RESTAURANT REVIEW : Endless Summer: A Hearty Happening

Feeling optimistic, I spent some of the first days of summer eating at Endless Summer in Marina del Rey, right there on Washington Boulevard, three blocks from the beach, on the banks of a shallow canal.

As one might expect, Endless Summer is a happening kind of place: restaurant, bar, sports bar, takeout counter, pickup joint, all in one. One day, the whole place is packed with boxing fans watching closed-channel TV; a couple days later, there’s a live blues band playing loudly on the roof. Pick up what you think is a matchbook and you get a little scratch pad full of perforated paper just big enough to scrawl down the phone number of a new acquaintance.

The interior decoration alone has more plot than the classic film about the search for the perfect wave. There are aquariums full of cartoon fish, water-blue walls, a sky of swirly tropical clouds painted on the ceiling. The booths are upholstered in Jamms fabric and fake-lizard Naugahyde. Everywhere you look, it’s fuchsia, aqua, purple. In the bathroom, the sinks are sunk in a yellow surfboard, as if some surf-obsessed carpenter misheard the order for a drainboard.

And on the way to the bathroom, up the stairs, a wave curls perilously right out from the wall, bearing one rider and tumbling another in the tunnel, prompting a friend of mine to sigh, “Ahh . . . such forms the human spirit finds.”

Endless Summer draws more than a dedicated party and/or sports-mad crowd. When the dining room fills up, there are families of all ages, as well as dates, and women friends submerged deep in tete-a-tetes.

Our dinner waiter one night is blond and fond of the royal we . “Do we know what we want to drink?” . . . “Are we doing OK?” He is also unflappably politic. I say: “I’m afraid this grapefruit juice is a little fermented.” He booms: “Oh, well, that’s just what can happen when one deals in fresh fruit juices!” and promptly brings me another, fresher fresh juice. Has he thought of running for office?

The food--oh, yes, there’s food--is classic California coffee-shop eclectic with accents borrowed from Thailand, Tucson, Tuscany and Baltimore. Servings are generous, prices moderate, presentations are bright, bright, bright.

The Chilean sea bass ceviche, a clean tasty white fish with fresh cilantro, comes in a red tortilla cup and I mean red, and not the red of ground chiles, but the red of Revlon lipstick, of maraschino cherries. The accompanying fresh and juicy papaya/avocado salsa adds more color, and while everything tastes pretty good, it’s a funny, disjointed plate of food.

Pretty, but mushy crab cakes come with a nice remoulade and a clever wedge of lemon breaded in coarsely cracked pepper. Smoked turkey nachos are a towering heap of lipstick red, white and blue corn chips, meat, black beans, yellow-green guacamole, good red salsa and melted white cheese.

The Caesar salad had a scant but thick dressing, which left the croutons hard as ice, and thin sheets of Pecorino Romano, a strong sheepsmilk cheese. The Tuscany was a spinach salad with an encyclopedic assortment of condiments including big, fat, OK grilled shrimp, pitted black olives, vegetables, bacon, sun-dried tomatoes and rubbery squares of fresh mozzarella.

A goat cheese pizza was heaped with all sorts of bright fresh vegetables, bacon and a nice bland cheese. The fresh tomato-basil pasta was one of the few visual duds--the basil capellini was green--and was also fraught with garlic: clearly not the dish to order before a night of gathering phone numbers in the adjoining bar.

The dish the menu calls “Half a Rosemary Garlic Chicken With a Brick” does not come with a brick, as our waiter delighted in explaining. The chicken is cooked with a brick. The brick is washed after every use in the dishwasher. Sterilized. It is not a dirty old brick, but a clean brick, a special brick. After tasting the incredibly overcooked dried-out result of a chicken cooked in the company of this hygienic brick, I say, put the brick in a chimney.

The grilled Thai shrimp proved to be a generous portion of plump, good-sized, slightly overcooked shrimp in a pool of two sauces, one a decent cilantro cream and the other a very hot and terrible-tasting brackish red curry sauce. The grilled lamb was juicy and cooked to a good medium rareness, but the vinegary mint sauce pervaded not only the lamb but also the roasted peppers, the steamed spinach, the hunk of goat cheese, and the sizable mound of yellow rice that came with the lamb. All entrees were accompanied by this sticky, slightly undercooked rice, and an assortment of vegetables.

The night of a big fight, I went in for takeout. The place was packed, all eyes on the TVs in each room. A hostess took my order and, soon enough, the food was ready to go. We were several miles away, sitting at a table outdoors before we discovered that my cheeseburger had no cheese and my friend’s salad nicoise with grilled ahi tuna had no dressing.

Better, I think, to eat in-house, where cheerful waiters right wrongs, where Atomic Lemonade flows, where the phone numbers are, where the summer never ends.

Endless Summer, 300 Washington Blvd., Marina del Rey, (310) 821-3577. Lunch and dinner seven days, breakfast/brunch Saturday , Sunday. Major credit cards accepted. Parking in rear. Full bar. Dinner for two, food only, $20 to $50.