A Shore Thing

In Santa Monica, summer is a lifestyle. On balmy nights, tourists and locals mingle on the palisades near the pier. The green strip overlooking the ocean is the city’s unofficial living room, where people linger on park benches, stroll along the paths and enjoy the sea breeze. If this were Europe, though, the palisades would be lined with little seafood restaurants, ice cream stands and cafes.

Along California’s beaches, restaurants are so few and far between that a seafront spot is a license to mint money. Restaurateurs don’t have to try very hard. Gladstone’s, at the junction where Sunset Boulevard runs into the Pacific Coast Highway, is one of the highest-grossing restaurants west of the Mississippi.

The other choice spot is the Lobster, at the top of the Santa Monica Pier. On the site of a down-home lobster shack, this contemporary American seafood restaurant is cantilevered over the cliff, facing toward the pier and the mesmerizing lights of the Ferris wheel. The location is such that the Lobster is packed day in and day out with tourists and locals in search of seafood by the sea. The scene at the indoor/outdoor bar sometimes looks like spring break in Fort Lauderdale.

Since it opened three years ago, the Lobster has been reconfigured to incorporate what was once the outdoor-and quieter-balcony terrace into the dining room. It has cut the deafening noise level just a tad. With its rough wood rafters, wide open space and half-windows, the sky partially screened by movable plastic flaps, the restaurant looks like a loft or treehouse open to the breeze. “What’s so great about the view?” one of my guests commented the night we lucked into a table by the window. We look down on a parking lot, the ungainly tent-shaped building that houses the vintage carousel and, in the far distance, the spinning Ferris wheel. Stadium lights shine right in our eyes and highlight every smear and scar on the plastic curtain. It’s not lovely, but it’s still a view. And there’s that unmistakable salt tang. Sea air makes you hungry. Has anybody done a study of this? If not, they should.

I can’t imagine coming to the Lobster for a little salad or just a bite or two. All around us in the clamorous dining room, people are donning lobster bibs and wrestling with lobster shells, wresting every last morsel of succulent meat from the crevices of the beast. They’re drinking tiny Manhattans, Cosmopolitans and martinis. The mood is high-spirited, almost giddy, as cascades of laughter erupt and ricochet off the wall. You can barely hear the waiter. It’s a good thing the menu is printed daily. If a waiter had to recite the specials, he or she would need the lungs of a Broadway star to carry over the din

Allyson Thurber, former executive chef at Water Grill downtown, returned from the East Coast to open the Lobster in 1999. She does an able job of commanding the galley on this overcrowded ship. The kitchen gets the food out, and fast. Most of the time the servers deliver it to the right person. The tips must be enticing because the staff works as a team at maximum efficiency.

Lobster is the theme, but Thurber’s contemporary American seafood menu includes a wider variety of fish than you’d find on most lobster house menus, though nothing near the selection she covered at Water Grill. It’s one of the peculiarities of Southern California seafood restaurants that only a small proportion of what’s on offer is truly local. Certainly not the lobster, which is live and from Maine. Salmon and halibut hail from Alaska, prawns from Louisiana, soft-shell crabs from Maryland, and day boat scallops from the colder waters of the Atlantic.

The squid and the mussels, the latter local, are two of the best starters. “Crispy lemon” calamari are just that, with a punchy anchoiade, or anchovy-laced aioli, to set them off. I like the combination of steamed mussels and clams in a broth scented with lemon grass and ginger. One night, sauteed fresh Pacific sole is delicious with its sidekicks of artichoke, lemon and capers.

Ceviche lacks the jolt of fresh-squeezed lime laced with chile (this is a very mild version), but the fried-to-order tortilla chips are a nice touch. Lobster cocktail comes with a lemony aioli suffused with tarragon. I keep wanting to dip everything in sight in it just so I can taste it again. The lobster runs out quickly, though. Served in a martini glass, the shellfish is propped up on shredded lettuce, so it looks like more than it really is. Whether or not you like the corn soup depends on whether you like it sugared. I don’t. With the corn season at its height, the fresh corn salad, which comes with plump crab cakes, tastes like summer. Fried oysters that garnish an ordinary romaine and endive salad would be better off on their own-or piled into a po’ boy sandwich.

Lobster, curiously, is one of the least successful items on the menu. It’s not that tender, and at $25 a pound, I’d expect something more vibrant. After a cocktail or two, and enough drawn butter, it passes muster, barely. The pan-roasted 1 1/2-pounder is a better bet. Set on redundant “lobster mashed potatoes,” it’s nicely cooked, and I like the Jim Beam sauce, but not enough to want a soup bowl of it on my plate. Garlic herb butter keeps the grilled lobster from drying out and nicely disguises the fact that the crustacean doesn’t have much flavor.

In season, soft-shell crabs are juicy and crisp, served with coleslaw and corn on the cob and a handmade tartar sauce. During the short Copper River salmon season, don’t miss this distinctive wild salmon. However Louisiana shrimp, cooked with the heads on, aren’t served well by “dirty” rice in a puddle of slightly thickened peppery sauce.

The waiters are slick, subtly looking to boost the bill, intent on ferrying the food out quickly, refilling those glasses and turning the tables. One waiter asks each of us in turn if we would like coffee, espresso, cappuccino, Cognac, another drink-as if hearing the whole litany one more time might trigger one or all of us into going for a cappuccino, or even better, one of their liquor-laced coffee drinks. I don’t consider it friendly to try to press a third Manhattan on one of my guests. What if he were driving? Before handing us the bill, she tells us we’ve been really sweet, and, palms together as if she’s greeting a swami, gives us a little bow.

Despite the restaurant’s seafood theme, the wine list has nearly as many reds as whites. Roses, which would be an excellent match with much of the food, are limited to just two entries, neither available by the glass, even though the wine-by-the-glass program encompasses some two dozen selections. There’s also a short, sweet selection of half bottles, which includes Blockhedia Ringnosii’s fine Sauvignon Blanc, and Ridge’s reliable “Geyserville” Zinfandel, as well as a split of Laurent-Perrier brut Champagne.

The Lobster’s desserts are the sort of sugary, gooey confections a 10-year-old would find riveting. Blueberry cobbler, for example, isn’t a proper cobbler at all but a sweet stew of blueberries topped with what seems like granola. Vanilla ice cream helps to cut its cloying sweetness. A couple of items feature peanut butter, the most fanciful of which is a sort of pie with a tall dark chocolate cookie crust layered with peanut butter filling, a billowy cloud of chocolate mousse and whipped cream. If you like Reese’s peanut butter cups, you’ll like this. Otherwise, get the smooth-as-silk butterscotch creme brulee. Sea air and seafood are a combination that brings in an inexhaustible crowd. I just wish there were something more personal, and less corporate, about both the staff’s reception and the food. Chef Thurber’s take on contemporary American seafood is a plus. Where it falls down is in the execution.

*

The Lobster

1602 Ocean Ave.

Santa Monica

(310) 458-9294

Cuisine: Contemporary American

Rating: *1/2

*

AMBIENCE: Busy waterfront seafood restaurant with open-air bar and clamorous casual dining room. SERVICE: Efficient but rushed.

BEST DISHES: Lobster cocktail with lemon tarragon aioli, steamed mussels and clams with lemon grass, crispy soft-shell crabs, crab cakes with sweet corn salad, Copper River salmon, butterscotch creme brulee. Dinner appetizers, $7 to $15. Main courses, $19 to $45. Lobster, $25 per pound. Corkage, $10.

WINE PICKS: 2000 Goldwater Dog Point Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand; 2000 Caymus Conundrum, ‘California varietal.’

FACTS: Lunch and dinner daily. Valet parking.