MATTERHORN CHEF SCALES FLAVORFUL HEIGHTS.

Byline: Larry Lipson Daily News Restaurant Critic

There aren't many restaurants around Los Angeles where you'll find flaedli suppe, herrenfilet and Berneplatte as regular menu items.

For this alone, the new Matterhorn Chef in Van Nuys is worth a visit.

But it's also nice to know that the chef is a former Chef of the Year as selected by the California Restaurant Writers Association and the opening chef at one of the most prestigious Italian restaurants in town, where he stayed for almost 17 years.

Ueli Huegli, who cooks Italian food as well as anyone, actually is Swiss. And though Switzerland is overshadowed from a culinary standpoint - at least to most Americans - by its French, Italian and German neighbors, it really has the advantage of being able to take the best from them while influencing them all in its own special way.

Indeed, the hotel schools of Lucerne, Lausanne and Montreux in Switzerland produce more of the best chefs and culinary staffers schooled in the preparation and service of international fare than any of its neighboring countries.

Swiss cheese is, of course, the food for which this nation is most famed. Names such as gruyere, emmentaler, sap sago and raclette are just a few of the more familiar ones. The latter is found at the Matterhorn Chef as the classic Swiss melted cheese appetizer with pearl onions, cornichons and potatoes ($7).

But a Swiss restaurant wouldn't be truly authentic without the mountain air-dried beef of Switzerland called bunderfleisch ($7), here another expressive appetizer reminder of the chef-owner's heritage.

Yet with these and plenty of additional preprandial temptations, first-timers will find that the holdover (from previous resident Hoppe's Old Heidelberg) appetizer tray of pate and several marinated salad items and mixtures that comes with every entree order (even pastas), when combined with the good crunchy breads, fills you up pretty fast, leaving little room for other starters.

If you have enough willpower, however, to resist making a meal of the appetizer tray, Huegli makes a strong statement with his soups.

Contrary to most restaurants today, which deem it satisfactory to make a single du jour offering, the Matterhorn Chef's kitchen, befitting its Alpine emphasis, turns out three marvelous soups regularly in addition to a daily one.

The previously mentioned flaedli suppe ($3) is a delicious full-flavored consomme in which strips of Swiss-style pancakes are floated. Huegli also cooks his zuppa con vongole, a superb Italian clam soup ($4) and gemuese suppe ($3), a satisfying vegetable soup much like a minestrone.

And he reminds in a hurry that he's no slouch with pastas. He may be the best gnocchi maker in the city. His puffy, airy, feathery Piedmont-style potato flour dumplings ($9) make most others seem like cannonballs.

And his personally prepared, meaty Bolognese sauce with rigatoni ($8.50) continues as a veritable classic.

He already has the local Swiss contingent rejoicing over such back-home favorites as chimney-smoked meats served cold ($13.50) or hot, the latter, called the Berner platte ($14), a supremely satisfying meal of subtly smoked pork loin, hearty sausages and thick smoked bacon with warm sauerkraut and string beans.

Named after one of his Swiss customers is Bruhwiler's herrenfilet ($16.50) , a three-meat, three-sauce platter that somehow resists being overwhelming, despite its arrangement of veal medallions with mushroom sauce, beef medallions with green peppercorn sauce and lamb medallions with a grain mustard sauce.

Huegli chooses a Burgundian-leaning recipe rather than the German hasenpfeffer-style for his juicy, flavorful, red wine-sauced preparation of rabbit, although he pairs it with polenta and lists it by its Italian name "coniglio" ($16.50). But if you want a superbly comforting meat dish of German ancestry, his jaeger steak ($13.50) provides another use for the kitchen's stock of good-quality pork loin, here cooked in traditional slab-steak fashion with a hunter mushroom sauce and served with spaetzles.

With some 40 entree opportunities a night that include at least four fresh fish items ($15 to $17), this is a restaurant for big, medium and small eaters, for those who prefer a light pasta dish such as fedelini with fresh tomato and basil ($8.50) or Swiss-style fried sweetwater pike ($13.50) to a filling dish of traditional sauerbraten or a large, juicy, mushroom-studded, rosemary-flavored, grilled veal chop ($19.50).

And you can end the experience with a hard-to-find Sicilian cassata or a hearty serving of apfelstrudel ($3.50 each) for a gratifying dessert.

THE FACTS

The restaurant: Matterhorn Chef.

Where: 13726 Oxnard St., Van Nuys.

When: Open for lunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, for dinner from 5 to 9:30 p.m Tuesday through Saturday, until 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday; from 4 to 9:30 p.m. Sunday.

Behind the scenes: Ueli Huegli is chef-owner.

Recommended items: Zuppa di vongole (clam soup), gemuese suppe (vegetable soup), flaedli suppe (consomme with Swiss pancake soup), gnocchi Piemontese, coniglio con polenta (roasted rabbit in red wine), jaeger pork steak, Bruhwiler's herrenfilet (medallions of veal, beef and lamb), Berner platte (smoked pork loin, smoked bacon, sausages, sauerkraut, string beans), cassata, apfelstrudel.

How much: Starters from $3 to $8.50, pastas and entrees from $8.50 to $19.50, desserts $3.50 each.

Wine list: Swiss wines finally have arrived, but were not available during review visits. Rest of the list is divided into four to six choices of domestic, German, French and Italian bottlings, with at least 15 under $20. No vintage dates listed. Some of the food is better with beers, either tap and bottled. Recommend Spaten on draft or Swiss Lowenbrau in bottle.

Reservations: Suggested. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three and 1/2 stars for food; three stars for service; two stars for wine.

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PHOTO

Photo Ueli Huegli, Matterhorn Chef's owner and chef, brings his 17 years of culinary expertise to the Van Nuys restaurant. Joe Binoya/Special to the Daily News