Another New Steak House : If You’re Really Hungry, Try Spencer’s

“Star Wars” is something for the folks in far-away places like Washington and Moscow to worry about.

We’ve got a serious conflict of our own going on right here in Surf City: Bovine Battles. What better name to give to the current race for steak?

The newest entrant in the fray is Spencer’s, a no-holds-barred steak house forged in flames just as intense as those that produced such luxurious beef palaces as New York’s Palm and our own Remington’s in Del Mar. Spencer’s replaces the Chambrette dining room at the Sheraton Grand Hotel. Chambrette, an extremely handsome room (the decor fortunately remains unchanged), featured an admirable menu that never attracted a local following.

Since the public turned up its nose at Chambrette’s California cuisine, the Sheraton management effectively said, “Let them eat steak,” and devised Spencer’s. Because the recent proliferation of steak houses (Rainwater’s, Vic’s, Milligan’s) in San Diego County has made it essential for each new place to try to establish itself quickly at the top of the heap, the Sheraton came out swinging when it opened this place.

“Spencer’s is not just any hotel restaurant,” said Edward Kissane, general manager of the city’s two adjoining Sheraton hotels (the Grand was formerly known as the Sheraton Harbor Island West). “We are hopeful that our restaurant will set an example or standard of excellence in the city to which others will look.”

If a single image could be said to lay bare Spencer’s soul, it would be the sight of a waiter displaying an oaken plank laden with slabs of the restaurant’s “Certified Angus Black Gold” beef. The steaks, glamorously trimmed, gloriously ruddy, and weighing up to 24 ounces (the New York sirloin for two), look worthy of the pride evident on the waiter’s face, and later, in a cooked state, prove their worth quite nicely.

Marvelous meat, but is Spencer’s a marvelous restaurant? Well . . . it’s pretty good, but the servers need to be taught a bit more about pouring wines and clearing tables, and the menu needs to overcome a tendency toward cuteness and fussiness.

The rules that currently define the luxury steak house specify that portions be out-sized (partly as a way of justifying the prices), and Spencer’s zealously obeys. An appetizer of well-stuffed crab quesadillas, for example, included no less than seven fat wedges of tortilla-encased crab and cheddar, a quantity that could have satisfied four or more appetites, and was well beyond the efforts of a pair of guests. A la carte vegetable side dishes (entrees include salad and a choice of starch), also can serve two or more, so be careful when ordering. (First choice here would be the mountain of pencil-thin asparagus spears, cooked to that perfect point at which crispness shades into tenderness; the creamed spinach, a steak house necessity, was overly endowed with garlic and salt.)

Perhaps because meals are so large, the menu dallies but briefly with appetizers, offering only shrimp cocktail and oysters on the shell as alternatives to the crab quesadillas. There is also a soup of the day.

All meals include a salad of chopped romaine garnished with cherry tomatoes, served at the table from the middle of a Lazy Susan contraption that contains supplementary compartments for little dishes of blue cheese and homemade croutons (both excellent touches), as well as sprouts, broccoli and mushrooms. It is a nice idea, but rather messy (guests tend to spoon things all over the table), as are the five kinds of salad dressings, each served from a mini-carafe. These carafes, like ketchup bottles, tend to release their contents either grudgingly or in a flood, and never quite in the speed or quantity that guests intend. The spinach-yogurt dressing is different and good, the blue cheese robust, the Green Goddess overpoweringly seasoned with anchovy.

Steaks--filet mignons in three sizes, rib eyes, 16-ounce New York sirloins served plain, as pepper steak, or in a mustard-onion-bacon sauce--are the stars of the entree list. But the menu also features prime rib, veal, lamb and pork chops, two-pound Maine lobsters and grilled salmon and swordfish. Each is garnished with a hillock of the desired starch, among which the choices include baked potato, thick-cut steak fries, tasty sweet potato fries, rice pilaf and scalloped potatoes done in the French gratin style. These last, baked in cream with snippets of leek and garlic, suffered from a serious overdose of nutmeg; restraint is always the watchword when nutmeg is used.

In their pristine perfection, the meats require little description. Both a filet mignon and a pair of thick lamb chops were beautifully charred and voluptuously tender, and both meats featured a depth and fullness of flavor that is almost unknown in this era of hormone-fattened animals. The kitchen, working with such perfect raw materials, would have had to try very hard to fail with these.

There is a kicker to all this, of course, and it comes in the form of the four steak sauces (herbed horseradish, brandied blue cheese, mustard and “Mexican barbecue”) that accompany the meats. Also served in inconvenient mini-carafes, each has the power to overwhelm the flavor of the meat it dresses. There is a niceness to the mustard sauce, and one might indulge in a drop or two of this with a bite of lamb; the “barbecue” sauce, actually an excellent rendition of the classic, chocolate-tinged mole sauce, buries meats under its onslaught of vivid flavors.

Desserts follow the pattern set by other courses, and are large, simple and bold. Sweet potato pecan pie features fat, elegant pecan halves layered over tasty cubes of potato, but could use more egg-sugar mixture as both a binder and an enrichment. The carrot cake is nicely moist and not overly spiced. A square of crumb-crusted cherry cobbler looked handsome, but the filling tasted uncannily like cherry Life Savers.

Spencer’s also offers a well-written lunch menu as part of its effort to attract the business crowd; a solo meal showed that it is prepared with some care and is every bit as extravagant as the dinner menu. Among featured items are a hefty mixed grill, calves liver with onions, a rib eye steak, several seafood offerings, a good choice of luncheon salads, and an equally attractive selection of sandwiches

A delicate, carefully made cream of asparagus soup (it included tarragon as a delightful surprise) preceded a main course of lobster salad that properly should have been called lobster with lobster. A relative steal at $11, this handsome plate featured a pile of meaty lobster chunks arranged over a couple leaves of radicchio lettuce, with a few leaves of Belgian endive added for color; some pickled cucumbers or beets, or both, would have been a nice addition. A lobster mayonnaise, coral-colored and richly flavored by the addition of crushed lobster shell (the same element that gives lobster bisque its shade and savor), was a brilliant moistener.

SPENCER’S.

Sheraton Grand Hotel.

1590 Harbor Island Drive, San Diego.

291-6400.

Dinner nightly; lunch served Monday through Saturday.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, with a moderate bottle of wine, tax and tip, $55 to $90.