Tandoori chicken. Caribbean shrimp. Peking duck. Grilled eggplant. Bacon, lettuce and tomato. Those don't exactly sound like traditional toppings for pizza. But a pair of California entrepreneurs are betting that they can cut themselves a slice of the Washington area pizza business with their West Coast version of an Italian-American favorite. Their restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, already is a hit on the West Coast and in other cities. Yesterday, it opened at Tysons Corner Center in a joint venture with Vie de France Corp. Vie de France is hoping to build several more California Pizza Kitchens in the Washington area and on the East Coast and use them to help accelerate the McLean-based bakery and restaurant company's recovery from several years of doldrums caused by up-and-down earnings and executive upheaval. Vie de France has begun franchising its own restaurants so it can spend money on improving its bakery operations and on expanding in other areas. "Once we get this store open, our plans are to set up a plan to open up anywhere from 10 to 20 stores over the next four or five years," said Robert N. Blessing Jr., executive vice president of Vie de France in charge of the company's restaurant division, which includes the 58 Vie de France cafe-bakeries. California Pizza Kitchen is the brainchild of Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield, two former federal prosecutors and law partners who opened the first of the restaurants in Beverly Hills in 1985. "We think we have a very unique concept," Flax said. California-style pizza, he said, "is going to become the hot pizza of the next decade" -- news no doubt to pizza mavens in the traditional strongholds of New York and Chicago. Not surprisingly, Flax and Rosenfield think Washingtonians will take a liking to the unusual pizzas being offered by California Pizza Kitchen -- once they get over their affinity for the traditional mushroom, pepperoni and sausage pizza (which is on the menu, nonetheless). "Once you break the public's mind that it has to have tomato sauce on it, that's when it begins to open up," Rosenfield said. California Pizza Kitchen cooks its individual-sized pizzas in a wood-fired oven and has translated familiar tastes into pizza toppings such as chicken burrito, roasted garlic shrimp, teriyaki chicken and Cajun andouille sausage. "We're not just trying to be off the wall. We're not trying to create new tastes," Flax said. "What we're trying to do is figure out what tastes the American public likes and putting them on pizza." "It's putting good flavors on good bread," Rosenfield said. The restaurant's most popular selection is barbecued chicken, which comes with smoked gouda and mozzarella cheese, red onion and cilantro. "The barbecued chicken is our Big Mac," Rosenfield said. Prices are relatively inexpensive, ranging from $5.95 to $8.95 for an individual pie, which divides into a half-dozen smallish pieces. The wood-fired oven can turn out a pizza in about three minutes, and the restaurant also serves salads and pasta dishes in such unusual varieties as Thai chicken linguini and black-bean sauce angel hair. If Tysons Corner Center, which has not previously been known for its gourmet dining opportunities, seems an odd location for such a tony, if inexpensive, eatery, chalk that up to changing philosophies in shopping mall management. As malls like Tysons move more and more into upscale retailing, they also are seeking restaurants that will appeal to higher-income shoppers. California Pizza Kitchen already has restaurants in West Coast malls, and Flax and Rosenfield say they've gotten inquiries from a number of other mall developers throughout the nation. "It moves mall eating into that cut above that {mall developers} want so they can bring that high-income customer in and satisfy him," Rosenfield said. "We look to be neighborhood restaurants in upscale neighborhoods."

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