RESTAURANTS : BEEFED UP : What’s Full of Fat and Costs about $13 an Ounce at the New Otani Hotel?

Wagyu beef, the famous Japanese beef from Kobe, is so marbled with fat it’s a deep, mottled pink. It would probably scare your doctor right out of his socks. It might scare you, too, if you have a problem with the idea of paying $156 for a 12-ounce filet--a la carte. But that’s the going rate at the Garden Grill in the New Otani Hotel, and believe it or not, it’s probably less than you’d pay in Tokyo.

Oh, you could order seafood here, but what’s the point? The Garden Grill is for dropping a bundle in order to spend time in the lap of luxury, Japanese-style. A kimono-clad hostess glides you across the black marble floor toward one of three polished granite teppan tables, two with views of the hotel’s rooftop Japanese garden, the third screened off from the rest of the world. After you order, a waitress discreetly ties an apron around your neck.

It’s a teppan-yaki restaurant, meaning a chef cooks everything on a griddle built into the table, but there’s no showy chopping and flinging, Benihana-fashion, and everything is cooked to order--he doesn’t wait until a table is full to start cooking. In fact, if you’re planning to taste a bit of what one of your dinner partners is eating, he’ll even cook that portion separately to your instructions. Altogether, you feel adequately pampered for the money you’re paying; this may explain why the restaurant attracts big spenders, such as the group of Japanese and American shopping center developers who shared a table with me one night.

You can order a la carte, but the basic idea is to choose one of the prix-fixe meals (which differ only slightly in their courses) and then decide how much steak you want to include. It doesn’t have to be Wagyu beef; there’s also excellent domestic Black Angus. One difference is that the domestic beef is $3.25 to $3.50 an ounce (you read that right: not $3.50 a pound but $3.50 an ounce ), depending on whether you want New York or filet, while the Wagyu runs $11 to $13 an ounce.

On the table are chopsticks, a napkin and a little square plate. As the chef starts to work, slicing and frying, you get a lacquered bowl of miso soup with seaweed and tofu cubes in it, a simple green salad, some rice mixed with bits of carrot and green onion and a little plate of relishes: pickled ginger, sweetish pickled yellow radish and sliced cucumber.

When the chef’s got something ready for you, he puts it on a serving plate set on the edge of the teppan grill. This means that to get your hot food, you have to reach pretty far over, with chopsticks well extended. Learn to master this. The serving plate is where it is so that the food will stay warm.

Before the chef has finished cooking anything, though, you’ll have been served the cold appetizers that come on your prix-fixe meal. On the Winter Menu, for instance, you get a shrimp cocktail--big, very fresh shrimp, a good, tomato-based cocktail sauce and an intricately cut ornamental carrot on the side for fun. If you ordered the $58 Tachibana dinner, you choose either boiled, thin-sliced halibut with ponzu sauce, assorted hors d’oeuvres, a sashimi assortment or Wagyu beef sashimi (yes, raw $11-per-ounce beef).

On the other hand, if you ordered the $38 Kaede dinner, you get a plate of seasonal appetizers. Mine were thin-sliced raw halibut rolled up in a thin omelet, strongly flavored with ginger; chewy raw calamari, also heavy on the ginger; an oblong of rich orange fish roe, a dense slice of boiled chicken breast and a cube of fish-flavored gelatin in the shape of a maple leaf, complete with changing fall colors (how seasonal can you get?).

By now there are a couple of sauces on your tray, such as vinegar, lemony ponzu sauce (which you can doctor with minced radish) and a light and very good fresh barbecue sauce. The chef has been frying bok choy, onions, garlic slices, a slice each of kabocha pumpkin and very starchy Japanese sweet potato, and various mushrooms: maybe oyster mushrooms, shiitake and golden chanterelles. He’s been giving you samples of them and of fish, abalone and

lobster tail as they finish cooking.

And now it’s the moment of truth: steak time. Yes, your doctor would advise against beef so heavily marbled, but every test has shown that fat is the main factor in whether beefsteak tastes good. It makes the beef rich and tender, it “carries” the meat flavor on the palate and it adds flavor of its own. This is probably a Paleolithic thing; as travelers from the Arctic to the tropics have reported, a diet of strictly lean meat can’t support human life. On some primitive level, perhaps our in medulla oblongata or “reptilian brain,” we yearn for fat.

So here’s the report. Skip the domestic filet and the Japanese New York steak on bang-for-the-buck principles. Go for the biggest bang, the Wagyu filet, which is extraordinary, unlike any other steak--it literally melts in your mouth, like a cross between beef and butter, and a little goes a long way. The second-best steak, oddly, is the cheapest, the Black Angus New York cut. It’s nowhere near as rich and tender, but it has a powerful beefsteak flavor.

By this point in the meal, the reptilian brain is sated. There’ll be some sort of dessert--ginger ice cream or maybe shortcake or tiramisu. You’ll scarcely notice.

Garden Grill, New Otani Hotel, 120 S. Los Angeles St., Los Angeles; (213) 253-9263. Dinner served nightly, lunch Monday through Friday. Full bar. Valet and validated lot parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $76-$225.