Celebration of Good, Honest Food : Rainwater’s Remains Tied to the Steak

At the end of a bland restaurant year that offered virtually nothing in the way of novelty, it seemed just as well to retreat to an old-fashioned, all-America eatery to reminisce about our solid but rapidly vanishing cooking traditions.

Rainwater’s chop house on Kettner Boulevard is such a straight-from-the-heartland place--one that celebrates good, honest cooking of the kind that largely has been blown away by gusts of microwaveable frozen entrees.

Sardines on Toast

The fact that boneless sardines on toast appear on the appetizer list more or less sums up Rainwater’s appeal for anyone hankering for real food. Sardines on toast might be considered a captain of industry sort of thing, but relatively few captains of industry order it these days (in New York, some CEOs nibble edible violets and pansies between sips of designer water, which does much to explain the country’s messy balance of payments). In any case, this dish used to be a traditional starter.

The decor and mood go hand in hand with the cooking: tables are massive, set with starched linens and well-spaced, and the service is quiet, deferential and efficient. Business can be done here, although most dinner patrons seem concerned primarily with the business of enjoying themselves.

The menu is enough to make an alfalfa-sprout fancier gag, but it’s unlikely such a person would be willing to climb the sweeping staircase that leads to this second-story restaurant--there’s too much of an aura of rare beef about the place.

And beef is the ultimate expression of Rainwater’s cuisine, offered in a profusion of possibilities that runs from a modest 8-ounce filet to a 24-ounce T-bone, and to even larger steaks that are proposed as service for two, though the restaurant will serve them to a single guest ($3 is deducted from the bill, and a round of applause also would seem in order). Roast prime rib, again offered in a range of sizes, and lamb, pork and veal chops fill out the meat list.

Ocean Fare, Also

The restaurant by no means ignores the sea, a realm that chop houses traditionally have valued primarily for its lobsters. Rainwater’s does offer lobsters in 2- and 3-pound versions, priced at the day’s rate, but it also offers daily selections from a revolving list that includes salmon, swordfish, local halibut, tombo, petrale sole and soft-shell crabs. A house specialty is fried lake perch, billed as “a mess of lake perch,” the centerpiece of many a Midwestern Friday night fish-fry and obtained by Rainwater’s from ice-fishers in the frozen backcountry of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Sardines may set the tone for the appetizer list, but the restaurant probably sells more orders of giant shrimp in cocktail sauce, shrimp sauteed in garlic butter and small servings of fettuccine Alfredo (which also is available as an entree). The list finishes on an uppity note with pate de foie gras and Beluga caviar, the latter priced by the ounce, which makes it easy to skip on to the soups and order a cup of pureed black beans brewed as dark as Navy coffee.

This is a particularly edifying soup, served with a raft of sliced lemon that adds a tart, fresh flavor and bears a small cargo of chopped egg that is meant to be stirred in as a final enrichment. As humble as black beans may be, this soup actually assumes a rather grand air with the addition, at table, of a splash of Madeira, the traditional fillip that points up the savory nature of these unassuming legumes. In a nice example of culinary serendipity, it happens that the driest of the four types of Madeira is called Rainwater, and it is this type that the restaurant serves.

Hearty Salads, Pastas

Rainwater’s recognizes that it is in San Diego and serves a good variety of salads and pastas, most of them heartier than the norm and all intended as entrees (the majority can be ordered in half portions as a starter course). The Caesar salad is a good example of the genre and includes plenty of anchovy, which will not endear it to everyone; those who know for a fact that they really do like anchovies can indulge in the combo of sliced tomatoes and onions decorated with fat anchovy filets.

Two salads that almost amount to meat dishes in disguise are built around grilled sliced steak and fried, boned chicken, each bedded on Romaine lettuce and garnished with raw vegetables and the dressing of choice (the restaurant recommends blue cheese with the steak salad, which sounds thoroughly Midwestern and indulgent).

Among the pastas, some include as much meat as they do fettuccine, notably the chicken Vesuvio, which tumbles chunks of sauteed chicken breast with egg and spinach noodles, peas, tomatoes and garlicky white wine sauce. This tasty dish is much more in the steakhouse than the Italian mood.

The fresh fish selection recently included king salmon, a fish of denser and more richly flavored flesh than the garden variety salmon. Cooked like a steak, it arrived charred in several places. This would seem a questionable practice, but perhaps not to everyone, because the guest who ordered the fish pronounced it superb (it was in fact an unusually succulent salmon). Rainwater’s wavered from its primary vision by serving a tomato-basil hollandaise sauce on the side, which wasn’t such a bad idea, even though the kitchen, like most San Diego kitchens, has only a vague notion of how to construct a hollandaise.

The same goes for the restaurant’s bearnaise, which is offered with the steaks and which is a very easy sauce to make, though not, evidently, easy for this kitchen. Because sauces are, in any case, foreign to Rainwater’s mission, these faults are easier to ignore than they would be elsewhere.

Pepper Steak a Star

Beef is what this restaurant is all about, and besides the giant rib eyes and Kansas City strips, it offers a very likable, very hearty “pepper filet special” (some steakhouses call this a “Chicago pepper steak”) that dresses a hefty grilled filet with a melange of sauteed mushrooms, onions and bacon. As in a traditional pepper steak, a few peppercorns have been pressed into the meat, and these supply occasional fireballs of flavor that point up the quality of the aged, corn-fed beef ever so nicely.

Chop houses are one of the last bastions of the American side dish, and though Rainwater’s fails to offer creamed spinach, it does serve creamed corn, exceptional onion rings (mere flour-coated wisps fried to a lovely crispness) and genuine shoestring potatoes, the kind that are cooked so crisply that they must be chased around the plate. Onion rings and vegetables are a la carte, but potatoes are included, and the choice runs to heavily laden potato skins or plump, baked Idahos that servers dress at the table.

Desserts continue in the mood inaugurated by the sardines--simple but hearty. The choice includes a particularly gooey pecan pie, cheesecake and (a little far afield, perhaps) chocolate mousse, but the ne plus ultra in this department has to be the hot fudge sundae. The kitchen ladles plenty of premium fudge over several scoops of the best vanilla, and finishes it all with whipped cream. One could ask for nothing more.

RAINWATER’S

1202 Kettner Blvd., San Diego

233-5757

Lunch weekdays; dinner nightly; after-theater menu.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including tax, tip and a glass of wine each, $40 to $90.