Palate chef breaks through

YOU SNAG a parking spot on the street in the middle of Brand Boulevard's endless row of car dealerships and as you get out of the car, you can feel the salesmen go into high alert. A possible buyer for that gas-guzzling truck? No, just another food lover on the way to the most exciting and delicious new restaurant to open in a very long time -- Palate Food + Wine.

This is the breakout restaurant for Octavio Becerra, who put in years with Patina Restaurant Group and was the original chef at Pinot Bistro in Studio City. But his cooking at Palate is nothing like the saucy Joachim Splichal style.

At this casual California-Mediterranean bistro and wine bar, it's fresh and direct, polished but not showy, food that anyone can understand, food that celebrates California's great bounty of local ingredients. The lamb's from Sonoma, the lettuces are from Coleman Farms in Carpinteria -- and the butter is made in-house.

Plus, Palate includes a wine shop and wine bar at the back where you can stop in for a quick -- or a lengthy -- bite at one of the communal tables there and pick up a few bottles to go as well. And Palate does all this while changing the irresistible menu frequently and pricing everything under $20.

Becerra came out of the club scene in the late '80s and flaunts one of the better chef tattoos I've ever seen: a life-size Japanese knife inked onto his forearm. But his Mohawk is now a silvery vestige of its former flamboyant self.

Inside the dazzling white former Bekins warehouse built in 1928, the ground-floor space has a straightforward bistro look. There's a curved bar at the front of a long narrow room divided into thirds by transparent fabric panels printed with a pale photo image of grapes. Handblown glass grapes spill over the sides of a pair of giant urns, a tongue-in cheek reference to the wine, which is such a big part of Palate's charm. Becerra's chef-partner is Gary Menes, who worked with him for nine years at the Patina Restaurant Group. With Becerra, Menes is doing his best cooking yet and Becerra himself doesn't miss a beat. A real pro, he moves easily between the kitchen and the dining room, but mostly stays squarely in front of the small open kitchen, inspecting and finishing off every dish before it goes out to a table.

From a corner banquette one night I watch the way Becerra sniffs a potato-size truffle before shaving it over the night's special, risotto with summer truffles. Just the way he finesses the truffle, letting the slices fall in a lovely loose drift over the rice, persuades me to add the risotto to our order. And the coddled egg with summer truffles too.