Restaurant Review : Fish Co.: Seafood for the Masses

Fish Co., a.k.a. the Famous Enterprise Fish Company, tucked on Kinney Street in Santa Monica almost forever now, has recently changed its logo and spruced up its menu with no apparent blip in its nonstop popularity.

This vast feeding hall rigged with fishnets and fiberglass fish, cork floats and splintery lobster traps hauls in humans of all ages and sizes--up to 1,000 a day.

Families, dates, office parties and barflies alike swarm through these doors, many of them precooked to a stinging pink by the beach sun and most apparently unperturbed by long waits for a table. On weekend nights especially, reservations are a must: They can cut the wait in half.

Dress here ranges from post-beach casual to formal first date: You’d be hard pressed to find shorter shorts than those worn by our stork-legged waiter, or more pearls on a sweater than the one worn by that grandmother with whipped copper hair.

There’s an amusing child’s place mat/menu with word puzzles and a connect-the-dots crab, and an aquarium with fancy groupers and a speckled eel, but much of this mass-scale restaurant’s mass appeal radiates from a central glassed-in open kitchen where huge round grills full of fish sizzle over red-hot mesquite coals.

Meals are largely crew-size portions of plain, substantial seafood--and any deviation from this can send a diner into murky waters.

In other words, the crab louie’s great, but the warm ahi salad’s a bust.

When you finally snag a seat, your hunger is temporarily appeased with thick slices of good crusty sourdough bread. The service is competent--it has to be.

*

Manhattan Clam Chowder, misrepresented as “World’s Best” on the menu, is thickly emulsified and dull. But the crab cocktail, chunks of sweet Alaskan crab topped with pleasantly generic tomato-and-horseradish cocktail sauce, is not only generous, but a labor-free alternative to ordering actual crab legs. Steamed clams, served with broth, lemon and drawn butter, are plump with a brisk, oceanic taste. New Zealand green-lipped mussels, steamed in wine and cream, are meaty and full-flavored.

Fried calamari and Cajun popcorn shrimp aren’t exactly lightly breaded or grease-free, but they’re well-spiced, and we douse them with lemon and eat them with relish.

All dinners come with a choice of salad, potato and/or rice. The cole slaw is fresh and satisfying, and our faith in the menu’s claims, which plummeted with the Manhattan chowder, might have been restored had we read the words, “World’s Crispest Dinner Salads” there: These plates of iceberg garnished with radish and cukes exist as if in steadfast opposition to the very concept of baby greens.

Skip the gummy potato Romano and insipid rice pilaf. Spend a dollar more and get a baked potato with your dinner.

“The Day’s Catch,” printed on chalk boards, holds no surprises. Copper River salmon may be running for its brief two-week season, but North Atlantic Salmon is what’s available here.

Fish grilled on the mesquite broilers I found oddly disappointing, possibly because the kitchen tends to cook everything well-done. Channel Island swordfish is low-in-flavor, lacking heft and meatiness: truly a fish for those who dislike fish. Salmon, ordered medium, is still overcooked and, again, faint in flavor. Halibut, also cooked to virtual juicelessness, is predictably dull.

After watching the young cooks man the huge grills, one sees how impossible it is to give any filet the one-on-one attention that fish, being so delicate, requires.

But then, my bowl of cioppino, a thick, lukewarm, Pernod-sweetened tomato-y sauce embedded with seafood, is so undercooked, the mussels, clams and scallops are cold!

Mustard dill sauce on a colorful seafood fettucine is so rich, we’re sated after a few bites. But steak and lobster, despite a wild market price of $29.95, hits the spot--even if the steak, like almost everything else, is overcooked.

But who dares to really complain? Fish Co. is as popular as bait in a kelp bed. And I never left there hungry.

* Fish Co., 174 Kinney St., Santa Monica, (310) 392-8366. Open 7 days for lunch and dinner. Full bar. Mastercard, Visa and American Express accepted. Reservations advised on weekends. Dinner for two, food only, $25-$85. Early bird special.