RESTAURANT REVIEW : Caught Between Hard Rock, Ma Maison, Pacifics Copes Well

Pacifics is in an awkward situation: under an escalator, a few steps east of the Hard Rock Cafe, across the street from the new Ma Maison. Especially that last part. As a shopping-mall restaurant (it’s in the Beverly Center, though you have to enter from the sidewalk), it could seem almost impressive, but the other side of the street from Ma Maison is a desperate place for a restaurant.

True to its name, it leans heavily to seafood, starting with an appetizer list of decent oyster-bar fare. The crab cocktail, for instance, is not random scraps of claw meat mixed with sauce but whole chunks, the sauce served on the side. This is a noble way of doing things, even if the crab meat might be a little more flavorful.

Pacifics throws clams around with a generous hand. The best dish on the menu is probably the linguine in thick cream sauce loaded with clams and garlic. The clam chowder, of a floury rather than a creamy texture, is well stocked with clams. Pacifics even puts chopped clams into Caesar salad; the clams do add something subtle and meaty to the salad, though some people are going to have a hard time with the little gray lumps of stuff that look as if they’re climbing around on the lettuce leaves.

The seafood entrees are mostly straightforward things like broiled swordfish sprinkled with paprika on a bed of spinach, though with that one you do get French-fried julienned yams (call them shoestring potatoes made from yams). Even the dishes on special are likely to be reassuring old favorites, like blackened red snapper, that little Southern California Cajun tradition of ours. It’s not bad as blackened snappers go, in a crunchy crust much heavier on cumin than red pepper.

Sometimes, though, Pacifics gets high on sauces. Chicken New Mexico is chicken breast in a rich cream sauce pleasingly flavored with pecans, corn kernels and chunks of sweet pepper. Trout Santa Fe is much the same with tomatoes in place of pecans. The highly flavored sauce is delicious, but is that really a trout under it? Who can tell?

And sometimes it gets maybe a little too high on sauces. Scallops Cho-Cho San come in a very exotic mixture of white wine, cilantro and plum sauce, plus paddy mushrooms and broccoli. The aroma is oddly reminiscent of an old Madeira wine mixed with cilantro, and a bit sweet in the bargain. I guess I like it, though I can’t think what I’d like it on. Not scallops, anyway.

And Pacifics has a very mistaken idea that there is a special affinity between seafood and orange juice. It serves excellent barbecued shrimp sprinkled with hot paprika, but they come with a pilaf mawkishly dashed with orange juice and a most absurd barbecue sauce that tastes like ketchup plus orange juice. Alas, the restaurant is about to introduce a new menu, which they boast will contain yet more orange sauces and even some tangerine sauces, not to mention black-bean sauces--which sound ominous in their own right.

It’s odd that Pacifics doesn’t seem to have any orange desserts. Mostly the dessert list is a selection of semi-familiar pastries: cakes and tarts and that box thing made of slabs of chocolate with more chocolate stuff inside. The caramel pecan basket, though, is unusual and quite good, a basket of pecans lined with chocolate on the inside, filled with vanilla Bavarian cream and strawberries. It looks homely but the flavors and the textural contrast are a great success.

Pacifics is in an awkward situation, but aren’t we all sometimes? I’ll say this much: If I don’t have the money for Ma Maison or the right attitude for the Hard Rock and I’m on the sidewalk outside the Beverly Center, it’s where I’m going for clam linguine, anyway.

Pacifics, 8500 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 652-1974. Open for lunch and dinner seven days. Parking in Beverly Center. Wine and beer. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $27-$73.