Restaurant Review : Plenty of Plain Food--but Few Thrills--at Pioneer Boulangerie

GastroLand, you could call it. Pioneer Boulangerie may only cover a single Santa Monica block (though like Disneyland it’s big enough that you have to enter from a parking lot, rather than the street), but it has been growing steadily, often adding something new every 6 months or so in the 13 years since this decades-old bakery opened a restaurant.

You wander through a corridor of attractions: the Garden Cafe (don’t get your hopes up, it’s really more or less a garden cafeteria), Pie Land (one of the best attractions, unpretentious pies with old-fashioned American crust), Pastry Land, Wines o’ the World Land and traces of an abandoned Frozen Yogurt Land. Finally, there’s Fresh Bread Land with the Watch the Bakers at Work through the Plate Glass Window exhibit.

Beyond that, in the deepest corner of the place, you find a restaurant that might be called Basque Land. The walls are adorned with folkloric art reflecting the Basque heritage of the family that started Pioneer.

There’s more than one sort of Basque cookery. Twenty years ago, Americans read about a very distinctive version in a Time-Life book, which seems to have inspired a fashion for Basque cuisine in Boston. In California, however, Basque means plain home cooking and plenty of it, food for lonely sheepherders down from the hills.

Pioneer Boulangerie basically follows the California pattern. No ttoro or kokotxas a la bilbaina that I’ve seen, though I don’t actually know what happens on Tuesday nights, which are said to be Basque Nights in the Bistro dining room. Mostly what’s served is plain home cooking, rather more homey than you find even in places that advertise home cooking.

Mind you, the appetizers are restaurant style, a short list but a respectable one. A generous shrimp cocktail in a cocktail sauce with a serious horseradish quotient. Good fresh oysters with a little dab of the cocktail sauce. Breaded fried mozzarella in the thick, sweet marinara sauce that shows up on some other things.

An appetizer is not absolutely needed, though. Dinners include either salad or a choice of soups, among which there always seems to be a solid vegetable soup based on string beans and cabbage with a dose of red pepper in its tomato broth. The best of the soups is an improbably rich New England clam chowder, dense with clams and altogether one of the best clam chowders around.

The entrees are all in the plain- food tradition. Steak basquaise is just steak smothered with mushrooms. One of the best is sand dabs almondine, another idea from the distant past, but the sand dabs are just as nice in their egg batter as sand dabs have ever been, and the almonds are plentiful and well- browned.

Even the most unusual dish is not such a long reach: pork chops stuffed with sourdough bread. However, since the Pioneer people bake the sourdough bread and have doubtless cooked with it for a long time, they know what they’re doing. It’s not a positively exciting stuffing, but it is good.

When Pioneer steps out of this safe world, it can easily go astray. The shrimp creole that was on special one night was not spicy at all, just shrimp in marinara sauce. Nice enough, I suppose, but there were only four shrimp in it (there were five in the shrimp cocktail appetizer).

If you want the epitome of the Basque tradition of huge amounts of plain home cooking, you can order the Basque dinner, which gives you a nightly changing mixture of meats in the entree (say, plain stewed beef and roast chicken). You also get both soup and salad, the soup being vegetable with unusual garnishes (red beans, pimiento salsa). The salad is plain iceberg lettuce mixed with marinated thin-sliced onions and slices of pickled beef tongue, with tomatoes and pimientos to mix in.

At dessert time, the pies are always a safe bet and often include semi-forgotten traditions like pineapple pie. There are pastries too, of varying levels of excitement: high for the Black Forest cake, low for a chocolate mousse cake that has gobs of butter cream but not much chocolate flavor, middling for a white cake with chocolate frosting and stewed apricots on top.

There aren’t any high-ticket rides at GastroLand, and few real low points (principally the relentlessly overdone vegetables). The crowds who flock here, though, seem to be having a good time.

Suggested dishes: shrimp cocktail, $6.95; sand dabs almondine , $10.95; Basque dinner, $13.95; pineapple pie, $2.25.

Pioneer Boulangerie, 2012 Main St., Santa Monica. (213) 399-7771. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Full bar. Parking lot. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted in restaurant (no credit cards in cafeteria). Dinner for two, food only, $32.30 to $49.80.