with toasted walnuts, apples, and Stilton), the bow-tie pasta salad with roasted chicken, the roasted chicken panini (with fontina, caramelized onions, and roasted eggplant), the pizza topped with casually spiced chicken, and sui generis with garlic mashed potatoes -- a buzzword with a side of buzzword. There's a newstand next door, where you can buy copies of oddly named magazines that emerge for a single issue and are never heard from again, literary mayflies that get in all the living they can in their one day of life.