A Tale of Two Salads : First Avenue and The Stove Lack Consistency

Regular restaurant patrons may accuse local eateries of many things, but consistency rarely is one of them.

How does it happen that a cafe that serves a silky pate de trois foies one day will dish up something that resembles concrete the next? And why is it that a few weeks after a restaurant has received a lovingly written rave review, outraged readers will call to say that when they visited the place, the only items in the salad that looked fresh were the roaches?

Why, in other words, can so many restaurants not be relied upon to serve the same quality of food every day, week in and week out? This question probably has as many answers as there are cooks in San Diego County, but easy-going management also has much to do with the problem.

Management has the duty to invade the kitchen constantly to supervise, supervise, supervise. Yet the tendency at many places seems to be to take a rather laissez-faire attitude, and to let the potato chips lie where they fall. It might make an interesting study to determine whether the quality in San Diego restaurants drops when the surf rises.

Consistency seems to be a problem at both downtown’s First Avenue, the recently refurbished dining room in the Executive Hotel, and at The Stove, a new “country-style” eatery in La Jolla.

First Avenue certainly is a pretty restaurant. The hotel’s current management kept the best elements of the original decor when it freshened this room, and the elegant wood paneling, subdued colors and comfortable banquettes work to provide the clubby atmosphere that ought to attract businessmen and other downtown types.

But at two recent lunches, one of them on a Friday, the place was more sparsely populated than it ought to have been. The pair of meals sampled here suggested that the size of the clientele might have related to the lack of consistency between one day’s lunch and the next.

At First Avenue, the consistency issue partly came down to a tale of two salads. On Day One, a Cobb salad was returned to the kitchen when it was found to be lacking about half the advertised ingredients (the menu specifies finely chopped lettuce, tomato, eggs, avocado, turkey, bacon and blue cheese, all to be tossed with green goddess dressing.) A new, all-inclusive salad was brought and tossed at table, but was found to lack any flavor whatsoever, an odd situation indeed for a plate of fresh ingredients. This strange pass was explained when the server mentioned that the salad had been prechopped and plated some time earlier, and then placed in the refrigerator, where it evidently surrendered all its tastes as it waited for a buyer to come along.

On Day Two, however, a guest ordered a salad Nicoise and pronounced it so good that he would be glad to order it again. And it was an impressive-looking salad; it obviously had been freshly arranged when ordered. Attractive clusters of various ingredients, each grouping moistened with a bit of tangy vinaigrette, were placed over crisp mixed greens; among these garnishes were chilled boiled potatoes, tuna, anchovy filets, thin, crisp, perfectly cooked green beans; egg slices, olives and cherry tomatoes. In a way, the plate seemed like a veritable cold buffet of good things to eat. But why was it so vastly superior to the previous day’s Cobb salad?

Generally speaking, Day Two greatly surpassed Day One. The server of the first occasion was genial but bumbling, while the server on the next occasion was taciturn but efficient. Bacon made repeated appearances in the first day’s meal, but never successfully, because it was the hard, cold, nasty kind of bacon that obviously had been cooked at breakfast time, and had sat around slowly congealing until noon. This meat first appeared in a sopa de tortillas that basically was a somewhat weak vegetable soup garnished with a few strips of corn tortilla and a spoonful of sour cream. The bacon reappeared as garnish for a serving of sauteed liver that had been cut far too thickly, and was teamed with an uninspired mishmash of julienned vegetables.

In addition to the salad Nicoise that brightened the second visit, the meal included an interesting onion soup au gratin, and a hefty hamburger topped with feta cheese that had been grilled to a sizzling turn. The soup offered all the flavor one could desire, but was shy on onions; the cook probably had not ladled the serving from the bottom of the pot. The hamburger, simple as it was, quite eclipsed the shabby liver of the previous day.

The Stove threw the problem of consistency into even greater relief. A first visit produced an adequate if unremarkable meal; it would be charitable to describe the second meal as ghastly.

This new La Jolla eating spot bills itself as a family-style place dedicated to good old-fashioned country cooking. It employs a grandmotherly figure as its logo and suggests that many of the dishes were inspired by “Grandma.” Based on some of the dishes sampled, this Grandma probably did time at Leavenworth.

On the acceptable side, The Stove served a fairly good fried chicken, which it accompanied with limp french fries. Barbecued beef ribs and chicken turned out to be equally acceptable, if not exactly inspired, while a serving of sea bass, the fish of the day, actually was nicely grilled and quite likeable. Simple but fresh salads and big hunks of crumbly corn bread preceded the main courses, and overall, no complaints could be made about this first meal.

Sadly, the second meal started with stale corn bread and quickly devolved into a debacle. A serving of tri-tip roast, which correctly or not was understood to be a pot roast, turned out to be grilled slices of tough meat. These were raw inside and had to be returned for further cooking.

A chicken pot pie, one of the specialties of the house, proved to be an immense lump of sodden, quite raw pastry filled with a very tiny amount of chicken in gravy. This, too, was returned, with a request that beef stew be served in its place.

The menu states that the beef stew is “homemade, just like your Grandma makes.” It unquestionably was made on the premises, since it was so vastly inferior to the canned variety, but it wasn’t like Grandma’s. Had she served this brimming bowl of dirty-looking gravy studded with a few tough cubes of meat and vegetables, she would have been tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.

The waitress, to her great credit, handled the situation quite well, offering apologies along with her insistence that the offending items would be deleted from the check. But she was unable to explain why a restaurant that just a few nights earlier had served an acceptable meal had fallen to such depths so quickly.

FIRST AVENUE

Executive Hotel, 1055 1st Ave., San Diego

232-6141

Lunch served Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Lunch for two, including a glass of house wine each, tax and tip, $18 to $30.

THE STOVE

634 Pearl St., La Jolla

454-2500

Dinner served nightly, 5 to 10 p.m.

A meal for two, including a glass of house wine each, tax and tip, $25 to $35.