RESTAURANT WITH VIEW IS HIGH ON ATMOSPHERE

About a year ago, two readers asked me to suggest a thrillingly inventive restaurant for a honeymoon dinner. The problem was that the honeymoon was going to be in Laguna Beach. “Look,” I wrote, “isolated beach towns like Laguna don’t support the kind of restaurant you’re asking for, but I keep hearing that the Towers is the best place down there. Anyway, it’s pretty. Let me know how it is.”

Did they ever. I got a full rundown on the Towers’ faults and a faint sense that I was being held to blame. Let me take this occasion to announce that I no longer offer my honeymoon restaurant service.

The Towers Restaurant does have its faults. It’s on the ninth floor of the Surf & Sand Hotel, and like every Orange County restaurant above ground level I’ve ever been to, it is more than air conditioned--it’s downright chilly. You see the waiters going at the apparently cranky thermostats with forks or toothpicks about once every half-hour, trying to adjust them in accordance with the latest complaint. Maybe this is why I’ve had a side plate of vegetables come to the table practically stone cold.

And there is at least one really hideous dish on the menu, a spinach salad that is loaded down not only with bacon and mushrooms but hot chicken livers, apple slices and gherkins. The result is a sort of coarse stew of partly cooked spinach in a vinegary, liver-flavored broth, the sort of thing beaming waiters used to bring you at a certain sort of restaurant that really specialized in brown rice.

This kind of problem is quite exceptional, though. Generally, the Towers is a lovely place with enjoyable food. My honeymooners were right, however, in finding it to be far from a thrillingly inventive place. It is just what it seems to be--a luxury spot, a high vantage point for looking down at the sea and the Laguna Riviera shoreline, a place where people come seeking major plushness and a terrific sunset view rather than creativity as such.

The view is striking, and it’s everywhere; the windows are practically wrapped around you. There are mirrors on most of the walls and mirrors on the ceilings as well, so the motion of the sea is in your eye wherever you look--at night, you may even see the waves in the ceiling mirrors reflected in your table top. To enrich the house-of-mirrors effect, you may be eating from a 12-sided plate set on an eight-sided service plate on a six-sided table.

And what does one eat in such a place? Meat and seafood in cream sauce, of course. The Towers is a veritable fountain of cream sauces. I have had 14 dishes there and only four of them did not come bathed in cream (one being the spinach salad and another a hamburger). Good cream sauces, I hasten to add, rich and unctuous and scrupulously differentiated, one being sweeter or tarter or saltier than another, or flavored with mustard or herbs or mushrooms or meat juices. It’s impressive stuff, but heavy, and a bit like a concert where every composition is in the key of C.

To take the creamless items first, there is a very good luxury-class hamburger at lunch, a light and beefy patty with cheese and bacon. At dinner, duck comes in a honey and cilantro sauce (which tastes rather more of soy--the effect is altogether Chinese, complete with good stir-fried carrots and bell peppers). Escargots with the usual garlic butter are served in peeled, cooked tomatoes which are pretty good on their own.

On the cream side of the menu, note the exceptionally fresh scampi in an orange-flavored sauce and scallops in a deliciously tart cream sauce (both of these are appetizers), a humble-sounding chicken breast with excellent morel mushrooms and wonderful lobster in a Pernod cream sauce that is rather too heavy on the liqueur. (I’m not usually one to go on about how a sauce tragically “dominates” a dish--my feeling is that if you have a highly flavored sauce you can simply adjust how much you take in--but this is one case where the sweetness and anise flavor of the Pernod really are distractingly prominent.) The chive-cream sauce that comes with the sliced artichoke heart appetizer seems to be exactly the same as the one in the cassolette of oysters, but I wouldn’t say a word against either one.

The Towers also makes good coffee and impressive chocolate desserts and has a not particularly inexpensive but well-chosen California wine list. At lunch (a relatively simple meal consisting mostly of sandwiches and omelets) appetizers run $3.50 to $6.50 and entrees $6.50 to $12. At dinner, appetizers are $6.50-$11 and entrees $16.50-$23.

THE TOWERS: Surf & Sand Hotel, 1555 S. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach

(714) 497-4477 Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. All major credit cards accepted.