RESTAURANTS : Festive Seafood Restaurant Captures the Essence of the City by the Bay

It is a long way from the hills of San Francisco to the valleys of Fullerton, but there are ways to reduce the distance. A visit to Steamers, a San Francisco-style chowder house and seafood restaurant, might be one.

The concept is simple: Take lots of fresh fish, a bright, cavernous room, a large mesquite broiler, lots of happy, smiling faces and presto--you’ve got a busy new restaurant.

The dining room is ingeniously divided into stations, advertised in a glimmering array of neons (“Oyster Bar,” “Creme Glacee,”. . .); you can watch each section’s inner workings and build up an appetite. It’s all very festive, sort of like an urban market place filled with little concession stands. You sit at glass-topped tables with giant pink umbrellas suspended from the ceiling and enjoy the pleasant atmosphere.

But not everything is rosy. On my first visit, the food was a bit slow coming out of the kitchen. And the salads seemed to suffer from the restaurant’s apparent more-is-better dressing policy. An innocent pasta dish, similarly, was practically drowned with unwanted Parmesan.

My group started with a variety of soups, a white and a red clam chowder and a seafood gumbo. All were rich and chunky, and the gumbo was appropriately dark and smoky. If it hadn’t been oversalted it would have been excellent.

Then we ordered appetizers: Cajun popcorn, little nuggets of fried shrimp in a thick batter; clams casino, baked in the shell with a topping of bread crumbs, bacon, and cheese, and sauteed artichoke hearts with almonds and bay shrimp. The same problem was evident throughout: Too much salt.

When one of the owners approached our table to ask how everything was, we informed her of our opinion. “Yes, I agree,” she said. “The chef is new. I’ll do something about it.” In most places this would have been an idle response to appease customer dissatisfaction, forgotten even before the customer had paid the check. But not here. On subsequent visits I found marked improvement. Everything had considerably less salt, and the natural flavors of the seafoods were much easier to enjoy. Steamers has a daily selection of at least 10 fresh fish (you see the filets, ready for cooking, in a huge ice-filled case as you walk in); the kitchen will prepare any of them in several styles. I tried a firm, fresh piece of swordfish, blackened Cajun-style, and found it unashamedly hot and peppery.

Orange roughy, the flaky, delicate white fish from New Zealand, was done with capers and lemon butter and may have been just a tad overcooked. Halibut meuniere , a misnomer because it was broiled ( meuniere , literally “miller’s style,” means lightly dusted in flour and then pan fried in butter and lemon), was pleasing despite its identity crisis.

There are many things other than broiled fish, though. Sit at the marble oyster bar and try a spicy ceviche of snapper, or perhaps green-lipped New Zealand mussels. The house specialty--steamers, natch--is served with melted butter and lemon in an iron pot. They are tender enough but, as in many restaurants, the top mussels get unappetizingly dry because there isn’t enough broth.

There are mesquite-broiled steaks for those who blanch at the thought of eating sea creatures, and they are pretty good. Also surfacing are the obligatory lobster tails, scampi, and cioppino , none of which I tasted.

A whole section on the menu is devoted to Cajun dishes. Shrimp etouffee , as the name implies, is smothered in a spicy sauce and served over rice. Cajun chicken and tempura shrimp is satisfying, even if the shrimp have too much breading and the chicken, for my taste anyway, is a bit sharp from cayenne pepper.

I would avoid some of the house specialties such as linguine supreme (pasta is not one of the reasons for coming here) and crab casserole, a tasteless combination of melted cheese and lifeless crab baked together. This dish won’t bring San Francisco any closer.

Steamers is pretty proud of its rich, sugary desserts such as chocolate suicide, white chocolate mousse cake and the designer cheesecake parade, which it buys from a company called Heidi’s. Excessively gooey desserts bring out the curmudgeon in me, but the people I spied on seem to be just crazy about them, eating them up like they were putting something over on unseen parents. I prefer the restaurant’s ice creams, particularly a smooth, exotically flavored vanilla bean, or a creamy chocolate raspberry.

We had to wait nearly 20 minutes for a round of espresso because the espresso machine wasn’t switched on when we ordered. But that is another minor flaw bound to have been corrected by now. Besides, in most seafood restaurants, an espresso is a real extra. It is hard to get one on Fisherman’s Wharf because coffee lingering slows down turnover. Fullerton has its advantages, too, you know.

STEAMERS

444 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton

(714) 738-0781

Open for lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine. All major cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $25-$35.