Spitfire Grill Is Fit to Fly

Ah, Santa Monica, city of airport dining. Santa Monica Municipal Airport may not be as busy as LAX, but it’s loaded with restaurants, and not one of them in a departure lounge. On Donald Douglas Loop, overlooking the runway, there are the California Cuisine-ish DC-3 and the Pacific Rim-ish Typhoon.

And then there’s Spitfire Grill down on Airport Avenue, where you can barely see the runway. But that’s evidently close enough for its clientele, which includes a lot of fliers. The people gossiping in the next booth are likely to be hashing over various airplane engines.

The walls are full of the sort of battered airplane memorabilia you’d expect a place called Spitfire Grill to have--WWII posters, antique flying instruments, photos of old planes and such. And basically, it’s the sort of place you’d expect it to be. It’s a diner, open all day from omelet breakfasts to “candlelight suppers,” which are as romantic as I imagine any somewhat worn airport hangout could provide.

But Spitfire Grill has ambitions. Besides a wine list, it has a boutique beer list full of Firestone Double Barrel Ale, Bay Hawk Chocolate Porter and their peers.

The menu lists a lot of familiar stuff--nachos, shrimp cocktail, buffalo wings, stuffed potato skins--but the complimentary appetizer is sui generis. They call it a spread, though the slovenly-looking contents of the little pot on your table are not spreadable at all and people often end up spearing chunks with a fork. No matter. It’s a very tasty hash of artichoke hearts, Parmesan and garlic.

Oddly, it’s more garlicky than the shrimp scampi, available as either an appetizer or an entree; nice shrimp, bland drawn butter. Spitfire does use nice big shrimp, and they show better in the ale-battered shrimp, which come with an intensely tomatoey cocktail sauce.

The appetizers are mostly just bar snacks, whatever their gourmet claims (the bread in the bruschetta appetizer--six slices, bountifully loaded with tomatoes--doesn’t seem to be toasted). The salad list includes a stripped-down Caesar (no egg in the dressing) with homemade croutons.

The dinner entrees, all including rice with some orzo in it a la Rice-A-Roni and perfectly steamed vegetables, are more daring. Chicken tarragon is just the simple, flavorful sort of thing you wish a rough and ready little grill would serve. The little bit of tarragon cream sauce with capers is perfect.

Chicken Dijon is a breast rolled in bread crumbs and baked, giving juicy meat in a nicely browned crust. The mustard flavor is rather understated; you might think of it as a reduced-fat fried chicken.

Lime cilantro shrimp seems to have short-stopped a lot of the garlic that should have gone to the scampi. It’s five big shrimp split and fried in the peel, and the little pot of butter sauce seems to be mostly garlic, though there’s some lime juice and, I assume, cilantro. I sucked up every drop of it.

Alaskan king crab legs, with a pleasant hint of herb flavor, also come with drawn butter. You can also get a surf and turf combo of crab legs or shrimp with a charcoaly, reasonably tender steak unexpectedly dusted with black pepper.

The steak they boast of here is the carne asada, and it’s a distinctive one, because it tastes as if there’s soy sauce in the marinade, which is not what many people in these parts expect in carne asada. It’s a good flavorful skirt steak, despite its teriyaki tendencies.

The short pasta list includes the favorites of the day--arrabbiata, checca, pesto, vongole--and one unique model, pasta primavera with spicy peanut sauce. The last is an interesting idea, pasta with a Southeast Asian ginger and peanut butter sauce, but it would be better off with less pasta and more primavera. You have to look hard to find the vegetables in the mass of pasta.

The hamburgers are all named for ancient aircraft (as are most of the lunchtime sandwiches). The basic burger, the Spitfire, is good and charcoaly, served with romaine lettuce salad. It says worlds about Spitfire Grill that they bring you a bottle of Dijon mustard with a hamburger. The desserts are in the same avant-diner mode: cheesecake, chocolate cake, ice creams from Robin Rose, an apple torte that’s basically apple pie with a pa^te sablee crust. A little out of the ordinary is the lemon bar, a rectangle of cookie crust topped with lemon curd.

From its runway rat ambience to the faintly silly uniforms that make its waiters look like postal carriers, Spitfire Grill is a place with personality. You won’t find its likes at LAX.

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BE THERE

Be There: Spitfire Grill, 3300 Airport Ave., Santa Monica. (310) 397-3455; fax 397-4325. Open 7:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Sun.-Thur., 7:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Beer and wine. Parking lot. MasterCard, Visa, Diners Club. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $35-$67.

What to Order: Ale-battered shrimp, chicken tarragon, lime cilantro shrimp, carne asada, king crab, lemon bar.