Luna Park

The holidays inevitably bring out the big spender in us all: Small wonder that at this time of the year top restaurants are booked almost solid. A party here, a gift exchange or a family get-together there. Bring on the Champagne, truffles, foie gras and extravagant desserts. Let's have them all. And so the season rushes by in one long celebration. Then the bills start coming in and we're all scrambling for the name of a good, but inexpensive new restaurant.

Luckily, last year brought us a few moderately priced restaurants, such as Cheebo and EM, where you can get a meal for less than $25 or $30. New York is full of such little places.

San Francisco has its share, too, and now one of them, the Mission District's popular Luna Park, has moved south to open an outpost on La Brea Avenue.

The owners seem to be going after same crowd they attract in San Francisco -- the young and plugged in on a budget.

Luna Park's drinks, like this mojito, are good and strong.

The menu is a mix of mostly French and Italian with a few solid American dishes and some Asian hits. The most expensive thing on it is breaded pork cutlet for $15.75.

Lively bar scene

Luna Park brings an exuberance to this space it never had as Gadsby's, One or Lucky Duck. Punky unframed paintings with cartoonish characters are unfurled high on the walls. They've put a big bar at the front with an open kitchen at the far end.

The drinks are good and strong. The young women tending bar work double-time, lining up six glasses at a time, packing them with fresh mint and muddling the pungent leaves with sugar, mojitos in the making. And then they do it all over again. And again. At prime time, the crowd at the bar surges five deep.

Some are just there to drink. Others, mostly the neighborhood kids, are angling for a seat at the bar where they can order something to eat. If any of them gets a table, they tend to linger despite the exasperatingly high noise level.

The hosts aren't skilled enough at directing traffic so a line almost always snakes out the door.

One night we waited more than 45 minutes past our reservation time to be seated.

But when we finally were, we scored one of the just-vacated booths along the wall where we could begin to hear ourselves. And a complimentary pot of fondue arrived as compensation. It's a New Age version, though, made with chalky goat cheese instead of the traditional gooey Gruyère and it suffers in comparison. It could have been hot yogurt for all the flavor it had.

Flavor isn't a problem with the terrific pork satay. Threaded onto a skewer, the charred pork is tender and juicy. It comes with a smoldering vinegar dipping sauce and an Asian slaw that matches it in firepower. All it needs is a glass of cold beer.

S'mores are a playful way to end the meal.

The waiters handle the barrage of noise with good grace. Whoops of laughter erupt from a table of eight, all women, next to us. Most nights there are more big tables than not.

The moules frites is made for sharing, a huge bowl of tender mollusks in a delicious briny broth and a heap of crackling gold fries. The grilled artichoke can sometimes taste waterlogged, and the aioli isn't gutsy enough to warrant the name, flavored only with a wan squeeze of lemon.

Hardly anybody pays more than lip service to the idea of soup. Luna Park takes pains to offer soups everyone could love. One night it's an interesting sunchoke puree; another time a real minestrone made with elbow macaroni and a confetti of vegetables.

Salads are more like what you'd get at any college-adjacent restaurant. Ingredients are fresh, but they're not big on presentation. The Cobb salad features big chunks of chicken and postage stamp-sized squares of bacon with greens on the limp side. Baby spinach is tossed with sugared nuts, a little crumbled feta and currants.

Homey cuisine

It's a lot of food for the money, especially when it comes to main courses. This might be the weather for "pot on fire," the kitchen's version of that earthy French pot-au-feu, which is basically boiled brisket, here with root vegetables cooked until they're beginning to fall apart. You'll definitely want to doctor it with Dijon mustard and sea salt.

Grilled flatiron steak is nicely cooked and comes with those same excellent fries. Breaded pork cutlet stuffed with Gruyère and mushrooms is another good choice. And the grilled yellowtail I had one night was a beautiful, if small, piece of fish.

Most entrées come with some kind of vegetable, but you also can order sides such as broccoli rabe with chile and garlic or green beans with shallots, lemon and olive oil.

The modest wine list includes some wines less than $20, with most less than $30. When prices edge above that, they're for wines that are worth it, such as D-Cubed Zinfandel, Hitching Post or Bonaccorsi "Red Monkey" Pinot Noir. But the big sellers at Luna Park are the $8 cocktails.

The bar even turns out some rather intriguing dessert cocktails if you're into that kind of thing. Desserts tend to be sweet and sloppy.

Pass up the coconut cream pie and the terrible bananas foster for Luna Park's do-it-yourself s'mores: pots of bubbling dark chocolate and melted marshmallow along with a stack of homemade graham crackers.

It's kind of fun to make s'mores in a restaurant, but is it better than the original Girl Scouts snack? Honestly, no. But like much of the food at Luna Park, it's convivial and fun.

Diners at the boho bistro/bar Luna Park on La Brea Avenue.