Where classic is prime

THERE’S not a Hummer in sight. No babes in flirty dresses. No phalanx of valets sprinting to get your car. No guy with a clipboard checking off names, so no need to summon your inner supermodel to bluster through the door on Jimmy Choos.

This is a steakhouse?

With the rash of new ones such as Republic, the Lodge, Boa, Lincoln and Chapter 8 attempting to reinvent the genre, I thought it would be instructive to revisit a classic, Pacific Dining Car. And because the Westside outpost is now, like the original downtown locale, open 24/7, it seemed like the right moment to review the Santa Monica branch.

From the outside, it’s the antithesis of flash: Score a point for Pacific Dining Car.

Seen from Wilshire Boulevard, this place, which opened in 1990, has always seemed so forbidding: a concrete bunker with no way to peer inside. I admit I passed it by for years for that very reason. Step up to the entrance, though, and there is a bit of ornament: opaque windows framed in metal to suggest a railroad car. At the original downtown, which opened in 1921, and where the booths are favorites with politicos and stockbrokers, the interior replicates a railroad dining car, but here it’s just an exterior suggestion.

Inside, PDC Santa Monica is a series of opulent Victoriana dining rooms, each done up in a different color, with swagged drapes, polished brass railing, and ponderous still lifes in heavy frames. Booths are comfy and generous and, for larger parties, there are tables that would fit right in at any dim sum palace. A handsome oil painting of a steer hangs on one wall. Beneath it, three guys, buffed to the max, butter their baked potatoes and get down to business demolishing various cuts of red meat. In the Wine Room at the back, what must be four generations of one family celebrate a birthday, everybody from the 7-year-old girl to the wispy, white-haired matriarch sawing away at a massive steak.

Unlike the new breed of steakhouses that have made a fetish of having interesting, cutting-edge appetizers to precede the main course -- the beef -- PDC sticks mostly with the tried and true. The menu is classic steakhouse, with everything a la carte. Steaks are massive and mostly prime. Drinks are big and strong. If you order a martini, the bartender won’t necessarily assume you mean vodka instead of gin or want some newfangled, flavored version. The default here is always the classic.

Start with a martini or a Manhattan, which will give you time to browse the impressive wine list for a bottle to go with your boeuf. Then proceed to the appetizer course.

The shrimp cocktail is decent enough, four or five meaty shrimp languishing on the plate next to a bowl of emphatic cocktail sauce, enough to garnish 10 times the amount of crustaceans. Or you can get shrimp sauteed in lots of garlic and butter escargot-style, if you want to find something to do with your bread.

Salads are perfunctory, nothing to get excited about, not even the Caesar, which is bland but acceptable. But there is a reassuring wedge of iceberg, here with rather too much pungent blue cheese crumbled over the top.

Seafood martini

THERE are a couple of nice surprises, though. The lobster appletini may sound gimmicky, but it’s actually kind of irresistible -- chunks of chilled lobster piled in a martini glass over julienned green apple, all dressed with a vodka-dosed Louis dressing. Try that, or break form and order the onion rings as an appetizer (they’re listed as a side). The waiter claims they’re better than the ones at the original PDC, and he’s right. These aren’t your thick-cut bracelets, but a delirious mess of fried onions, a little greasy but completely delicious.

And so on to the meat, which is the entire point.

You could go surf ‘n’ turf. One night, though, the broiled lobster tail smells funky enough as it sails by on the way to another table that my table decides to skip the surf. That means no filet mignon with choice of crab cakes, grilled shrimp, sea scallops or lobster tail. But maybe that’s a good thing. The crab cakes aren’t that special. And I’ve had better broiled lobster tail elsewhere, for sure. The seafood just can’t compete with red meat here.

But seriously, why would you come to PDC for anything other than steak?

PDC is proud of the fact that the restaurant ages its prime steaks in-house, and that’s admirable. But the prices are so steep they’re positively vertigo-inducing: At PDC a 16-ounce New York strip sets you back $48.95; it’s $39.95 at Mastro’s and $38 at Republic.

I stare at the menu. Should I order the baseball cut? The rib-eye. The T-bone? Any one of them is an investment. The payoff is just this, the evening, so I want it to be a good one. At these prices, it’s a given: You’re going to expect one of the best steaks of your life.

But at PDC, a bite of the New York strip or even the massive baseball cut, an extremely thick cut of top sirloin, is not going to stop conversation. The most notable thing is its height: It’s a tremendously tall steak. Odds are that despite the in-house dry-aging, you won’t be nudging your companion to insist he try the T-bone, which really should have more flavor, given that it costs a whopping $54.95.

The one steak that demands attention is the cowboy steak, which will set you back $43.95. This is a rib steak on the bone, the same cut as prime rib. All the steaks here are grilled over hardwood charcoal, which certainly helps out the lesser cuts. But with a truly great piece of beef like the cowboy cut, it gives the meat a primal, campfire taste that’s superb.

The Colorado lamb chops are also delicious (at $45.95 for four chops, they’d better be), very tender and suffused with true lamb flavor. Prime rib is an option too, and the larger size is $1 less than the cowboy steak. Ordered medium rare, it has an almost jellied or rubbery texture that I don’t find appealing. But the au jus and the horseradish sauce certainly help.

What are they thinking, though, when a hamburger steak -- plain ground hamburger with chopped onions mixed in the patty -- is $28.95? And not even very good. (PDC takes the high road with the appetizer prices, though, which seem positively moderate compared with those at many of the newer steakhouses.)

Vegetables and sides are plain as can be: baked potato with sour cream and chives, creamed spinach or corn, sauteed green beans or steamed asparagus. Broccoli, though, gets dressed up with hollandaise sauce. Curiously, when you order a side, it’s not served family style but comes on the plate of whoever ordered it. (It turns out you can order them family style at no extra charge.)

It’s not uncommon for a new steakhouse to come on strong with fabulous prime beef in the first weeks and then cut back on the quality. It’s a pretty sly trick. PDC, on the other hand, has been around long enough that consistency is not an issue. And because the beef is aged in-house, the kitchen has more control of the entire process. But even this care doesn’t guarantee that the piece of beef on your plate will be something exceptional every time. Aging can only go so far to improve the taste of a steak.

Wines within reason

NEW places often make a fetish of their wine lists, and so many make it a practice to gouge on prices. Perhaps that’s why it took a few minutes to register that many of the wines on sommelier Dan Gutierrez’s well-researched list are very fairly priced. The list seems broader than I remember too, very strong on Rhone wines and California Cabs. I even spotted Sine Qua Non’s 2002 Syrah “For the Love of It” for under $200, which is quite a good price for this cult Central Coast wine.

The restaurant is also one of the few places that’s made an investment over the long haul, so you can drink older Bordeaux and California Cabs. If that is your pleasure, you’ll have a fine time rifling through the selections. The wine service here, in general, is more professional than you’d find at some of the new-style steakhouses. These waiters didn’t just stroll over from a casting call to ask for a job.

In fact, the service here, from a team of dedicated waiters who know exactly how to make everyone comfortable, is exceptional. It’s more about making the evening enjoyable than about the server struggling to make an impression, any impression.

I don’t know how they do it, but somehow they make even a newcomer feel like a regular. Not to mention a big spender. (Which, of course, you are, if you’re dining here....)

For dessert, the waiter will always propose the house chocolate souffle and suggest ordering it at the same time as your entrees. Do it. It’s by far the best dessert, and shared four ways, it’s a fine way to cap off your steak dinner.

So. A martini straight up, onion rings, cowboy steak, excellent service and a good bottle of wine at a reasonable price. Finish with that chocolate souffle, and it’s an evening.

I guess there aren’t enough takers, though. The Santa Monica locale can feel dead sometimes, even at 8 p.m. Good place for a clandestine meeting, however. So who’s going to show up at 3 a.m. now that it’s open 24/7? Hardly anybody, I got a waiter to admit.

Still, if you want to live large and spend big on the Westside in the middle of the night, Pacific Dining Car is your kind of place.

*

Pacific Dining Car

Rating: * 1/2

Location: 2700 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica; (310) 453-4000; www.pacificdiningcar.com

Ambience: Opulent old-fashioned steakhouse with a series of interconnected dining rooms with large tables and plenty of generous booths separated by half-curtains. The clientele is here for the prime beef and good service, but also because it’s one of the few restaurants around where you don’t have to strain to be heard.

Service: Gracious and polished.

Price: Dinner appetizers, $10 to $17; prime beef, $37 to $55; surf ‘n’ turf, $43 to $49; other main courses, $29 to $49; sides, $5 to $7; dessert, $9 to $11..

Best dishes: Onion rings, Maine lobster appletini, shrimp cocktail, cowboy steak, Colorado rack of lamb, chocolate souffle.

Wine list: Extensive and broad-ranging with some great Rhones and cult California Cabernets at very fair prices. Corkage, $35.

Best table: Hard to pick; you can’t go wrong with one of the booths.

Special feature: Open 24/7 every day of the year.

Details: Open daily for breakfast from 11 p.m. to 4 p.m.; for lunch, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; afternoon tea from 3 to 5:30 p.m.; dinner anytime. Full bar. Valet parking, $3.50.

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.