Ellis Island: It’s a Small World and Very Large Menu

“Why would anyone call a restaurant Ellis Island? “ a friend of mine wonders aloud as we pull into the valet parking area.

Pass through the portals of this Newport Beach combination restaurant, night club, gift shop and billiard parlor and you’ll find out. You’ll get an instant rush of all-American eclecticism. Take a look around the bar and see people eating gravlax, boar satay, goulash and gazpacho--dishes from almost anywhere on Earth.

“E Pluribus Unum” trumpets the menu here, paying homage to the 100 million Americans who can trace their ancestries back to a humble immigration queue in New York harbor. Here is a veritable United Nations of eating right in our own back yard, inspired by the very spirit of freedom itself.

So much for idealism. Now, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story:

It begins in 1976, when first-generation Italian-American Lucia Luhan opens What’s Cooking, an upscale neighborhood bistro in Newport Beach. A second What’s Cooking follows in Costa Mesa, and so does an Italian restaurant, Luciana’s Ristorante in Dana Point. In 1985 she buys a farm house in Tuscany and begins making her own olive oil; in 1990, she opens a cooking school there.

But Luhan is not content even with all this heady stuff. She dreams of opening an international eatery where she can celebrate the entire world--a world she clearly adores (as anyone who meets her is bound to discover). So, about two months back, with the help of her husband, an Argentine-born surgeon, she opens Ellis Island. Now, to paraphrase the song, she’s got the whole world in her hands.

It’s some concept. You enter the restaurant through what Luhan calls the Island Shop, a gift shop where whole-bean coffees, cookbooks and crafts are sold. The live music you hear is coming from the Union Hall, a cavernous room that features an 18-tap bar, a cozy fireplace and a glass case filled with hand-blown bottles of expensive grappa. Just to the right is a white-brick Cape Cod-style dining room whose charms include clapboard shutters, wooden captain’s chairs and faux chandeliers hung with luminescent blue candles. Cross the dining room and you come to Club ‘92, an informal club room with two billiard tables.

Impressed? Wait until you see this menu. The restaurant’s 28-page book-bound menu looks like a Fortune 500 takeover proposal. Just look at the contents: dishes numbering in the hundreds, hot and cold tapas, bios of the owners, an entertainment calendar, satay (Malay-inspired miniature shish kebabs cooked on wooden skewers), a short treatise on olive oil, a list of international wines and beers and a description of food and wine programs in Tuscany. Whew!

First, you need to know that the menu is focused on grazing and (this is where the confusion starts) that most of it lists dishes not served in the dining room. (The dining room menu is small, though diverse; you’ll find it on page 20).

The appetizers provide a rousing start to a serious dinner: for instance, cazuela, a Mediterranean fish stew loaded with leek, saffron and good fresh shellfish. However, the main course dishes such as chicken Portuguese, gigot d’agneau and kung pao shrimp give you a good idea of the limits of this kitchen. The chicken, baked in a sauce of roasted peppers and onions, is excellent. The gigot, a roasted leg of lamb with white beans, is solidly prepared (although the chef forgot our beans). But the kung pao is a dismal mass of dark soy and overcooked shrimp.

You’ll have to visit Club ’92 or Union Hall to eat tapas, pizzas and stews, the most successful cooking here. The satays are first-rate, made in truly imaginative ways: Bangkok boar--gamy and intriguing, tasting of a coconut milk marinade; Thai shrimp--soft and yielding, in a spicy peanut ginger sauce; garlic and lamb (my favorite)--pungent with yogurt, lime, garlic and hot pepper, like something you’d get in Singapore.

The snacks called tapas (although they aren’t real Spanish tapas) are no slouches either. The smooth, creamy hummus tastes like what you’d find in any good Middle Eastern restaurant, the garbanzo puree authentically garnished with a puddle of Luhan’s own olive oil. Panzanella is a delicious Tuscan bread salad made with chopped tomato and fresh basil, and this one would pass muster in Luhan’s beloved Tuscany. Ultra-salty Southwestern-style spare ribs and a tasty Anaheim chili stuffed with goat cheese are typical of the hot tapas.

Pizza is quite accomplished here too--thin-crusted, and also of an ostentatiously international bent. Pizza Zorba is topped with good eggplant, feta cheese and olives. Pizza Czar Nicholas is made with smoked salmon and salmon caviar.

The list of soups, stews, salads and veggies reads like an atlas of the world’s foods: d’fina, salade Nicoise, Indian spinach, yaki soba. The d’fina, a Moroccan beef and bean stew, is particularly fine, tasting faintly of cumin and full of white beans and tender lean beef.

Now, some of you may be asking whether anyone can bring all this off. The issue is moot. Quite a few of these dishes are better than you have a right to expect, and some of them don’t work at all. But many, predictably, are just plain unavailable. For example, of the 10 international desserts listed on page 17 one evening, only two were actually being served. “I’ve still got a few of these desserts,” Luhan said rather downheartedly, “but they have been sitting around, and I don’t want to serve them.”

I admire her attitude, but that doesn’t solve the problem. Ellis Island is just going to have to trim down to realistic proportions or face a difficult road ahead. The message does get across, though. Unintentionally, the Luhans may have fashioned the perfect metaphor for the ‘90s.

Ellis Island is moderately priced. Tapas are $3.95 to $7.95. Pasta and pizza is $4.95 to $14.95. Satay is $7.95. Entrees are $11.95 to $17.95.

* ELLIS ISLAND

* 353 E. Coast Highway, Newport Beach.

* (714) 673-7800.

* Dinner Sunday through Thursday 5 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday till 11 p.m. Union Hall and Club ’92 open nightly 4:30 p.m. to 2 a.m.

* All major cards accepted.