GOOD FOOD, AMBIANCE REEL ‘EM IN

Newport Landing, right at the Balboa Ferry, is just steps away from a forest of pleasure-boat masts. It’s nautical inside, in white enamel and maroon trim, and boasts a smashing view of Balboa Bay. For the final touch, the stairway to the oyster bar is decorated with painted portraits of a couple of local oddballs you’d practically have to live on the peninsula or the island to know of.

This is a restaurant that knows the clientele it wants and knows it right down to the ground, as is proved by the fact that even though it’s only been open a few weeks (part of that time partially closed because of a kitchen fire), it’s fiendishly popular with the Newport-Balboa sailing crowd. Nightly through these doors passes one of the world’s finest collections of deep-water tans.

It really is attractive inside, particularly the oyster bar with its captivating view of the bay: a cozy, Disney-like stretch of placid water bristling with boats, nestled (“nestled” is the only word you can use) in gently undulating hills. The bar itself is a jungle, or maybe a jungle gym, of brass railings. It looks as if the bartenders must have to make like a monkey if somebody wants a bottle on a brass railing shelf above the seven-foot level.

The oyster bar is home to an intensely social younger crowd, and the food is nothing more than you would expect in a sharp-looking hangout, though the oysters themselves are plump, flavorful ones. Standard-issue seafood cocktails fancily served (the shrimp on a bed of the kind of purplish-green crinkly lettuce that you suspect is not for eating). Soft ceviche of scallops and red snapper. A rather good thick hamburger on a sesame roll. An albacore (not tuna, mind you) sandwich with avocado on whole wheat bread that falls apart in your hands in nothing flat.

Downstairs, older and more sedate, is another story. Here a menu that might easily have gotten away with nothing beyond swordfish and blood-rare beefsteak is spattered with hip mushrooms, oddball vegetables, unusual garnishes.

Beefsteak and swordfish there are, to be sure: remarkably good aged New York steak and nicely crusty grilled swordfish. But Newport Landing is not just a grill but a virtual barbecue. For my money, the best thing on the menu is the chicken--pardon me, the free-ranging chicken, which has evidently been jogging around the barnyard rather than flaking out in front of the tube. It’s a sizable and pretty flavorful bird to start with, and it is seriously barbecued. I mean, this chicken is positively brown with smoke. It’s moist and tender as well, and the rack of lamb, garlicky and smoky on its charred exterior, is another barbecue treat.

The menu aims at being even more respectable than that. There is very creditable pasta, such as tagliarini in wild mushroom cream sauce, and sauteed dishes that aim to be a little out of the ordinary, such as veal medallions in cream sauce with walnuts, almonds and pine nuts. This last isn’t quite memorable--I kept wishing there were a little lemon juice or something in it to counter the faint bitterness of the nuts--but an interesting idea, topping veal with a Near Eastern nut garnish that is traditional with chicken.

The appetizers include a number of things from the upstairs oyster bar, including a nice, subtle crab-artichoke cream soup. There’s a strange warm duck salad not at all in the nouvelle cuisine style: salad greens on the bottom, a duck sculpted out of slices of apple on the top, and in-between, chunks of duck meat in a thickened sweet-sour gravy. It’s peculiar, as if an entree had fallen into the salad bowl along with the fruit course, but really rather likable.

Desserts are passable, the pastries apparently coming from a local bakery (which may in fact endear them to the boaty crowd). Only a terrifically creamy creme brulee with fruit strikes me as outstanding. The prices here run $4.15 to $7.50 for appetizers and $6.95 to $15.50 for entrees, with oyster bar items in the appetizer range.

All in all, I have to admire Newport Landing. Beautiful as it is, with its lovely view and highly focused appeal to the local clientele, it could have taken things easy in the kitchen and served nothing but view-restaurant food. In the downstairs dining rooms it does, or at least aims at, quite a bit more than that.

NEWPORT LANDING

503 E. Edgewater Ave., Newport Beach

(714) 675-2373

Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. Visa, American Express, MasterCard and Diner’s Club accepted.