San Diego Spotlight : Would You Care for a Burger With Your Noise?

Sports bars come and sports bars go--and in San Diego, despite the city’s reputation as a center of professional sports mania, they do tend to go.

There’s a new place in La Jolla called Moondoggie’s that borrows a 1960s surfer moniker for its name but takes sports, as purveyed over 10 television screens, as its reason for existence. If you want to eat and drink while watching the athletic activity of the moment (live or recorded, as the case may be), this casual upstairs eatery provides another option.

Probably the ultimate occasion to visit Moondoggie’s is a full-moon-drenched Monday night during football season, which, as it happens, exactly describes the past Monday. “Monday Night Football” was in play on the TV screens, the crowd around the horseshoe-shaped bar was in full cry, and connoisseurs of noise found it difficult to hear themselves munching hamburgers and ribs over the din. But because a sports bar is all about excitement and activity, the scene was just right.

The food was another matter altogether. The menu, given the restaurant’s orientation, takes an almost literal all- American stance and aims mostly at training table fare, heavy on the meats and carbohydrates and decidedly two-fisted in terms of portion size. You may not wish to finish everything on the plate, but if you do, there isn’t a Hail Mary chance of leaving hungry.

The menu opens with nachos and closes with a plate of grilled fresh vegetables, and between these two dishes offers a fair survey of much of what is popular in contemporary casual dining. The lightness of the vegetable plate is by and large an aberration, however, since this list pays far more attention to such requisites of bar fare as onion rings, burgers and pizza.

Although entree portions are more than generous, an opening snack seems pretty much required if you want to feel at home in the surroundings. The most radical would be the Cajun fish tacos, a spicy variation on a theme that uses mahi mahi and a white sauce heated with jalapenos. Other than that, the starters are the sorts of things that could be found at saloons--sports bars and otherwise--coast to coast, including the ubiquitous “Buffalo wings,” nachos and fried potato wedges garnished with sour cream, bacon and cheese.

The best of the bunch probably would be the “island rings,” a messy batch of onion rings cooked more or less in the “loaf” style introduced by the Tony Roma’s rib houses. Greasy and flavorful, these are about all that one can ask of onion rings. The Buffalo-style chicken wings, hot with cayenne pepper and sided with the obligatory blue cheese dressing (a more bizarre combination is difficult to imagine, but it certainly is popular), are more than sufficiently spicy and also meaty enough.

The barbecued baby back ribs in a Bourbon-flavored sauce similarly are meaty, if not as tender as they might be; the sauce itself has a good deal of flavor and makes finger licking a pleasure. This dish is accompanied, most unusually, by what the menu is pleased to call a watermelon salad, but which seems mostly just a pile of cubed fruit. Close examination suggested that there just might been the faintest hint of spice in this “salad,” but the sensation may have been nothing more than the imagination bending over backwards to be kind.

The rest of the menu continues in much the same vein, with salads--an Oriental chicken version and a Caesar dressed up with avocado and roasted red peppers--prefacing the sandwich and hamburger lists. A comment that can be made about these categories is that the kitchen takes the view that more is better. You can’t possibly feel shortchanged by these hefty sandwiches, but beyond that they seem assembled in a perfunctory manner. For some reason, those sampled seemed dry, including the lavishly layered turkey club, the roast beef sandwich jazzed up with cheese and chili peppers and the house hamburger, draped with several kinds of melted cheese and almost too large to be conveniently approached by an average-sized mouth. The choice of accompaniments with these are a simple green salad or french fries that are better fresh than reheated, as they were on one occasion.

Options continue with the house pizzas, which are square, served on an unusual grilled crust and not very exciting. A pie that featured pesto and grilled chicken along with much cheese was notable mostly for a salty flavor. There are also several pastas, which might seem out of place in a sports bar were Moondoggie’s not positioned both in San Diego and in 1992, and a few formal entrees, such as sirloin steak, chicken, halibut and yellowfin tuna, all of them grilled.

Desserts are catered by outside suppliers; the list includes pecan pie and cheesecake.

Ambience, more than food, would seem to be Moondoggie’s strong suit. In addition to the sports motif and the televised action that plays loudly on the occasion of major events, this casual place presents a pleasant enough face and is especially likable for the terrace, perched above Prospect Street and just about ideal for a simple lunch on one of those rare afternoons when the La Jolla weather decides to live up to its reputation for perfection.

The service, in keeping with the tone of the establishment, is casual, but the servers get the job done and most guests should feel quite comfortable here. Moondoggie’s is up one flight and across a courtyard from the ever-popular Hard Rock Cafe.

MOONDOGGIE’S 909 Prospect St., La Jolla 454-9722 Lunch and dinner daily Sandwiches and entrees $5.75 to $11.25. Dinner for two, including a beer each, tax and tip, about $20 to $35. Credit cards accepted