Having Your Steak on the Rocks

There’s this place in Pasadena where you cook on rocks.

That’s the short version. Here’s a longer one: There’s this place in Pasadena where you cook meat on slabs of rock heated to 700 degrees and the motif is Aboriginal Australia, complete with the booming, rattling drone of didgeridoo music and lots of colorfully painted boomerangs (hence the name, Boomerock Hot Rocks Grill).

If this sounds like a hoot, it is a hoot. Or a high concept, if you prefer. “This is like a CityWalk restaurant,” one of my guests observed, and Boomerock does have that sleek, franchisable air.

The decor really is pretty handsome. Three massive columns made to look like Aboriginal carvings of giants divide the room. The walls near the ceilings show a cut-out silhouette of a rather mountainous landscape with slowly varying lights behind it (if you’ve been to a planetarium, you know the effect). The funky stripes and spots of Aboriginal art decorate much of the available surface, and there’s a shop area where you can buy boomerangs and koala dolls.

The place may conceive of itself as a surfer magnet, because your bill concludes, “Thanks for Boomerockin’ with us!”

But I’ve seen all kinds of people here besides whoa-dudes, from young families (the place thoughtfully provides children a paper mask and the crayons to customize it with--and a nonthreatening burger and fried chicken menu) to those of retirement age. One of the attractions--apart from the delights of playing with your food, of course--is the fact that the meat on those stones is cooked without fat.

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Unless you swipe a pat of butter from the bread basket and grease up your rock, that is. My table’s experiments show this works excellently with the prawns, with are otherwise a little awkward to cook on a flat surface.

That would undermine the low-fat angle, of course, as would the best appetizer, jumbo sweets, a foot-high stack of fried onion rings that looks as if somebody really got lucky at ring-toss. They’re quite good, and they come with a representative collection of Boomerock sauces: a mainstream barbecue sauce, a very tasty curried catsup and a weird honey-mustard with a lot of ginger in it.

One night a waiter told my table a new chef is about to arrive and remake the menu. So part of what follows may soon not apply.

For now, anyway, the meats include prawns, scallops and chicken, all perfectly good, and several steaks: beef, lamb or ostrich. The waiter explains that the steaks need to be cut up in small pieces for cooking (as he warns you not to touch the hot rock in its pottery holder). The rib eye and the strip steak are of supermarket quality, the ostrich more like red meat than you might expect and filet quite tasty and tender.

But the whole sauce concept is problematic, at least as it now stands. You choose among trios of sauces, which might be a handy way to get to know them, but eventually you’re bound to have favorites and might not care for another sample of, say, a watery mushroom puree or a bland pineapple relish.

For what it’s worth, the current Red Meat Selection A is decent. It’s a black olive relish, a mild quasi-Asian peanut sauce and a hot pepper sauce. (Another olive paste appears on Seafood Selection A, along with a mild wasabi and something I couldn’t figure out.)

Red Meat C has a great spicy tamarind sauce and two hot sauces, one a restrained habanero paste. But the most interesting element of Red Meat B is soy sauce, which tells you all you need to know.

The stone slab stays quite hot for about half an hour, plenty of time to cook everything and even play around with your side dishes--improvising fried rice, if you took the pilaf, or a fried mashed potato patty, if you ordered the potatoes.

If you wanted health stuff, of course, you ordered steamed vegetables.

Not everything has a Stone Age motif. There are salads, a shrimp cake--OK, but a little on the mushy side--and a simple corn chowder.

The desserts run to cheesecakes, a tasty, rather cake-like tiramisu and an “upside Down Under apple tart” topped with whipped cream.

So this is what it comes to. Order those onion rings, pick your sauces carefully and, if you’re down with the whole concept of cooking on stone, go ahead ‘n’ Boomerock.

BE THERE

Boomerock Hot Rocks Grill, 61 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena. (626) 440-0088; fax, 440-0062. Open 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and 5-10 p.m. Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Full bar. Parking lots nearby. All major cards. Dinner for two, food only, $26-$50.

What to Get: jumbo sweets, chicken stick, scallops and prawns, filet, tiramisu.