Loews Riva: 1 Rm., Ocn. Vu : But what you see (and it’s not much of a view) is all you get.

Riva, at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, 1700 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica. (213) 458-6700. Open for dinner nightly. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $47-$98.

Leaving Riva, we stand waiting for our car. When the valet pulls up, I open the passenger door. “Hold it,” shouts another valet from across the lot. He comes loping over. “Hold it?” I ask, folding myself into the seat. “Yeah,” he says, standing at the door looking down at me, “ I’m supposed to open the door for you.”

At Loews new Santa Monica Beach Hotel, they know what they’re supposed to be doing. The problem is, they don’t know how to do it.

Consider Riva, the top-of-the-line restaurant, the one that their press people announced would not be another hotel restaurant, but rather “one of the three or four best restaurants in town.” It has a theme--Italian seafood. To go along with that it has an outdoor view of the beach (a small view, but a view nevertheless) and an indoor view of a table laden with bottles of Grappa. And it has a very appealing menu, filled with dishes such as sarde fresche alla griglia (grilled fresh sardines), risotto ai frutti di mare (seafood risotto) and caciucco alla livornese (seafood stew). The thing is that although all the dishes sound very good, few of them actually taste very good.

The two most enticing appetizers--those grilled sardines and another dish offering marinated fresh anchovies--have been unavailable every time I’ve eaten at the restaurant. Of the remaining appetizers, I’d counsel sticking to calamari fritti, nicely fried baby squid, the insalata tre colori, a very respectable salad of arugula, radicchio and endive topped with a dressing of balsamic vinegar and shavings of Parmesan cheese, or raccolta del riva, a generous “shore harvest” (harvested, happily, on shores far from these) of oysters, clams, shrimp, crab and mussels.

The other appetizers are forgettable at best. The grilled vegetable plate was generously filled with a lot of extremely crunchy zucchini, eggplant, radicchio, shiitake mushrooms and so forth. The problem is that these had spent so little time on the grill that they were virtually raw. Tuna carpaccio offered thin squares of raw fish that had no flavor at all. Pomodori ripieni di caprese al forno turned out to be a sort of updated version of tomato surprise; what looked like cottage cheese on top of the baked half tomatoes turned out to be goat cheese instead. It wasn’t a bad dish, but it wasn’t a good one. Sauteed bay scallops were simply dry and sad.

The pasta dishes I’ve tried have not been much more successful. Linguine with clams, for instance, offered small mealy clams on the half shell arranged in a circle around a heap of pasta containing far too much garlic. The risotto was large, expensive ($25) and little more than rice with seafood; considered as a risotto it wasn’t very good, but it was certainly inoffensive.

The same cannot be said of the mushy sauteed scampi or the caciucco-- a huge bowl of tomato-sauce drenched, overcooked fish and seafood so unappealing that after one bite the prudent eater refused to take a second. Fritto misto del mare was not much better; it reminded me of a plate of fried seafood you might buy at a carnival. You are safest sticking with the grilled dishes--tuna, swordfish, veal chop or chicken. Even the vitello alla Milanese turned out to be a rather flavorless piece of breaded veal, still attached to the bone and served with a lot of tasteless vegetables piled on top.

Desserts? Like the rest of the menu, they sound more enticing than they actually are. I’d avoid the chocolate Grappa cake--it’s a combination that was never meant to be. The time I had macedonia, the ubiquitous Italian fruit salad, it was mostly unripe fruit cut up and folded into zabaglione. The tirami su (is there any restaurant in town that doesn’t serve the stuff?) was about as good as it ever is.

Loews has only been open a few months, and eventually the valets are bound to figure out how to do what they’re supposed to do. If we’re lucky, the kitchen will too.

Recommended dishes: fried calamari, $8.50; salad of arugula, radicchio and endive, $6.50; grilled tuna, $22.50; grilled veal chop, $26.