Getting its sea legs

WE circle the mall, rolling past Macy’s, past Neiman Marcus, past all the usual anchors of every upscale shopping center in the country, until someone in the car finally spots Fashion Island’s latest restaurant. There, next to Roy’s -- Blue Coral.

Love the name.

We pull into a parking spot where we’re soon rousted by a vigilant valet parker who not so nicely informs us that we’ve encroached on Roy’s territory. Blue Coral’s valet station is around the corner.

Unchastened, we take occupancy of an empty slot two rows over. Given a Newport Beach parking lot roughly the size of one of those East Coast states, valet parking seems faintly ridiculous unless you’re worried about marring the telltale red soles of your latest Louboutins.

Inside, the bar is blue, like the name, a gorgeous pale cobalt, backlighted -- the better to show off all those alluring bottles. Are we tipsy already, or is that water sheeting down the front of the two huge flat-screen monitors on each side of the bar? Cool. Definitely cool.

The dining room is less so. Though it’s got high curved booths and hanging lampshades so immense I seriously wonder if someone has slipped us Alice in Wonderland’s magic pill, the overall feel of the decor is corporate. We slide into a booth to find a small white plate perched on a green board in front of each place. But no, that board is the heavy, hard-bound menu. Could anything be more unwieldy? And old-fashioned pretentious?

And yet, the menu’s choices sound terribly au courant. Here’s crudo (raw seafood), “leaves and bowls,” “fins,” “shells” and, for anybody who doesn’t want anything to do with seafood, a category dubbed “land & air.”

This is not, by any means, your parents’ seafood house. Instead of regular shrimp cocktail, the chef proposes one featuring wild gulf prawn, or a crab cocktail trio of blue crab, king crab and Dungeness crab, each with its own sauce. Blue crab cake is almost all lump crabmeat, no filler, served with a roasted tomato aioli. The appetizers I try are decent, but not much more than that, with one exception. Yellowtail sashimi with blood orange juice and slices of freaking hot serrano chile makes a bold -- and delicious -- statement. And although the white clam chowder has an appealingly intense clam flavor, somebody dumped in so much flour it’s more porridge than soup.

The wine list merits some studying. It’s organized by flavor categories starting with sweeter or lighter and progressing toward the drier and more strongly flavored. The idea is to make it easier for a novice to negotiate ordering a bottle of wine, and in some ways it makes sense. I’d rather see somebody who knew something about the wines from firsthand experience, but then when waiters are as perky and clueless about the food as ours, you might be better off making your own mistakes.

Main courses read as very up-to-date, but some are too tricked up and/or tricky to execute. Sturgeon, a rare sight on local menus, shines here grilled and encrusted with cracked peppercorns. But pan-seared sea scallops arrive in a sea of sauce they certainly don’t need.

The house favorite, so the menu tells us, is “lounging lobster.” That would be lobster baked in the shell in a cream-laden chile aioli and served lounging on a bed of potato chips. Wacky, I grant you. Unfortunately, it’s quite awful, and $36 to boot. And even lobster tails served with drawn butter, the simplest preparation imaginable, are sadly overcooked.

Until the kitchen irons out the kinks, the best strategy at Blue Coral may be to take the kitchen up on the offer to prepare seafood any way you’d like, including simply grilled, so you can really taste the fish or shellfish. If you strip away all the bells and whistles, Blue Coral could be the place to get a nice piece of fish.

virbila@latimes.com

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Blue Coral

Where: Fashion Island, 451 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach

When: 5-10 p.m. Sundays to Thursdays, 5-11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Full bar. Valet parking.

Cost: Appetizers, $9 to $17; soups and salads, $7 to $18; main courses, $19 to $36; sides, $5 to $12; desserts, $6 to $8.

Info: (949) 856-2583, www.bluecoralseafood.com