Second Visit Fell Short of First Meal : Coconut’s Can Sometimes Miss the High Mark

It is not especially delightful to have to eat one’s words, but by the close of a preliminary meal at Shelter Island’s new Coconut’s, it seemed that just such a meal might be in store for this writer.

After grousing at some length recently over the sorry state of the cooking at most San Diego waterside restaurants, that first meal at Coconut’s came as quite a surprise. Hot dishes arrived hot and cold dishes cold, the waiter was both informed and helpful, and, most importantly, the food tasted as if it had been prepared by cooks who knew their trade. One expects these qualities in a restaurant, of course, but finds them all too rarely in waterfront locations that enjoy lush views of boat anchorages and dancing waters.

Coconut’s is, you see, yet another of those places designed to create and sustain a mood of carefree well-being. It projects (and indeed insists upon) a South Seas atmosphere that goes hand-in-hand with its waterside location and is, in fact, quite well done. The walls bear a load of islands memorabilia sufficient to decorate a set for “South Pacific,” the servers wear bright Hawaiian shirts, and the menu attributes most of the dishes to funky-sounding bars and restaurants scattered from Roratonga to Bora Bora. (The genuineness of these attributions often seems suspect, as in the case of the Mexican-sounding shrimp in a tequila and avocado sauce, supposedly created at the Kia Ora bar in Rangiroa.)

Coconut’s was cast, in other words, in the classic waterfront eatery mold, but it does differ from most of these places on one major point: The cooking can be really good. But the word can is important here, because the food served at a second visit fell far short of that served the first time around. The reasons behind this lack of consistency remain unclear, because the dishes ordered at the first meal were, if anything, rather more complicated and demanding than those ordered at the second.

Nonetheless, at top form Coconut’s can turn out quite a meal. Although not a practitioner of haute cuisine, chef Brian Devine (a San Diego native) understands the relatively simple seafood and meat entrees that dominate his menu; most of these are marinated in or finished with highly seasoned sauces of the sort that rightly or wrongly have come to be associated with South Seas cooking. For example, broiled scallops arrive in a ginger-kiwi sauce, flank steak is marinated in rum and mustard, and a hot chicken salad is flavored with mango and lime. Devine spent some time working in Paul Prudhomme’s New Orleans kitchen, an apprenticeship evidenced by the presence of such dishes as blackened fish and steak, and Prudhomme’s famous sweet potato-pecan pie, a sugary wonder that Devine does quite well.

The appetizer list is fairly ambitious and fairly impressive. (It also is quite expensive; the cheapest item, ceviche, costs $4.50, and five offerings cost more than $7.) The appetizers include all the usual things, such as oysters and clams on the half shell, and shrimp cocktail, but also features an avocado stuffed with salmon tartar, clams in tarragon sauce and steamed mussels in a sauce of fennel and mustard.

The “ carpaccio a la Coconut’s” in a way exemplified the restaurant’s ruling culinary philosophy by creating an ersatz dish that drew on several Oriental cuisines and several cooking styles, including cuisine nouvelle, and still managed to be delicious. Regular carpaccio, a popular dish of recent vintage, consists of paper thin raw beef dressed with olive oil and perhaps a sprinkling of shredded Parmesan cheese. Carpaccio a la Coconut’s consists of extremely thin slices of raw ahi, a Hawaiian fish, decorated with shaved ginger and served with a most interesting sauce. A true hybrid of Oriental sauces, it tasted of Szechuan chili oil, northern Chinese plum sauce and dark soy sauce. The dish could be considered as just an elaborate sashimi, but it was clever and it did make a good starter.

The waiter of this first visit, who seemed quite well informed about cooking in general and his menu in particular, raved on and on about Devine’s soups, insisting that, “we don’t use any phony canned stocks. Everything is made fresh here.” To prove his point, he brought out an acceptable seafood chowder and an excellent (and most unusual) brew of onions and arugula simmered in brown stock. Arugula, a salad herb that only lately has begun to receive the attention it deserves, has a fine, slightly pungent flavor, and its inclusion in this soup was a masterstroke.

The meal continued in this happy vein with a pair of carefully crafted entrees, one of which traveled under the amusing name of “shark bites.” Listed as a special, this was actually a re-working of a luncheon salad centered on smoked shark, but for this dish, the bite-sized pieces of fish also were marinated in a potent dressing, and then skewered and broiled. The fish remained delightfully moist and had a very satisfying flavor.

The second entree was lifted from the so-called Polynesian style of cooking that swept the country in the 1960s. Called “coconut beer shrimp,” this was another of those ersatz dishes that, no matter how shaky its claim to legitimacy (do Polynesians really cook shrimp this way?), can taste very good when prepared correctly. Coconut’s did a fine job, using the largest available prawns and coating them with a light beer batter and a wealth of shredded coconut before immersing them in a bath of sizzling oil. The sauce, seemingly elaborated from orange marmalade, went nicely with these sweet but tasty mouthfuls.

As good as this first meal was, the second started badly with the house salads, which were not sampled the first time around. The first sign of trouble arose when the server offered chilled salad forks, because restaurants that offer chilled forks almost always serve boxed croutons, and sure enough, Coconut’s indifferent jumbles of greens were indeed laced with the hard, tasteless little cubes. The salad dressing, a type of “ranch” style liquid mixed with purees of mango and cantaloupe, was an idea whose time has yet to come.

The server recommended the “black and white pescador” so highly and so insistently that it almost would have been rude to fail to order this blend of black and white noodles topped with creamed seafood. But it was impossible to find anything in the dish to provoke such praise;the pasta was soggy, the seafood overcooked, the cream sauce virtually flavorless. It was hard to imagine that the same kitchen that two nights earlier had served such a pleasing onion-arugula soup could send out such a messy, gooey creation.

A blackened rib-eye steak somewhat saved the occasion. The classic Prudhomme recipe calls for the spice-coated meat to be seared and nearly burned in a red-hot skillet, and when done just right this can be very good. Many places literally do burn the meat, however, with less than thrilling results. At Coconut’s, the kitchen took a cautious approach--the meat merely appeared to have been sauteed, and it was only lightly dusted with spices. However, it remained juicy, and its flavor was piquant without being overpowering.

Coconut’s may hope to become the Don the Beachcomber’s or Trader Vic’s of the ‘80s, distinctions that seem beyond its present grasp. It also appears to have designed itself to appeal especially to the under-30 crowd, a group that should enjoy the lively atmosphere and casual attitude as well as the somewhat off-beat cooking.

COCONUT’S

1901 Shelter Island Drive, San Diego

222-6887

Dinner served 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday; until 11 p.m. weekends.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a moderate bottle of wine, tax and tip, $35 to $70.