Paradise Bay Brings Diners Down to Earth With Plain Fare

If views were edible, Paradise Bay would be a slice of heaven.

This Marina Village restaurant looks through tall picture windows at an alluring scene that begins with the rows of boats tethered in Quivira Basin and continues with a watery vista that leads the imagination to dream of sailing to Tahiti and China.

But this sort of view, as has been remarked upon so many times, is as much a curse as a blessing, because restaurateurs frequently take the attitude that what the diner sees on his plate counts for less than what he sees outside the window. The phenomenal success of view-endowed restaurants would seem to support restaurant owners in this belief, and it must be added that despite this region’s tourist industry, eateries such as Paradise Bay do not live by tourists alone. Locals enjoy these places just as much as do the folks from Dubuque.

The food philosophy at Paradise Bay seems guided by a somewhat laissez faire, “let them eat nothing challenging” attitude. In other words, this is a lowest-common-denominator type of menu, one that caters to the broadest and plainest tastes and takes no chances with anything that could be considered remotely out of the ordinary. This is not to say that the food is necessarily poorly prepared at Paradise Bay, because it is sometimes rather good. But the quality is by no means consistent, and while few dishes fail, relatively few receive grades much better than passing.

A glance at the appetizer list reads like a synthesis of every culinary cliche available in San Diego. Many other restaurants of a similar nature serve these dishes, but Paradise Bay seems to have the list in its complete and unexpurgated version. Thus we find shrimp cocktail, a slightly more glamorous shrimp-and-avocado cocktail that may convince the tourists they have had Southern California cuisine at its most exotic; stuffed potato skins; nachos, and “scampi saute,” the ubiquitous, misnamed dish that in this case consists of sauteed shrimp flavored with garlic, white wine and Parmesan cheese.

Some slightly more ambitious starter courses, relics of the old red-velvet French eateries, are also offered, including oysters Rockefeller (done in this case with creamed spinach, rather than a mixture of eight green herbs), clams or mussels bordelaise(steamed in white wine with garlic and flavorings) and snails baked inside mushroom caps.

Paradise Bay calls itself a seafood restaurant and states on its menu that it purchases fresh fish (never, the menu laudably points out, “fresh-frozen”) from waters around the world. These fresh fish are listed on a special insert that is written daily, while the standing list is basically devoted to shellfish, shrimp and beef selections. It is with these fresh offerings that the kitchen perhaps does the best job, and it certainly is in this department that it allows its imagination to range the most freely.

One recent night’s list, for example, offered Pacific flounder sauteed with capers and white wine; blue nose bass baked with a pesto mayonnaise (this dish was not sampled, partly because it sounded like a misguided nouvelle experiment); broiled rainbow trout with sauce bearnaise, and baked monkfish in lemon butter. Monkfish has attracted attention lately because of the popular claim that the fish tastes like lobster, and if one digs into a slab of monkfish hoping for that flavor, one may indeed find it. Objective taste buds will more likely conclude that monkfish tastes like fish, but a very nice, mildly flavored fish; baked and sauced with lemon butter, as at Paradise Bay, it was quite likable.

A special fish of another visit, a swordfish steak, was cooked simply and came out well. Broiled just until it flaked, the fish retained its moisture, which is usually hard to do with swordfish. So the kitchen’s grill cook can be praised for his knowledgeable eye. However, the fish was spread with a highly objectionable bearnaise (or as this and other local eateries like to write the word, “Bernaise”), which leads us to one of this restaurant’s down sides.

Sauce bearnaise is one of the grand creations of the French haute cuisine . Essentially a hollandaise, or egg yolk-butter emulsion, flavored with a reduction of shallots, vinegar and tarragon, its name honors Henri IV, whose birthplace was the old French county of Bearn. The sauce goes well with almost any grilled meat or fish, and in the days of the old grand restaurants was almost invariably paired with grilled beef filet.

The old grand restaurants have gone out of style, though, and have been replaced by restaurants that generally eschew such calorie-laden sauces. This sauce lives on, however, resuscitated by second-class restaurants that find that bearnaise gives their cooking a touch of grandeur, while demanding relatively little extra effort or expense on the part of the kitchen. The problem is that few make it well, Paradise Cove included; they take shortcuts, or use (horror of horrors) a packaged, powdered mix, or shore up its delicate texture with such binding agents as corn starch and flour. The sauce at this restaurant lacked the necessary flavors and had a gluey consistency that instantly labeled it a fake.

Several other dishes have this spurious sauce, including the calamari (in this case, squid steaks) French Quarter style, which are breaded, fried and topped with sliced avocado, and are quite nice without the sauce. Among other menu choices are shrimp tempura, scallops sauteed with vegetables, soy sauce and garlic; chicken breast in mustard sauce, and several steaks. A grilled top sirloin served with sauteed mushrooms turned out to be perfectly flavorful and properly cooked. All entree plates of both visits, however, were garnished, or at least filled out, with a pile of cold but wildly overcooked sliced carrots, zucchini and yellow squash.

Dinners include the choice of soup or salad, and by all means choose the soup, which seems consistently to be among the kitchen’s best efforts. One evening featured a smooth cream of chicken that included large chunks of tender meat and had a delightfully homemade flavor; the seafood chowder of another evening was equally delicious, even though there was little seafood in the bowls.

Paradise Bay.

1935 Quivira Road (in Marina Village), San Diego.

223-2335.

Dinner served daily. Call for hours.

Dinner for two, including a modest bottle of wine, tax and tip, from $35 to $55.