RESTAURANT REVIEW : Supercharged Home Cooking at San Pedro’s Grand House

At the next table, somebody was retiring or being promoted or something, and everybody seemed to be in the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce. In fact, from the way they called out to other tables I might have been the only person having lunch who wasn’t in the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce.

I sat under the huge old tree in the shady little quasi-Spanish patio, enjoying the cool sea air and playing with my salad, and thought how that made sense to me. If I were a San Pedro heavy-hitter, this is certainly where I’d go. Great patio aside, the Grand House is an exciting operation to find on a side street nowhere near the restaurant fast lane. In its short history it has always been a surprisingly daring, chance-taking place, and the present chef, John Chopchich, is not the first to have come from the Culinary Institute of America, that hotbed of experimentalism.

The menu has always tended to change at every meal. A menu that changes so often--it’s a large one, too, with at least 20 entrees at dinner--is a real challenge for a chef, one reason why the Grand House has tended to have energetic young chefs just getting started. It’s also a challenge to write about. What can you say about a meal that will probably never be served again?

Well, you can always generalize. You can characterize Chopchich as solid, both in the sense of not always wandering away from tradition and solid as in serving large portions of food that are a bit on the heavy side. The Grand House is a converted old home, and it’s serving a sort of supercharged home cooking, assuming that you grew up in a home with an intense background in haute cuisine.

There’s likely to be lots of pasta: say, basil fettuccine with deer sausage and smoked pheasant in a sea of garlic cream sauce. A number of appetizers will be close to familiar, like chicken breast with chanterelle mushrooms and slightly thickened Madeira sauce, except that the chanterelles will be fresh and surprisingly tender. Rack of lamb may be coated with bread-crumbs flavored with garlic and rosemary--and saffron.

But the toll of putting together a huge new menu every night must be the cause of oddities like salmon with papaya and saffron sauce (nice salmon, nice sauce, but if it were a marriage I wouldn’t give it six months), to say nothing of duck with coconut and strawberry, where the problem isn’t even the bizarre strawberries but the massive amounts of coconut, which hit the stomach like a sack of rocks.

And Chopchich has a tendency to go wacky on the garnishes. Bits of fruit, of course, that ‘80s equivalent of the old sprig of parsley on the plate, but mostly lots of vegetables. One night I counted nine with my entree, only one of which was really memorable: broccoli with a sauce that looked like some kind of chili but turned out to be a tart, concentrated essence of dried tomatoes.

The dessert chef, Christine Brown, also does best when she sticks close to the familiar. She makes an apple walnut cake far removed from the usual heavy, dense thing that goes by this name, light and delicate with an aromatic Drambuie cream sauce. On the other hand, I truly suspect chocolate brownies should not include pine nuts--there’s something musty about them--and the combination of flavors in the gingered rhubarb crisp made me think uneasily of eucalyptus leaves.

All in all, though, if I lived in San Pedro I’d make the Grand House my home.

Grand House, 809 S. Grand Ave., San Pedro; (213) 548-1240. Open for lunch Tuesday through Friday, for dinner Tuesday through Sunday; Sunday brunch. Full bar. Parking lot. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $45 to $70.