SUITABLE SEAFOOD FOR BIG EATERS, BIG SPENDERS

John Dominis doesn’t need a review; it needs more parking valets. Its flagstone-paved driveway in Newport Beach is a traffic jam.

I’m talking about weeknights, too. The place has been heavily booked in advance since before its opening just over a month ago. On a Tuesday, the earliest reservation I could get was at 9 p.m., and I still had to spend an hour and 10 minutes in the lounge.

And mind you, it’s a great lounge to wait in, rivaling Newport Landing or the Charthouse in sharp-dressing bar action. It has a decent, and decently priced, bar menu as well, which can give you fair warning about the meal to come. Like everything at John Dominis, a simple appetizer like fried calamari in a Parmesan-laced marinara sauce tends to be a generous portion. This is a restaurant for big spenders who are also big eaters.

What we’re seeing here is the longtime special relationship between Orange County and the Islands. A lot of Newport Beach heavy hitters are big fans of the original John Dominis in Honolulu, so there is a guaranteed local market for a similarly gorgeous, high-ticket seafood restaurant with Italian and Oriental leanings.

Located in a splashy new building of a sort once described as futuristic (it is a building of the future, in a sense--it isn’t completed yet), John Dominis could be somebody’s vision of paradise. The low, intimate ceiling has so much woodwork it would be a deck if you turned the restaurant upside down.

There are waterfall-fed fish ponds where you can see lobsters and rays and little tiny sharks swimming around. The dining room and the lounge both have a high-rent view of Balboa Bay (you can also see the nine moorings available for patrons who feel like sailing to dinner in the old 30-foot).

The appetizers include the usual shellfish items, including unusually good, anise-heavy oysters Rockefeller, and a wonderful garlicky linguine with clam sauce. Escargots in shells, served tied in a sack for reasons undisclosed, emphasize the meaty flavor of snails by serving them practically without butter. The prize salad is made with manoa lettuce, an especially fine Hawaiian butter lettuce.

All very good, though there is some weirdness going on. That terrific manoa lettuce came in a sweet mayonnaise dressing with chopped pickles, tasting uneasily like bottled sandwich spread. The great-sounding grilled eggplant was green and rather bitter, and its “sauce,” really a sort of spread, was staggeringly rich goat cheese with pimentos in it. I did not see the point, nor did I quite understand why the “salad” of cooked asparagus, nice though it is, was served warm with orange slices.

The entrees are mostly seafood dishes, and uniformly excellent. The cioppino is a huge copper pot packed full of seafood in a restrained saffrony broth. Sauteed items like tiger prawns or Alaskan crab claws come in a garlicky cream sauce with herbs. The fish, all Hawaiian, can be ordered cooked according to a variety of methods: broiled, sauteed, and so on. The best is en papillote, a method where the fish is baked in parchment. The result is equally pure but more flavorful than steamed fish would be.

There is a small meat menu where the starred dish is lamb sirloin in an old-fashioned red wine sauce with a somewhat heavy note of rosemary. The menu also has a pasta list and a section of wok-cooked dishes, including “evil jungle princess,” an excellent chicken in coconut curry that’s rather Thai in effect.

You have to watch the prices because a lot of the seafood is at market price. Which brings me to the abalone, one of the starred dishes. Maybe I’m alone here, but since abalone is a mild sort of meat, milder-flavored than eggs, I don’t see the point of cooking it in an egg batter. Well, some people may like spending around $30 to taste eggs with an unusual texture.

Lunch, which has only been going on for two weeks, is so far a less busy meal than dinner. The menu--for the time being a Xeroxed one--is a lot smaller, with a high proportion of salads and sandwiches (e.g., crab clubhouse). The big favorite seems to be the shrimp and scallop ravioli--at the table next to me, four out of five people had ordered them--but they strike me as uncharacteristically dull in their very bland cream sauce.

After the sort of meal you eat here, dessert is likely to be out of the question, but John Dominis does have excellent cream pies (banana, macadamia) with old-fashioned American crusts, and a number of ice cream and berry combinations. For better or worse, the chocolate overdose cake tastes curiously like Duncan Hines.

Prices are definitely on the special-occasion side. At lunch appetizers run $4.95 to $8.95 and entrees $8.95 to $13.95. At dinner, the appetizers are $6.95 to $12.95 while entrees are $13.95 to $29.95 and up, depending on the market price.

JOHN DOMINIS 2901 W. Coast Highway, Newport Beach

(714) 650-5112

Open for lunch and dinner daily. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted.