RESTAURANT REVIEW : Simple Fare the Best Bet at the BB

The Broadway Bar & Grill on the 3rd Street Promenade is the type of place that we Americans, raised on Archie Bunker and weaned on “Cheers,” number among our basic human rights. Housed in one of Santa Monica’s oldest brick buildings, this classic San Francisco-style eating and drinking establishment has been around five years--it survived the block’s conversion to a walking mall and continues to do a steady, respectable trade.

Like any serious bar and grill, the place is filled with dark wood, dark booths for privacy, dark partitions between bar and restaurant. Especially charming are the tiny tables in the bar: They’re just big enough for drinks and elbows, the perfect setting for an intense conversation on the virtues of hockey. The bar itself is a substantial vintage relic uprooted from another, older, authentic bar back East. Televisions are tuned to sporting events. One learns, after a while, not to faint each time the bar crowd roars at a particularly galling interception or tackle.

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For all its classic touches, one could say the place has been kissed by contemporary ideas of bar and grilldom. In addition to chops and fish and chips, there’s pasta and salads made with baby lettuce on the menu, as well as a number of post-modern architectonics such as faux-marbled pillars, a false ceiling and kleig lights. There’s also a small, fenced-in patio outside on the Promenade, where you can sit under awnings and watch the topiary triceratops spit water into a pool.

On weekend nights, the bar burgeons with a lively, young singles scene but the dining room stays persistently democratic in terms of age, gender, personal style. The couple next to us are cheery octogenarians--the tortilla soup’s a little spicy for them, they say. The young couple on the other side of us are home for the holidays from their colleges back East. New Year’s Day, a large family of red-shirted Badgers arrive, triumphant, for dinner; they’re subjected to only the lightest good-natured ribbing. Besides, the bar crowd is already engrossed in another bowl--the Orange, the Sugar, it matters not.

When ordering, it seems wise to stick with simpler, standard bar and grill fare. The simpler the salad, for example, the better: nothing wrong with the mixed baby greens, or the mixed baby greens with blue cheese and toasted hazelnuts. The grilled chicken salad with sunflower sprouts and crispy thread-like potatoes has its pleasures. But order the endive salad with pear and Stilton cheese and the kitchen is over its head: It’s the standard mixed baby greens with a few slices of rock-hard pear and four meager spears of Belgian endive.

On a chilly day, acorn soup sounds perfect--and would be if only it were, well, soupy; instead, we have a bowlful of tasty, fluffy squash puree that, like egg whites, forms stiff peaks.

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Steamed whole Louisiana shrimp are the most expensive appetizer and the most hard work. I had to clean the shrimp myself--pull off heads and skins, devein them--a process that endeared neither me nor the perfectly fine finished shrimp to my squeamish dinner companion (not a dish to order on a first date). Golden calamari fritti , the bar and grill food of the ‘90s, while curiously uncrisp, comes with a delicious ancho chile mayonnaise. Grilled vegetable skewers are wonderful, and too small.

Singapore chicken breasts, with a rich nut crust and a sweet honey mustard sauce, are pretty terrible, but a basic, unadorned corned beef and bright-green cabbage is a perfectly workable meal. The Broadway burger tastes like a burger you’d make at home: It’s juicy, on a crusty French roll with a slice of dead-ripe tomato, and comes with very ordinary fries.

Crab cakes are fresher and crabbier than many around. Fish and chips suffer from the same dullish fries as the burger and a vinegar absolutely lacking in any bite.

BB&G; servers are cheerful but harried; the place seems perpetually short-staffed. Service itself tends to be minimal, sometimes bordering on neglectful. You get seated, you get your food, eventually you get your check. That’s about it. As we wait for our dinner plates to be cleared, our urge for dessert gradually is replaced by the urge to pay the check and go.

* Broadway Bar & Grill, 1460 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica, (310) 393-4211. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner. (Brunch on Sundays.) Full bar. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $22-$61.