Third Avenue’s Blend of Classic and <i> Nouvelle </i> Bears Mixed Results

The classic San Diego restaurant menu has been displaced somewhat in recent years, but by no means has this artifact of a cloudy gastronomic history passed away.

This menu, which reflected the county’s firmly Midwestern tastes, once ruled supreme from the beaches to the mountains. It listed primarily plain salad (or gussied-up salad bar), steak-and combinations (steak-and-frozen lobster tail, steak-and-imitation scampi, steak-and-chicken, ad infinitum, ad nauseam), baked potatoes or ersatz rice pilaf, and heavy cheesecake desserts.

Newer types of menus have come along, bringing with them their own culinary cliches, to be sure, but also considerably broadening the region’s bill of fare. The flood of fish that has poured into restaurant kitchens in the last five years has not exactly put beef out to pasture, but it has provided a successful alternative to the old steak or prime rib routine. Pasta, too, has become so commonplace that one finds it even at fast food outlets, and fads have found a large, willing audience--look hard enough, and you can find almost anything “black ened” in the pseudo-Cajun style. Vegetables also gained a new prominence, although for a long time the choice was either carrots or zucchini, or carrots and zucchini.

A modified version of the classic menu is being introduced at the new Third Avenue restaurant at Horton Plaza. Beef-and-potato types will embrace it as they would an old friend, while diners of a slightly more daring nature may revel in its renditions of blackened meat and fish, and nouvelle curiosities that include such amusing experiments as duck sauced with strawberries and kiwis. The simple luxuries that draw such contented sighs from their legions of admirers are all present and accounted for, including lobster, king crab legs, and, God bless ‘em, shrimp scampi.

Third Avenue’s menu is a case of careful engineering, not chance. An offspring of two very successful Pacific Beach restaurants, Halligan’s and T.D. Hays, Third Avenue is very much a case of the beach gone downtown. Thus the service takes a slightly more formal tone, the menu includes a few seemingly sophisticated dishes, and the view (an excellent one) offers a vista of Broadway and Third Avenue rather than rolling surf and purple sunsets. The rough woods and greenery that decorate T.D. Hays and Halligan’s here have been replaced with an eye-pleasing, ‘80s-style Art Deco interior painted in a medley of soft pastels.

The cooking often seems rather amateurish, yet a fair number of dishes are pleasing. The soup du jour of two recent visits serves as a perfect example of this. A shrimp bisque (the standing menu naturally includes clam chowder; menus such as this always do), it had nothing in common with classic bisque but was nonetheless as satisfying and flavorful as one could reasonably expect a soup to be. A true bisque consists of cooked, unpeeled shrimp and flavoring agents, pounded to a paste in a mortar, sieved, and enriched with cream, cognac and a healthy pinch of cayenne pepper. By any measure of comparison, Third Avenue’s bisque would have to be classified rough-hewn and rustic, but it tasted wonderfully good--big chunks of shrimp and tomato swam in a rich, well-creamed stock in which thyme successfully substituted for the usual cayenne.

The meals certainly include more than enough food, and no one need leave Third Avenue hungry. But it does seem rather odd, in a restaurant that makes such a paragon of beef, to find that a baked potato must be ordered a la carte. Entrees arrive garnished with a sauteed and not always entirely happy vegetable of the day, and meals also include good sourdough bread and a green salad. In re the salad, it seems necessary to say no more than it is crowned with boxed croutons; how can this happen in a restaurant that surely has a great deal of bread left over at the end of every meal? To make this bread into the tastiest of croutons requires only that it be cubed, moistened with melted butter, and put to crisp in a moderate oven. Few operations of such simplicity yield such savory results.

The basic entree list features three cuts of prime rib, three cuts of steak, barbecued baby back ribs, chicken breast and lamb chops, along with lobster, crab legs and shrimp. The second page of the menu offers these in a Rubik’s cube-like profusion of combinations, so many that one nearly needs a calculator to tally them. Suffice it to say that guests may order prime rib with fresh fish (although why anyone would wish to do so is beyond understanding), shrimp with lamb chops (once again, why?), and so forth.

Two entrees were chosen from the standing list, and two more from the brief selection of daily specials. The baby back ribs proved to be nice in their way, not quite as tender or mouth-wateringly succulent as they are at some restaurants, but meaty nonetheless, and redolent with the flavors of a good basting sauce. (This plate skipped the usual vegetable garnish in favor of cowboy-style baked beans and apple sauce, which made a happy combination with the meat.) The blackened redfish had the spicy flavor and darkened crust that are de rigueur in this preparation; the fish also flaked nicely, but it contained a great many bones, too, and these came as an unexpected and unwelcome surprise.

The specials were, in their own peculiar ways, rather less successful. A slice of blackened prime rib weighed in as a toss-up; it had been charred too deeply, so that it tasted burned, but the meat under the crust had been rendered unusually juicy by the process, and the peppery flavors were intact. That someone in the kitchen dares to tread where perhaps he ought not was made evident by another special, a serving of sauteed duck finished with a sauce of strawberries and kiwis. The duck itself had been done quite well, but the sauce was a hilarious mistake; the dish tasted like a strawberry sundae in which someone had inadvertently substituted moist duck for ice cream. Exactly two green peppercorns turned up in the very last bite--these had not been advertised, nor had their heat “swum” through the sauce, so that the fiery explosions they made in a mouth soothed by strawberries seemed almost silly.

Meals can be concluded with desserts from a selection that includes a varying choice of homemade offerings. Two French-style fruit pastries were tried the first time around, but were so unsatisfactory that on the second visit, the chocolate mints that arrive gratis with the check were allowed to serve as the evening’s sole dessert.

THIRD AVENUE.

Top level of Horton Plaza, San Diego.

232-3200.

Dinner served nightly, 5 to 10 p.m.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, with a glass of house wine each, tax and tip, $30 to $60.