RESTAURANT REVIEW : North Beach Serves Up Manly Meals

By now everybody must have heard about the Venice Ballerino. On a building at Rose Avenue and Main Street stands an animated ballerina mannequin, gracefully raising and lowering her leg, with an oversized male clown face stuck over her head. Tourists take photographs; locals dream of vandalizing it.

It might do for Venice what the Eiffel Tower did for Paris, or come to think of it what the canals were supposed to do for Venice.

What kind of restaurant locates itself under the Sign of the Ballerino? Perhaps a place with a gorgeous turquoise aquarium behind the bar and a rugged sheet of copper with water flowing down it decorating one wall? Yes, all that, but don’t be deceived. North Beach Bar & Grill looks chichi but it’s actually a hairy-chested, old-fashioned steak house.

It revels in aggressive flavors. Lots of anise goes into the oysters Rockefeller, and plenty of Parmesan, garlic and anchovy in the Caesar salad. The steamed clams come in a broth with a booming note of garlic and marjoram, visible flecks of red pepper floating around in it. With the fried zucchini (good fried zucchini, not too soft) comes a honey mustard, with the accent heavily on the mustard.

Shrimp appetizers (I’d take the beer-battered shrimp over the tired shrimp cocktail) are accompanied by a solid cocktail sauce and a stunningly good tartar sauce, clean and fresh tasting. Incidentally, raw oysters come with the same cocktail sauce and a pot of horseradish, but you can usually talk someone into bringing a little of that tartar sauce as well.

The hairy-chested style persists in the entrees. With your steak you get studly chunks of steamed vegetables and a steak knife that looks like a Bowie knife with a serrated blade. The waiters refer to it as the Rambo knife.

The filet steak is worthy of all these theatrics. It’s an excellent piece of meat, tender and flavorful. I can’t say I found the advertised bearnaise sauce, but it did come with a strong port wine sauce that had a breath of cilantro in it; not to everybody’s taste, but no problem to remove.

That’s the best of the steaks. In order of increasing fattiness and gristliness we also find a New York steak, a rib eye with horseradish sauce and a porterhouse with brown butter that practically overflows the plate. Go for the filet.

The rest of the entrees are mostly seafood and pasta. The best of the fish, hands down, is the grilled swordfish with butter and capers. It’s a big thick chunk, beautifully cooked--essentially a swordfish steak , now that I think of it.

The linguine with clams is essentially the steamed clam appetizer with linguine added to the powerfully flavored broth. There’s also a huge garlic roast chicken and a not terribly flavorful pork chop; the restaurant’s own apple sauce on the pork chop is pleasant, though more like sliced stewed apples than apple sauce.

The retro angle persists at dessert time. The ice cream sundae is a little slovenly in presentation, but it has the true old-fashioned soda-fountain style: a couple of scoops of ice cream surrounded by big drifts of dense whipped cream, with little pots of chopped walnuts and fudge, caramel and raspberry sauces for doctoring it. The ice cream pie, which has peanuts and chocolate bits as well as vanilla ice cream, is another dietarily indefensible pleasure.

The pastry on the apple turnover is on the tough side, too tough for a fork (you might ask for one of the Rambo knives), but the caramel sauce goes well with the slightly caramelized apple filling. The chocolate pecan torte has no big chunks of pecan but isn’t oversweetened as these things tend to be.

The best dessert I’ve had was on special, but I hope the restaurant keeps it. It’s an old-time peach cobbler with the real biscuit-style crust, one of the few to be found in a restaurant (amazing how people can serve cobblers without bothering to check the recipe).

Who’d have thought it? At the Sign of the Ballerino, they serve Real Men’s food.

North Beach Bar & Grill, 111 Rose Ave., Venice; (213) 399-3900. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 6-11 p.m.; brunch 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Full bar. Valet parking in underground lot on Navy Street. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only: $35-$73.