On the lookout for luxury

LUXURY should be seamless. It’s hard to define, but when you encounter it, there’s no mistaking it. It should feel effortless. Luxurious dining is all of a piece -- the food, the service and the setting combine for a feeling that adds up to true generosity and comfort. A luxurious meal can be as basic as a perfect roast chicken and a salad fresh from the garden, eaten on an outdoor terrace with your best friends. Or it can be as elaborate as a four-hour extravaganza prepared by one of the world’s great chefs in one of the world’s great restaurants.

One place you don’t find it is at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort restaurant, Aqua. They have it all wrong.

When the hotel, just south of Laguna Niguel, opened in July 2001, the celebrated San Francisco seafood restaurant and the posh oceanfront resort seemed a brilliant match. But although Aqua at the St. Regis had all the trappings we associate with luxury -- a beautiful coastal setting, handsome appointments, breathtaking prices, a well-known executive chef and a built-in clientele with enough disposable income to spend $485 or more a night on a room -- it had none of the soul.

When the Aqua group’s longtime executive chef, Michael Mina, left to open his own restaurant in San Francisco about three years ago, I was interested to see what the new executive chef, Laurent Manrique, would do with the problematic restaurant here.

The problems, then and now, start with a design that owes more to Las Vegas than the St. Regis New York’s quiet refinement. Everything is oversized and over-scaled, from the porte-cochere where you drop off your car, to the vast gardens and pool beyond. You traipse down a hallway to find the restaurant’s maitre d’ station, which is located just across from the gift shop. The restrooms are down another interminable hallway lined with tacky gilt-framed mirrors.

It’s not a great beginning to an evening of dining. But Manrique, a French chef who dazzled at Peacock Alley in New York in the early ‘90s and later at Campton Place in San Francisco, is someone who knows the unique challenges of running a high-end hotel restaurant, and he’s installed his protege Alan Ashkinaze in the kitchen here. Manrique’s policy is to act as mentor to the chefs at the various Aquas. Ashkinaze’s menu is less ambitious than the original: The ingredients and ideas fall within most diners’ comfort range. The seafood is less exotic, the preparations less elaborate. It may be that he’s going for something lighter to suit the beach location.

There are oysters with Champagne mignonette, or cocktail sauce, if you prefer. But you can get that anywhere. A more interesting choice would be the ahi tuna tartare. I know, I know. It’s usually the fallback dish for people who’d really rather be eating sushi. But in this variation, which is served tableside, the waiter mixes in a raw quail egg, date paste, Moroccan spices, harissa (Tunisian hot sauce) and lemon oil. The tuna is beautiful, sushi-grade and blood red. And the dish rides the edge of sweet to hot, bringing the tuna along on a merry spice ride.

That’s really the most exotic thing on the menu. Everything else is pretty much business as usual for a fancy Orange County restaurant. You can expect a chilled lobster salad, heirloom tomatoes with bufala mozzarella, a chilled shellfish plate. Except for the foie gras, nothing requires a lot of expertise to prepare. But what’s with the terrine of foie gras served with banana-walnut bread? That’s just a wee bit too down-home for foie gras; it doesn’t work at all.

I did enjoy the refreshing shaved endive and fennel salad embellished with Point Reyes blue cheese, pancetta and grapes. It has more personality than most versions of this salad. Corn soup with Manila clams seems a natural -- the sweetness of the corn should play well against the briny complexity of the clams. Except here the corn’s natural sweetness is, I suspect, boosted with something else, the summer truffle garnish enhanced with truffle oil.

Usual suspects

THE chef must feel like he’s cooking in a straitjacket. The main course list reads like so many others: wild king salmon, tuna, scallops, duck, beef.

The ahi tuna, which one of my guests insisted on ordering, turned out to be delicious. Tall, thick slices of tuna were wrapped in nori and barely seared, so that the interior was virtually raw. The seaweed’s smoky sea-salt edge with the top-grade tuna and lemon-scented basmati made complete sense.

I can’t say that for everything else on the menu. The lobster casserole, one of Aqua’s signatures, is fancy without delivering with either flavor or finesse. Sauteed John Dory with porcini and mushroom foam tastes tired. Duck breast with seared foie gras is perfectly fine, but not at all exceptional.

But beef served two ways -- a slow-braised Kobe short rib with celery root puree and a Cabernet reduction along with a seared New York steak in a truly spicy Szechwan vinaigrette -- plays soft against firm, West against East. Instead of a big steak, the chef gives us two ways to experience beef.

The $95 tasting menu one night convinces me that the chef needs to loosen up the menu with more dishes like these. It begins with a demitasse of chilled watermelon soup with blueberries tucked at the bottom, followed by a caviar parfait -- diced salmon, hard-boiled eggs and creme fraiche layered with a dab of sevruga caviar on top. A little preserved lemon woven throughout picks up the flavors and makes it all work.

Ravioli stuffed with tender, braised lamb are delicious too, shaped like attenuated triangles and garnished with English peas, mint and strips of tomato confit, a lovely and contemporary take on meat-stuffed ravioli. Wild striped bass, accompanied by chanterelle mushrooms, bright green snap peas and garlic confit, is crispy and flavorful. A small portioned New York steak features juicy, rare beef in a finely balanced Cabernet reduction.

As elegantly appointed as the restaurant is, it’s not inviting. From the dining room, you can see the brightly lighted gift shop (in case you want to rush out between courses to buy a sweatshirt with the hotel’s logo). Lights from the corridor bleed into the room, and the kitchen’s glare is disguised only by a panel of pleated curtains. The noise from the bar is distracting too, especially since everybody in there seems to be having much more fun than anybody in the dining room. Out on the terrace, with its view of the hotel’s formal gardens and pool, a group of affluent thirtysomethings have nudged their tables together and are busy sharing bottles for an impromptu wine tasting.

Scant attention to details

MEANWHILE in the dining room, waiters wearing name tags (another touch borrowed from that bastion of faux luxury, Las Vegas) appear and disappear. Order a wine and more than likely the waiter will soon be back to ask what the number is. With wine prices as high as these, you’d expect servers to be able to, at the very least, remember the names of the wines.

No matter how hard the kitchen is working, when a dining room isn’t busy, the service suffers. For one thing, the restaurant can’t attract the caliber of waiter needed to pull off fine dining, simply because tips aren’t as high as elsewhere. At Aqua, one time you might get someone fairly professional, and on another visit a good-natured surfer dude trying his excruciating best to sound sophisticated and formal. Still, he’s more sincere than the managers who circle the room, swooping in to ask, “How’s everything tasting for you this evening?” without waiting around to hear a reply. Any reply. Some nights, it feels like a tactic to hurry you along so everybody can go home.

Meanwhile, no one’s paying attention to the details. One evening I got not one, but two forks with tines so twisted I couldn’t imagine anyone not noticing earlier. That’s luxury?

Most of all, the restaurant lacks presence, someone there who truly makes guests comfortable. The surfer dude explaining the intricacies of a mojito to a group of diners one night was the closest thing to human warmth on any of my visits. Everybody else seems frozen in their roles; they all suffer acutely from restaurant speak.

Fun? Not much.

I look around the room. Nobody acts as if they really want to be here. There’s the couple leaning away from each other and hardly saying a word. There’s the son-in-law in town on business dutifully taking out his wife’s parents and bearing the brunt of the conversation. There’s a table of technology types warily sizing each other up with talk of Robert Parker and the number of points he gave a wine. For whatever reason, Aqua doesn’t seem to be attracting the same kind of crowd as it does in San Francisco, i.e., people who come for the food more than anything else. And for a chef like Manrique or Ashkinaze, that’s got to be a huge disappointment.

For consolation, there is the flambeed banana performance tableside. A knob of butter, some sections of banana, a dash of rum and banana liqueur, and whoosh, the flames leap high. Poured over ice cream, this is something real and delicious. But stay away from the weird plum bread pudding or the fig almond cake served with cheese.

As I was writing this review, Manrique called my editor to tell us he’s considering closing the restaurant because of what he calls irreconcilable differences with the hotel. I hope that won’t happen and that the two parties can find a resolution. Though Aqua Monarch Beach may not embody true luxury, it adds some luster to the Orange County dining scene. And as fine dining loses ground everywhere to casual bistros and trattorias, somebody has to hold their ground. Now that the menu is improving at Aqua, if an effort were made to create a truly luxurious dining experience there, the tables might start filling up. Who knows?

*

Aqua at St. Regis Monarch Beach

Rating: * 1/2

Location: St. Regis Resort, Monarch Beach, 1 Monarch Beach Resort, Dana Point, (949) 234-3318.

Ambience: Hotel dining room with curvaceous damask banquettes, uncomfortable chairs and a resort crowd.

Service: Varies from pleasant to awkward and unprofessional.

Price: Appetizers, $12 to $39; main courses, $31 to $41; desserts, $9 to $15; tasting menu, $95 per person.

Best dishes: Oysters on the half shell, tuna tartare, endive salad, nori-wrapped ahi tuna, beef two ways, banana flambe, tasting menu.

Wine list: Predictable. Corkage, $25.

Best table: One on the terrace or in front of the fireplace.

Details: Dinner 5:30 to 10 p.m. Sunday; 5:30 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 5:30 to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.