RESTAURANT REVIEW : Fish House: Bring Back Mr. Bunn

A long while back (that’s restaurant talk for a year and a half), the owners of Ocean Avenue Seafood in Santa Monica started a businessperson’s fancy lunch joint in Long Beach. It was a respectable venture in nostalgia-Americana, replete with dark wooden booths and pressed tin ceilings, though the best part was that the baker was a man named Mr. Bunn.

It was called the Pine Avenue Grill, and it seemed to be going great guns for a while. But maybe the idea of an Americana businessperson’s fancy lunch joint seems a little less novel in Long Beach than it does on the Westside.

At any rate, the Grill recently became the Pine Avenue Fish House, Mr. Bunn’s bakery is now an oyster bar and the new menu reads a whole lot like the one at Ocean Avenue Seafood. It’s printed daily, though like most daily menus it changes only slightly from one day to the next. (“Tuna steak sandwich?” asked my waitress, taking my menu and scanning it. “Oh, yeah. That’s new.”)

What mostly changes is the available seafood, maybe 35 or 40 items. The menu suggests a preparation for just about each of them, but ostensibly you can ask for any fish on the list to be prepared the same way as any other, if you have the gastronomic nerve to bet that tombo (whatever that is) would be as good with the two-salsa treatment as Mexican baquetta sea bass.

The appetizers include an unusual and very good cocktail of calamari with yellow peppers and shallots in vinaigrette. I’d pass on the New England clam chowder if you’re in the mood for clams, though; it tastes like nothing more than buttery white gravy with potatoes and a little bacon.

The crab cakes are made from Dungeness crab and very tasty, but surprisingly oily. As I had them, they also suffered from mediocre condiments: a simple-minded cocktail sauce of horseradish-spiked ketchup and an oily, brassy tartar sauce. Things do change, though. A couple of days after the crab cakes, I got the tuna steak sandwich with some browned onions and an exceptionally clean-tasting, creamy tartar sauce.

Basically, the Fish House does very well with simple things, like a thick grilled yellowfin steak with an elegant cilantro-mint pesto. And when the things are very, very simple, as for instance when fish is broiled, sprinkled with paprika and served with citrus butter (which is a whole lot like maitre d’hotel butter, frankly), they’re everything that Seafood Broiler should be doing.

Alas, the Fish House has a tragic tendency to weirdness. Blackened catfish! What made anybody think something as delicate as catfish should have the blackening treatment, with a powerful scent of clove and a strong, blunt hot sauce that would be quite at home on beef? The oddest thing is the “Thai barbecue sauce” that might come on, say, California yellowtail. Not that it isn’t a most appetizing sauce. In fact, it seems to be an American barbecue sauce with extra ginger. But on fish?

Nothing fishy about the desserts. A sharp lemon tart with dense whipped cream. Mocha cheesecake with a lingering flavor (though now that I think about it, the flavor is as much like maple syrup as mocha). A citified fruit cobbler with a flaky crust that has a hole in the middle for a scoop of ice cream.

There are chintz curtains on the windows these days, but some antique Americana businessperson’s lunch-joint style still lingers.

Pine Avenue Fish House, 100 W. Broadway, Long Beach. (213) 432-PINE. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. Full bar. Street parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $25 - $55.