Give Us This Day Our Daily Grill : A Happy Spirit Fills This Brentwood Restaurant, From the Cooks to the Food

Daily Grill, 11677 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood (213) 442-0044. Open daily 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Beer and wine. No reservations. Validated parking. Visa, MasterCard and American Express accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $20-$60.

My first restaurant job was as a grill cook in a Midwestern coffee shop. I was 16, it was hard work and I loved it. I thought of it as a kind of dance--especially the lunch rush: Juggling 50 burgers at a time, I’d concentrate hard, trying to remember which got cheese, which got onions and which were supposed to be extra-crispy. (These were not, you understand, the kind of burgers that could ever come out rare.) I liked the hectic pace of it, the smooth flow when everything was under control, the giddy sense of being watched while I performed.

Sitting at the counter at the Daily Grill the other day, it all came back to me. I was eating a huge portion of Joe’s Special; the man next to me was eating chicken pot pie and down at the end of the counter actor Tom Hanks was spearing a salad. Next to him was a woman eating a plate of pasta and reading the paper. This is a great place to have a meal by yourself, and we all looked relaxed, happy and well-fed.

Still, the guys behind the grill, enveloped in their onion-laden cloud, looked like they were having the best time of all. They kept smiling at each other and cracking jokes along with eggs as they juggled burgers and played with potatoes. I wanted to trade places with them.

Over the years I’ve probably been in thousands of places where grill chefs were doing their stuff, but this was the first time I’ve remembered how much fun it was. I think that feeling has something to do with the Daily Grill itself, for this is a restaurant offering a new kind of nostalgia.

In a time when hokey diners have become all the rage, the Daily Grill doesn’t seem to be trying to re-create anything. The room itself is spare and simple, almost nondescript. Look carefully and you’ll notice that money has been spent here--the wooden booths are easy to be in, the tables are covered with white cloths, the counter stools have backs that you can lean into--but overall it’s a bright and bustling place that doesn’t feel as if anybody had given too much thought to the way it looks. It seems comfortable with itself, as if it had evolved rather than been designed, and if you didn’t know that the chic Brentwood mini-mall it occupies is brand new, you’d be willing to believe that the Daily Grill had been around for a while.

The food has that quality too. This is supremely straightforward stuff. They’ll bring you a big basket of sourdough bread (you get this even if you sit alone at the counter), and that’s probably all you need as a first course. Munch on a slice while you look at the menu; you’ll know instinctively which dishes you ought to be eating. Trust these instincts. Order an appetizer, for instance, and you’ll get what you deserve: mozzarella marinara, a huge fried lump of cheese overwhelmed by chunky tomato sauce, or (maybe) pasta primavera that looks and tastes like it came straight from the Midwest. Look around and you’ll realize that this is not the place to order anything with foreign names.

Stick with true-blue food, and you’ll be rewarded by a terrific hamburger, the bun dense enough to stand up to its load of meat without turning into a sorry mess. (These are, incidentally, the kind of burgers that come out rare when you order them that way.) There are good big sandwiches--Reubens, grilled cheese, BLTs and so forth. The chili is very meaty though not very chile-laden, and sure to be a disappointment to anybody expecting heat.

Joe’s Special, a San Francisco specialty, is a satisfying mix of fresh spinach, onions and ground beef, cooked on the grill with an egg. You might call it a fried salad or an undone omelet, but in the hands of a good grill chef it’s wonderful. Chicken pot pie is another winner, filled with lots of tender chicken, peas, carrots, a very rich cream sauce and an equally rich and flaky crust.

The meats are uniformly good, from a tasty top sirloin at $13.25 to a chewy, slightly fatty skirt steak that has been marinated in something sweet (pineapple juice?). The 12-ounce New York steak is $18.50, but it’s a good piece of meat.

The kitchen does well with fish--of which there is plenty, from baked sea bass to charcoal broiled whitefish. I think they have a less impressive way with chicken: whether you order it broiled or pan-fried it will probably come out dry.

All the meat and fish dishes come with a huge chunk of broccoli on the plate. If you want other vegetables, you can order them. You can also order a large variety of potatoes, the best being the combination fried shoestrings and onions, which come crisp and crunchy and hot to the table.

Salads here do not tend to be fodder for the sort of people who watch their weight. Caesar comes with lots of cheese and croutons (and too much dressing).

I’m not a fan of the popular Cobb salad, a mixture containing (among other ingredients) shredded greens and gooey pieces of avocado and blue cheese. I do have an almost embarrassing fondness for the quintessentially American mixed green salad, with its little crown of radish circles.

But the king of the Daily Grill salads is the shrimp Louie--lots of protein and gloppy dressing ladled onto an enormous shelf of lettuce so that you can actually fool yourself into thinking that you aren’t eating many calories.

Forget about trusting your instincts when you come to the end of the meal. The cobbler, which sounds like just the thing to order, is awful, a mush of tasteless strawberries and peaches under a pasty topping. The ice cream in the hot fudge sundae isn’t very good. And that fudge doesn’t do much for the cheesecake, which is much happier left to its own delicious devices.

Even the apple pie is more apples than pie, an enormous heavy slice that nobody’s Mom would want to claim. Still, what does any of this matter when you can have a glorious bowl of rice pudding?

Do remember to ask for some cream to pour over it--it makes a good pudding even better. As you sit there dreamily eating this food from your childhood, you may find yourself looking around and wondering what all these chic people are doing eating this sort of food.

For the crowd who fill up the Daily Grill--a mix of agents, lawyers and the like in very expensive duds--don’t look like the sort to be eating red meat and chicken pot pie and rice pudding. Yet here they are--a testimonial to the fact that in his heart every American has a secret soft spot for hamburgers. Living proof that if a restaurant makes good quality, straight ahead, no-nonsense food, all of us will be eager to eat it.

Some of us, of course, secretly yearn to cook it as well.

Recommended dishes: Joe’s special, $8.25; hamburger, $6; chicken pot pie, $8; Shrimp Louie, $13.25; fried onions, $2.75; rice pudding, $2.25