RESTAURANT REVIEW : Caribbean Color, Rum Galore at Santa Monica’s Key West

Caribbean food, as we know, is the Next Thing, the Cuisine of Destiny. So we’ve been hearing since the mid-’80s. And why not? It’s spicy and sweet, bright and cheerful with a hint of tropical savagery, and exotic but undemanding. In a sense, it’s avant-garde beach food and, hey, summer’s coming right up.

When you think Caribbean, you think of rum. At Key West, a tiny Santa Monica place full of colorful paintings of tropical street life, there are actually more than 20 rums on the drink list. Among them is one from Austria (yes, Austria) with a rich, fascinating aroma like vanilla, brown sugar and marshmallow. It’s an astonishing 180 proof, and should be tasted in tiny sips, or maybe not tasted at all, but only smelled.

You also think of starches: beans, breads, rice, bananas. As soon as you sit down at Key West you’re served fried slices of plantain, that starchy cousin of the banana. They’re a pleasant chew with their little pot of salsa. If you order them as an appetizer (misspelled on the menu here as “toastones”), you’ll get a much larger plate, but in that case they come with rather insipid guava butter instead of salsa. Really better than the “toastones” are the curried maduros , sweet plantain slices fried soft with curry spices.

Among the fried seafood appetizers, I like the conch fritters best. This Caribbean bivalve is ground up and fried in patties faintly flavored with clove. Fish cakes are similar but, although of a generous size, relatively plain. The one appetizer to skip is the pastellas , pork tamales made with murderously dry, oddly purplish masa of no particular corn flavor.

The traditional Cuban sandwich of ham, pork and cheese on a crusty French roll is a solid model. Even better, though, is the Jamaican steak sandwich, made with very tender fried beef sliced practically carpaccio-thin, topped with yellow-brown cooked onions as well as lettuce, tomato and mayo.

The steak sandwich comes with French-fried sweet potatoes, which, like the pastellas , turn out to be another problem in the starch department. My waitress pointedly asked whether I wanted ketchup for the potatoes, and it was a kindness. These things are really intolerably dry. Destiny or no destiny, I don’t think sweet potatoes are meant to become French fries.

The steak entree has a definite family resemblance to the steak sandwich; it’s also tender and sliced paper-thin, and it’s enjoyably covered with crunchy, tasty little bits of the dark-red spice annatto. Altogether the best entree is the pork loin, which has a charming perfume of lemon juice, garlic, bay leaf and cloves. For once, a pork dish that’s not at all sweet.

The rest of the entrees are beach food but not so avant-garde. Every plate is colorful with yellow rice, or black beans, or tomato salsa. “Cammarones” (usually spelled with one m ) is a dish of middle-weight shrimp and pork chorizo served on turmeric-colored rice. Duval Street Chicken is said to be marinated in fruit juices, but it seems to be a pretty ordinary roast chicken, and pretty dry.

The best dessert seems to be the coconut cheesecake, with a coconut sauce reminiscent of the good part of a Mounds Bar; the worst is a guava cheesecake. Just as sweet potatoes are not meant to be French fries, guava is evidently not destined to flavor cheesecake. Sweet plantains in chocolate sauce are a sloppy plateful, but useful in case of a chocolate attack.

Key West is a handy place, and quite popular, pretty full even on a Sunday. I just hope they can lick that starch problem. Destiny demands it.

Key West, 307 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. (213) 395-5115. Open for lunch and dinner daily. Full bar. Street parking. MasterCard and Visa. Dinner for two, food only, $29-$58.