RESTAURANT REVIEW : Unpredictable Entrees Cloud Sky Grill Dining Experience

The Sky Grill is a big, wide-open kind of place full of long, flat white walls with a few dark aqua highlights. A vast sea of perfectly set tables. Cheerful, airy paintings on the wall. I was there three times before I put it together that this was formerly the site of El Mocambo, an upscale Cuban party restaurant lush with palms, opulent fruit displays and costumed waiters. Gone are all traces of that extravaganza.

A joint venture by Teasers’ Jeff Di Mugno and Ocean Ave. Seafood’s Chris Adlesh, the Sky Grill, according to its menu, aspires to be “another good restaurant on Third” that offers “great food, caring service and easy prices.”

As it happened, we did have a terrific waitress on our first visit, a woman who was very no-nonsense, present and efficient. My friend wanted a steak, but the only one on the menu came with a “zesty brandy sauce” and he’s allergic to brandy. The waitress promptly consulted with the chef, who was sitting nearby at a table with some friends. He assured us he could make a brandy-less sauce.

There were only a few tables of diners on a weekday night. Many more people were gathered in the elevated bar area, which seemed to support a small but lively singles scene. The food came out of the kitchen with alacrity, which meant there was an impressively swift cooking staff, because the chef, although dressed in his working whites, remained seated at the nearby table for the duration of our dinner.

I enjoyed the scallop brochette, three fat, perfectly cooked scallops wrapped in pancetta and served with a dill horseradish that actually tasted more like a nicely spiced tartar sauce. The seared tuna was in a tasty soy-based vinaigrette with half of a good ripe avocado, but the little squares of tuna meat were striated with an unchewable, stringy membrane. A Caesar salad was acceptable. The entrees were less so.

I had the yellowtail with water chestnut-scallion relish, which turned out to be a good, dense wedge of meat topped by what tasted like canned, pickled water chestnuts. It was served with a mound of medicinal-tasting, underdone saffron rice. As for the steak, the slightly sour substitute sauce, rife with peppercorns, really didn’t kick any life into a very pedestrian piece of meat.

As we left, the chef called out to us from his table of friends and thanked us for coming. We waved back, but I secretly wished he’d slipped into the kitchen to sample that rice and maybe some of the other food to make sure he really wanted to send it out to customers tasting as it did. Surely, a kitchen that could cook such good scallops was capable of better.

On our next visit, three of us were served by a friendly waiter who listened in on our conversation enough so that he could learn our names and then call us by them. Again the food came out of the kitchen promptly. I enjoyed the smoky, rich roasted corn chowder, although it was mostly cubed potatoes. The spicy calamari was crunchy and actually rather mildly seasoned. The linguine with sweet sausage and chicken might have been an excellent dish, but our enthusiasm was tempered after several lumps of what tasted like raw chicken.

One friend absolutely loved her sweet, perfectly grilled trout with a good fresh mango sauce. Unfortunately, the other two entrees were inedible. Shrimp linguine in broth had dry, pasty-tasting shrimp in an otherwise bland assembly of watery broth and boiled mushrooms. And the California lamb “scaloppina” turned out to be thin discs of lamb that, as far as we could tell, had been fried, then glazed with maple syrup and topped with a few chopped hazelnuts.

Our waiter recommended what he called the Sky Grill’s “ piece de resistance ,” a Heath Bar creme brulee , which turned out to be a shallow bowl of weak custard studded with hunks of melting candy bar.

As we left, the waiter and one of the owners apologized about the entrees and offered to buy us our next dinner at the Sky Grill.

We did not return for dinner, but two of us sampled breakfast one Sunday morning. The room is sunlit and cheering in the daylight and it felt like a good place to have breakfast. While the so-called “fresh orange juice” tastes fresh from the carton, the rest of breakfast was just fine. The kitchen was again perfectly prompt. The tasty chicken hash was made with little nuggets of chicken fried up with potatoes and onions and spices. The peach pancakes were four whopping-big flapjacks with slices of sweet fresh peaches. And the service was appropriately caring.

Sky Grill, 8338 West 3rd St., Los Angeles, (213) 653-9826. Lunch Tuesday through Friday, dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Breakfast Saturday and Sunday. Full bar. All major credit cards. Parking on street. Dinner for two, food only, $26-$65.