Customers Flock to Seafood Restaurant : La Jolla’s Rusty Pelican Flies Despite Its Size

San Diego’s veteran restaurateurs must sigh every time they think of the new Rusty Pelican in La Jolla’s “Golden Triangle.” This restaurant not only breaks every rule in the local book, but gets away with it.

For example, San Diego’s two great, interlocking restaurant rules hold that large restaurants can’t make it here, and that this city is a Friday and Saturday night town.

That large restaurants can’t succeed here is an observation based on sad experience. One need look no further than Mission Valley, supposedly the hottest location in town, to find the evidence. Two mammoth restaurants there sit unoccupied and forlorn; one, originally built by the D.O. Mills mini-chain, failed in later incarnations as the Playboy Club and as a nightspot called Players. The second, Gulliver’s, closed due to an outbreak of hepatitis, but that was five years ago, and it is amazing to note that the property is still unoccupied.

Immense restaurants also face a crushing overhead that can’t be met when they sit empty on weekday nights. However, many San Diego restaurants do limp along with sparse attendance during the week, and stay in business only by attracting the heavier and more free-spending weekend trade. In fact, if such considerations as the need to supply employees full-time jobs did not get in the way, it is quite possible that many local restaurants would open only on Fridays and Saturdays.

Yet the Rusty Pelican seems to have waltzed past these ponderous barriers to success. Knowledgeable customers find it advisable to make reservations several days in advance, even for Mondays and Tuesdays and even though the place seats more than 160. The place seems constantly busy, even after 9 p.m., when most local restaurants have sent their chefs home.

So the assumption would have to be that this restaurant is giving the public what it wants.

The management has had practice in this area, of course, since this is the 14th Rusty Pelican in a chain that has branches as far away as Portland and Chicago. The menu is attractive, the cooking somewhat less so; both, like a television action show, seem designed to please the largest common denominator.

The restaurant’s physical attributes certainly help draw the crowds, since the place is designed very much for the eye, and is, in a way, the quintessential Southern California restaurant.

Greenery enough to furnish a Tarzan movie set cascades from the distant ceiling, an outside dining terrace overlooks a cool-looking pond, the bar pulsates with vigorous youth and live music, and the building overall seems rather quaint, in an instant sort of way. The iced display of fish that sits near the entrance, arranged so that the finned creatures seem to be swimming through a frozen aquarium, catches the eye and makes a strong suggestion about the menu.

The servers also make strong suggestions about the menu, specifically about the remarkable selection of fresh fish, which routinely includes more than 20 choices. One night’s waiter actually performed the amazing feat of reciting the entire selection, fish by fish, accompanied by comments, observations and explanations. The speech took five minutes (or so it seemed), and although the guests squirmed through most of it, it did leave them quite well-informed.

The fact that the waiter could recite this spiel, by the way, says much about the service. Even though the servers look like the typical surfers and college kids who staff so many local restaurants, they know what they’re doing, thus proving that training programs do work.

The most important fact to know about the fish is that they can be had either grilled over charcoal or lightly breaded and sauteed in butter. One must like the flavor of charcoal to enjoy the grilled fish, since this sharp flavor is nearly overwhelming, so much so that the flavor of the lemon butter with which the fish purportedly are basted disappears. The breaded and sauteed fish seem much more delicate.

The fish list changes from day to day; one recent visit’s menu included opah, grouper, ahi, halibut, albacore, sea bass, ocean perch, king salmon, whitefish, scrod, pollock and catfish. The menu names the origins of each and it truly is an international selection drawn from globe-spanning waters.

The sea bass was sampled one night and was described by the guest who ordered it as “ just sea bass,” an epithet that denied it any special quality. The flavor was rather flat and more or less unnoticeable, perhaps because the heavy scent of the charcoal smoke was too all-pervading. And a grilled ahi arrived overcooked and dry, even though it had been requested slightly underdone.

On the other hand, an order of sauteed scrod (baby cod, perhaps Boston’s favorite fish) sampled the same night was exquisite. The fish was marvelously fresh, mild and clean-tasting, as well as moist and beautifully textured.

The Rusty Pelican rounds out its menu with other simple entrees designed to suit those guests who find fin fish unappealing. Among these are stir fries of shrimp or chicken and Oriental vegetables conducted along vaguely Chinese lines, although they seem to owe more to the influence of the chain’s test kitchen than anything else. The cashew shrimp, for example, was sweet but savory, and likable for the crispness of the bean sprouts and pea pods that made up most of its bulk. Another entree alternative, however, listed by the menu as “ fresh pan-fried oysters,” was quite disagreeable. The oysters’ strong, fishy taste suggested that they had been pried from the shells far, far in advance.

Rice pilaf and stir-fried vegetables, neither of them at all out of the ordinary, complete the entree plates. Dinners also include good sourdough bread flown in from San Francisco, and a choice of red or white chowders (both pack plenty of flavor), or spinach or mixed green salads (try the latter with the raspberry vinegar dressing).

The wine list pays homage to California’s endless vineyards and offers plenty of choice in both selection and pricing.

The dessert list, on the other hand, is limited to a tasteless cheesecake (about which one guest commented, “If I had made this, I wouldn’t tell anybody”), ice cream and a chocolate pecan pie mantled with an unidentifiable and flavorless foam.

This restaurant is by no means inexpensive, since the fresh fish, most costing $14.95 or more, put it pretty much in the big leagues. Nor does it seem, based on the findings of two visits, to be the locus of gastronomic greatness. But its popularity, evidenced by the reservation-less crowds that seem always waiting to be seated, remains indisputable. There must be a lesson in this.

Rusty Pelican. 4340 La Jolla Village Drive, San Diego. 587-1886. Credit cards accepted. Dinner served nightly, 4:30 to 11 p.m.; until midnight weekends. Dinner for two, with a modest bottle of wine, tax and tip, $40 to $65.