The Ritz: A Classic Example of Old-Style Fine Dining

It’s Friday evening, and we’re at the Ritz smack on time for our 6:30 reservation. Only it turns out the main dining room is booked for the next three hours. Unless we want to wait until 9:30, we are informed, we have just two seating choices: the jampacked bar, where pipe and cigar smoking are permitted, or a hidden rear room. We take the art-filled, rather claustrophobic room in the back.

Anyone who says fine dining is dead need only show up here on a busy night. The Ritz is still a bastion of old-style fine dining, not only in terms of food but also in its classic appointments (gilt-edged mirrors, black-leather booths), and it enjoys vigorous health.

Not that some things haven’t changed around here. For one thing, the waitresses are no longer obliged to wear hot pants, I am told, though most seem to be wearing them anyway. For another, owner Hans Prager has yanked many of the controversial oil paintings that long decorated this place--mostly female nudes in supine postures--replacing them with gaudy, colorful prints by the French artist Guy Buffet.

As for the food, Prager hired the talented Claude Koeberle, formerly of Mille Fleurs in Rancho Santa Fe, to take over his kitchen last summer. And just six weeks ago, the restaurant started opening for Sunday dinner after being closed Sundays for 11 years.

Recently a reader’s poll in Conde Nast Traveler named the Ritz the 13th best restaurant in the country (Le Bec Fin of Philadelphia finished first) and No. 1 overall in service. That is an incredible vote of confidence and gives you an idea how pampered you feel when dining here.

Perhaps it subtly validates Prager’s taste in art as well. Not all the artfully racy paintings are gone--the dining area behind the bar is still lined with them--and Conde Nast Traveler readers apparently approve.

I’ve been eating at the Ritz often during the last month or two and enjoying it more than I have in previous years. Prager’s idea of good food has always been synonymous with opulence. Where else but here, for instance, could you find a dish like the carousel--a lazy Susan of gravlax, prawns, Dungeness crab legs, lobster medallions, duck liver pate, filet of smoked trout, prosciutto, steak tartare (of filet mignon) and herring marinated in sour cream? No matter that these ingredients are, by themselves, tasty. Lucullus himself would reel at the prospect of all this richesse.

When you order simply, though, some of this cooking can be quite a pleasure even to moderate appetites. This is particularly true at lunch, when crab cakes, mussels and Cobb salad can be ordered as entrees.

The crisp Dungeness crab cakes come with an eccentric celery root-apple slaw and a creamy, slightly spicy remoulade sauce. During my last lunch here, I ate two of these golden brown cakes, washing them down with one of the restaurant’s trademark frozen martinis--a mini-decanter full to the brim with Bombay Sapphire gin. The experience makes me fantasize that I’m power-lunching among senators at some Capitol Hill hot spot.

The mussels used here aren’t the bland, green-lipped variety from New Zealand but tiny, delicate cultured mussels from Prince Edward Island, Canada. You get an entire panful, submerged in their blue-black shells by a good, if mildly overboard, broth based on vermouth, garlic, shallots, tomatoes and cream. As for the Cobb salad, the Ritz serves this Southern California classic (chopped avocado, bacon, tomatoes, blue cheese, chicken and greens) in a big wooden bowl, and it is certainly the equal of any I’ve ever tasted.

But when you come for dinner, you find the cooking can still get as bogged down in excess as ever. Take the osso buco , an enormous shank of prime veal, fork-tender and beautiful to behold. Why couldn’t the Ritz just serve it with the kitchen’s fine-leaf spinach, instead of fussing up the plate with over-sauced, overcooked pasta and a heap of mushy polenta?

One evening a special of soft-shell crabs came in a heavy batter coating. Without that, the crabs might have been delightful. The prime culotte steak can be tough and overdone (the one dish served here that I would actually call substandard). Roast duck in the Bavarian manner is a particularly fine bird, served on a plate full of extras: warm apples, sweet and sour red cabbage, lingonberry sauce and spaetzle dumplings. All the side dishes taste fine on their own; lumped together, they cloy rapidly.

In short, I would like all this food more if it were lighter, but the prospects of that happening are slight. Chef Koeberle may have introduced a certain degree of lighter cooking, but it’s not by chance that the main dining room is dominated by a portrait of Auguste Escoffier, the early 20th Century chef who codified French cuisine for decades to come in all its focus on butter and cream (the room is actually called the Escoffier Room). Hans Prager himself learned to cook in this style at the old Waldorf Astoria in New York, and he has said he wants to give customers their money’s worth.

Anyone who finds the restaurant pricey, by the way, should take note of the chance to dine here on Sunday. On Sunday evenings only, complete three-course dinners are available for $24.50.

One Sunday, my wife and I dined in high style at a reasonable price. The first course offered two choices (cream of asparagus soup or a cold, crisp Romaine lettuce heart with Roquefort dressing), the second course four (Canadian halibut, Lake Superior whitefish, pork rib chops or lamb sirloin). At dessert, there was a fine sampler.

Dessert, by the way, is one place where Koeberle does seem to have lightened things up. There is now a wonderful raspberry creme brulee, an almond-crusted pear tart with caramel sauce and a five-layer chocolate fantasy to go along with Ritz classics such as harlequin souffle (Grand Marnier and chocolate) and profiteroles (chocolate-coated ice cream puffs).

The Ritz is expensive. Appetizers and salads are $4.50 to $12.50. Entrees are $17.50 to $28.

THE RITZ

* 880 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach.

* (714) 720-1800.

* Lunch Monday through Friday 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; dinner Monday through Thursday 6 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5:30 to 11 p.m., and Sunday 5 to 10 p.m.

* All major cards accepted.