Friendly and Funky and Still Around : The Galley and Chez Jay: Gastronomic old fogies where the meat comes in hunks and the cheese never comes from goats

When you walk into the Galley or Chez Jay in Santa Monica, two veteran bar/restaurants (with the accent on the first syllable), you walk out of the 1990s, back through several decades, into a simpler time. You walk back into an era in which tomatoes didn’t get sun-dried unless you left them on the kitchen ledge too long; in which cheese might have been Cheddar or Swiss or Roquefort, but never came from goats; in which a hunk of charred rare meat was considered something of a culinary treasure and not a suspected carcinogen.

In other words, the Galley and Chez Jay, 56- and 31-years-old respectively, are restaurant leftovers: outmoded, gastronomically old-fogyish. They are not, however, without their charms.

The Galley calls itself “Santa Monica’s oldest restaurant and bar” (their italics), and it looks the part. There’s sawdust on the floor, Naugahyde on the booths, and a jukebox featuring Billie Holiday, Otis Redding, Sammy Davis Jr., and Hank Williams Sr. The motif is nautical: lanterns, life-preservers, fishing nets, miscellaneous ships’ fittings. It’s all pretty hokey--but it’s old, authentic hokey, as opposed to all those parody/pastiche beach-look places in the Marina and the South Bay.

The food? Not hokey. Not great. Not awful.

The Galley’s famous steamed clams (four pounds of them to an order), were pretty seriously overcooked one lunchtime--but they were much better at a subsequent dinner, and they come with a rich broth and frothy butter and slabs of fresh, warm Pioneer sourdough. It’s an easy dish to recommend. There is a decent hamburger at lunch, a big, flat patty on a shiny-topped bun, with a slice of Cheddarish cheese and a spoonful of grilled onions and cheese. But the “steak fries” that accompany this and most of the other dishes (at dinner time baked potatoes are also served) aren’t much good at all. (I don’t know who first coined that name for these inevitably mealy, soggy shards of processed potato, but steak ought to sue.)

Many of the items at the Galley taste ready-made, out of packages, whether they are or not--the steak fries, of course, but also the chili at lunch, the corn served in little bowls with steaks, the fried clams. These last, though, are actually quite good--nicely fried so that they’re crisp and not greasy, and possessed of some true clam flavor. A grilled marinated chicken breast had a pleasant bite to it one evening, but was strangely mushy inside. Steaks, for which the Galley is particularly well-known, come in six or seven cuts, and are generous in size and reasonable in price--but, with the exception of a tasty sirloin, just don’t seem very flavorful. No dessert is offered at the Galley, but the staff helpfully points out that there’s a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor just across the street.

I like the service at the Galley--friendly but not chatty, helpful but not obsequious. And I like the simple fact that it’s still here, more or less intact. (Following the death last year of its founder and longtime owner, Ralph Stephan, The Galley was purchased by a New Yorker named Ron Schur, who liked the old place and wanted to keep it as it was. “Thank you for not painting the walls white,” one regular reportedly told him recently.) I also like the plainness and resolute untrendiness of the Galley’s menu, and I don’t think this food would be very hard to fix up.

Though Chez Jay is 25 years younger than the Galley, it feels funkier--more intense, more concentrated in its dense inartificiality. There’s sawdust on the floor here, too. Christmas tree lights hang above the booths, and it has its share of nautical paraphernalia (though not as much as the Galley’s). You’ll also find hot-air-ballooning memorabilia and mementos from the other sporting exploits of Chez Jay’s proprietor, Jay Fiondella. (He was in the news a while back when his 65-foot-long, homemade pirate ship capsized on Culver Blvd., and he once put up the money for a search for the sunken treasure hidden on the Andrea Doria.)

There is also plenty of legend attached to those who visited the place: Wasn’t it here that Daniel Ellsberg, who worked next door at the Rand Corp., passed the so-called Pentagon Papers to a reporter? And which waitress was it that Marlon Brando supposedly once took home? And what did Steve McQueen do that night at that half-hidden back booth?

Speaking of legends, there’s actually a real, old-fashioned “relish tray” of raw carrot and celery sticks, radishes, and such on the table when you sit down at Chez Jay--an amenity once ubiquitous in L.A. restaurants, but now practically the stuff of fable hereabouts. There are also big baskets of old-style garlic bread--which ain’t bruschetta con pomodoro but ain’t bad.

The food in general is more stylized here than at the Galley, and mostly pretty good in a basic sort of way (though the steamed clams were very rubbery one evening, and the creamy clam chowder was seriously over-salted). The scampi with garlic and shallots, served in a little gratin dish on top of oil-soaked toast, though, was delicious--reactionary though it may have been from the viewpoint of contemporary cuisine. A shrimp curry “a l’Indienne” didn’t seem like the sort of thing the average Indienne would recognize, but was quite good in a Westernized, French-bistro way: peppery, slightly sweet, and succulent (and, yes, curries of this sort are found in French bistros sometimes).

The house specialty, dubbed steak au poivre , comme chez Maxim’s , is a decent piece of meat, topped with black pepper, crumbled bacon, and shallot--but the butter steak (both are New York cuts), sauteed with butter and dried herbs, seems far more flavorful. A nice big piece of swordfish, served with credible sauce bearnaise, was cooked perfectly one evening, and very good. Dinner prices, which range from $10.95 (chicken breast Chez Jay) to $29.95 (whole broiled lobster tail), include soup or salad (the Roquefort dressing is good; the green goddess is excessively anchovy-ridden, even for a lover of those little creatures), low-key vegetables (for instance, sauteed summer squash), and a choice of baked or au gratin potatoes. These latter, which used to be described on the menu as “La Jolla potatoes,” are interleaved with bananas (!), which blend with the spuds and lend a kind of sticky sweetness to them. These are better than they sound, though the dish has a kind of concentrated salty flavor, as if cooked with insufficiently diluted bouillon cubes.

Fiondella, who will close Chez Jay at the end of the year, but open again nearby, candidly says, “Lunch is Mickey Mouse here; dinner is what I’m known for.” But the fact is that lunch at Chez Jay is quite pleasant, and something of a bargain. A seafood salad (also available as a dinner appetizer), served in a huge conch shell, is mostly bay shrimp with chopped lettuce, a few bits of carrot, cherry tomatoes, some superfluous black olives, and a few pieces of good, fresh crab claw on the rim--sort of silly, but still strangely appealing, especially with the recommended sherry-honey dressing. The hamburger is very good, though it comes practically ungarnished. The little luncheon New York steak is just fine, and is accompanied by rice, vegetable, and garlic toast--a steal for $6.25.

While the Galley offers no dessert, Chez Jay offers but one: a creamy homemade cheesecake in which lurk raisins, almond extract, and more bananas, all under a thick foam of whipped cream. (“Where the banana grows, man is sensual and cruel,” Emerson once opined.) Fiondella came to the table one evening as our party was wondering whether to try it or not.

“You’ve got to have some cheesecake to finish the wine with,” he advised. “Here’s what you do. Take a little wine in your mouth and swirl it around and swallow it, then take a bite of cheesecake, then take another sip of wine. It’s great. Trust me. I’ve been here 30 years.”

He started to walk away, then turned back, “Of course,” he added with a wink, “you’re supposed to do it naked.”

The Galley

2442 Main Street, Santa Monica, (213) 452-1934.

Lunch 11:30 a.m. to “about a quarter to four” Monday through Friday; dinner 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily. American Express, Diner’s Club, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Full bar. Street parking.

Suggested dishes: Steamed clams, $24 ($13 half order); fried clams, $9; sirloin steak, $16.

Chez Jay

1657 Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica, (213) 395-1741.

Lunch noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday; dinner 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. daily. American Express, Diner’s Club, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Full bar. Parking lot.

Suggested dishes: Seafood salad, $6.75 (lunch), $9 (dinner); luncheon New York steak, $6; scampi, $8; shrimp curry a l’Indienne, $13.50; butter steak, $14.50; swordfish bearnaise, $16.75.