Sage Advice: Relax

The exciting pace of modern living can make us long for restaurants that seem far from all the hustle and bustle--soothing, rustic places with an air of simplicity. Sage fits that bill beautifully . . . so long as you don’t come on a night when the place is full.

The restaurant is tucked into a corner of the well-hidden Eastbluff Center, next to a Hughes Market. It has replaced an elegant Italian restaurant named Puccini, a Frenchified sort of place where wines were presented on a rolling cart.

There are no such pretensions here. Sage belongs to young American chef Richard Mead, late of Stanley’s in Sherman Oaks, the 17th Street Cafe in Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Seafood Co., where he worked as chef consultant.

Familiar ‘90s ingredients such as ahi, portabello mushrooms and penne pasta crop up regularly on Sage’s menu, but, within a narrow framework, Mead manages to be pleasantly creative, drawing on regional American cuisine, the Pacific Rim and the Westside for his colorful cooking.

The decor is sweet and subdued, the walls filled with gentle, attractive watercolors of fruit and flowers. There’s a handsome parquet floor; French doors open onto a wooded patio. On weekends, though, the relaxing mood can be thoroughly broken by crowds of diners who evidently enjoy a noisy, energetic atmosphere. I prefer dining here during the week.

After being seated, you get a basket of soft, chewy breads and an oddball white bean puree that I find strangely bland. Yet I’m happy to report that I haven’t found the same problem with much else.

My first dinner got off to a bang-up start with the Sage salad, roasted hunks of carrots, potatoes and beets tossed with baby greens in a red wine Dijon vinaigrette. It’s a terrific idea, and the colors are smashing.

This chef has a nice eye for color, period. Another beautiful dish is the grilled vegetable pizza, a crunchy, good-tasting pie topped with an eye-pleasing array of eggplant, zucchini, pesto, pine nuts and three cheeses: Fontina, mozzarella and goat. The rather thick, fairly classical tortilla soup is a spicy red-orange concoction well-stocked with chicken and pale yellow tortilla strips.

Seared peppered ahi is another visual kick, sort of a sandwich between potato pancakes. The pancakes look like hash browns, but they’re like mashed potatoes in the middle. The only problem is that you can barely taste the fish for all the potato pancake (nice though the potato part is).

There’s a pungent salad of fresh baby greens, candied pecans, sliced Granny Smith apples, Gorgonzola cheese and dried cranberries, dressed in raspberry vinaigrette: an appealing combination of sweet and tart.

Another choice is balsamic grilled portabello mushroom salad, in which slices of steak-like mushroom are served on a bed of warm spinach with red onions, feta cheese, hard-boiled eggs and sun-dried tomato. Be aware that the balsamic vinaigrette is rather sweet.

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The dinner menu at Sage has four pasta entrees; I’ve tried two. Vegetables and saimin is a vegetarian dish of long, thin Chinese noodles and shiitake mushrooms mixed with ginger, green onions and lots of sesame seeds and drenched in a tart soy-orange broth. I preferred the salmon penne, in which the pasta is mixed with asparagus, shiitakes, tomatoes, basil and a whole lot of salmon cut into marshmallow-sized chunks.

Most of Mead’s other main dishes are quite good. This is one of the few local restaurants that serves good roast chicken, called herb-roasted on this menu. The half bird is boneless and juicy, the herb-crusted skin crisp, and it comes with terrific rosemary-infused roasted new potatoes, assorted vegetables and a light gravy.

The grilled pork tenderloin in applejack brandy sauce is tender, flavorful and pleasantly charred, and you get braised sweet and sour cabbage with it and some little grilled potato cakes dusted with Parmesan. Braised catfish acquires a rather Cantonese flavor from its topping of fermented soybeans.

The only main dish I haven’t been thrilled with was Oriental-style beef tenderloin. The meat was delicious and cooked perfectly medium rare, but the accompanying rice and minced Oriental vegetables were saturated with an overwhelming and excessively salty soy sauce.

The dessert list is short but well conceived. The big hit is an apple walnut fruit crisp. (Mead has the good sense not to call it a cobbler.) It’s basically sliced apples baked with a rich walnut streusel topping. You can have good vanilla bean ice cream on the side.

I’ve also had a creamy white-chocolate toffee encrusted pumpkin cheesecake, and this month, in honor of Mardi Gras, Mead is serving a sweet-potato pecan pie made with Steen’s pure cane syrup from Louisiana. It’s terrific.

Sage should be a fixture here on Eastbluff for quite a while. In the short run, the restaurant is featuring a special menu for Valentine’s Day. Make reservations early if you’re planning to attend that night, and expect that everybody will be whispering, in order to maintain that romantic mood.

Sage is moderately expensive. Appetizers are $3.50 to $8.50. Pastas are $9 to $13.50. Entrees are $12.50 to $19.

BE THERE

Sage, 2531 Eastbluff, Newport Beach. (714) 718-9650. 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday. All major cards.