Hotel Turns to American Fare to Fill Dining Room

One problem of maintaining a first-class hotel is the necessity of providing a dining room, as such rooms frequently operate in the red these days.

However, since those guests who wish to dine on the premises must be accommodated, hotel managements have come to realize that dining rooms are a necessary evil. The wisest operators try to make the best of the situation.

La Jolla’s Colonial Inn, a pleasant, 75-year-old establishment in the shadow of the Hotel La Valencia, its better-known neighbor a few blocks down Prospect Street, has made numerous efforts over the years to make its Putnam’s dining room into a restaurant that will attract local trade as well as in-house guests.

The latest change is the installation of chef Dan Mullin, who has written a reasonably diverse and attractive menu centered on old-fashioned American favorites. The cooking is fine, if not especially memorable, but Mullin does stand out on one point: he has resurrected the honorable but barely remembered practice of developing house recipes for a variety of condiments and other items that these days are usually purchased from outside purveyors.

Not all that long ago, restaurants that wanted to offer jams, jellies, ketchup and so forth made their own. These were tedious and time-consuming exercises, no doubt, but they resulted in products that were not standardized, and travelers thus were given the opportunity to praise or damn an establishment partly on the basis of its homemade condiments.

Excellent Ice Cream

Mullin makes the mint jelly served with the grilled Colorado lamb chops, the apple sauce served with the pork chops, the salad dressings, the jellies served at breakfast, and several other items. In addition, several excellent ice creams and an unsampled pate are made off the premises--but using Mullin’s recipes.

All of this adds up to something less than an earth-shaking development. The mint jelly tastes pretty much like any other, the ice creams are incontestably superb, and are among the best offerings at this restaurant. But on the whole the place has taken several paces in the right direction.

The Americana on the menu turns up more under the salad and entree headings than among the appetizer selections, but one all-American starter, the steamed asparagus on toast with cheese sauce, does wave the Stars and Stripes rather pointedly. This dish has strong turn-of-the-century Sunday supper associations, and Putnam’s does it quite well, the asparagus pencil-slim and barely tender, the Cheddar cheese sauce sharp and creamy, the toast simply toast--but then, that’s all the toast is supposed to be.

Among other starters, the fried artichoke hearts were rather less than expected, involving nothing more than canned marinated hearts (not sufficiently drained of their sharp marinade) rolled in crumbs and plunged in hot fat. The fettuccine with sun-dried tomatoes came off better, the noodles in Parmesan cheese, butter and cream given a tangy accent by the pungently flavored, agreeably textured tomato nuggets.

Cheddar cheese gets quite a bit of play here, especially as a stuffing for the baked potatoes offered with entrees. One visit, it also turned up on the day’s soup, a cream of cauliflower topped with a thick sprinkling of cheese, which made the soup less boring, but not much so. Cauliflower has only so much to lend to a soup.

Old-Fashioned Pea Soup

Another brew, an old-fashioned split green pea, was a much more enticing concoction, the thick soup rich and smoky with much shredded ham, and the whole redolent of thyme and other herbs, as is common in some Northern European split pea preparations. (The Dutch have a wonderfully resonant name for their popular split pea soup; they call it snert .)

The house salad offered as alternative to the soup (entrees include the choice of one or the other), is presentable but nothing more, even when the rather likable balsamic vinegar-Dijon mustard dressing is factored in. Among a la carte salad choices are a wedge of iceberg lettuce in Roquefort dressing that may veer too much in the direction of old-fashioned American eating habits, and a Caesar salad that was found wanting. Wanting what was not entirely clear, because the flavors were muddled and muddied, but in any case they did not add up to that sparkling dish of greens called Caesar.

The entree list is notable for its lack of pretension. Veal scalloppine in Marsala wine heads the list, followed by, among other dishes, a bacon-wrapped filet mignon (the restaurant used a good cut of meat, but flavor-wise it was not on a par with that served in our better steak houses); grilled pork chops with sauce Robert; sauteed breast of chicken in a cream sauce flavored with sage and mustard; Black Angus prime rib roast, and a grilled Black Angus rib eye steak garnished with sauteed mushrooms.

The Colorado lamb chops turned out to be thin, rather than the two-inch-thick chops served at some places, and were served in a pile of five or so. They were meaty, however, and quite flavorful, with or without dabs of the house mint jelly.

Festive Dish

Putnam’s offers a catch or two of the day, which one night was a good slab of sea bass, unadorned except for a bit of herb butter but grilled so well that it remained remarkably moist and toothsome. By contrast, the one standing seafood entree, a dish of jumbo shrimp sauteed with shallots, garlic and sherry, was rather poorly done. The shrimp were impressively sized specimens, but they dried out in the cooking process and were surprisingly innocent of sauce. They definitely needed a moistening agent; perhaps the sherry had been left out of the equation, because the only flavor that came through strongly was that of the garlic.

A final entree showed Mullin and Putnam’s at their most festive. This was a tableside flambe of veal scallops finished with brown sauce, lemon juice, garlic, dill and the amount of brandy required to make the dish flame. To its credit, Putnam’s presented the dish quietly rather than making a silly spectacle of it, and the dish actually was quite good--the dill and lemon added a certain bite, and the brown sauce smoothness. It could have been done equally well in the kitchen, of course, but the dining room manager made a nice job of it and seemed to enjoy treating the table to something that required a little special effort.

Putnam’s offers more than ice cream for dessert, but it is doubtful that it serves anything better. These are remarkably smooth, creamy and deeply flavored ice creams, and the waitress will arrange to have them drizzled with an appropriate liqueur if so desired. To have splashed the chocolate Grand Marnier version with a little extra Grand Marnier would have been a waste, frankly, because this ice cream simply was not susceptible to improvement. However, the white chocolate ice cream (studded with chunks of solid white chocolate for extra savor), did benefit from the addition of a bit of Amaretto.

PUTNAM’S

Colonial Inn, 910 Prospect St., La Jolla

454-2181

Breakfast, lunch and dinner served daily.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine, tax and tip, $45 to $70.