High marks for views

DRIVE up to the hotel’s porte-cochere and an attendant swoops over, stops your car and seems satisfied when you say you have a reservation for dinner. Just inside the lobby, a tall, slim, handsome guy with a clipboard and earpiece interrogates you again. You give him your name, his finger goes down the list, you’re on it. Whew.

No, you’re not at Chateau Marmont; you’re at the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica, heading up in the elevator for dinner on the 17th floor at the Penthouse, a fashionable American restaurant-lounge, with the accent on lounge.

Don’t count on seeing movie stars. The restaurant, like the rest of the hotel, has a great look (designed by Thomas Schoos), with polished off-white surfaces, gauzy curtains and lots of candles. It’s beachy-chic all the way. The bar quickly became Santa Monica’s hot spot when it opened in February.Though it’s still packed on weekends -- and unbelievably cacophonous -- it has never quite achieved A-list status, and the crowd is a little scrappier than you might expect in a spot with so much style.

Once seated in the dining room, order a margarita and take in the view, which is really the best thing about the place. Where to sit here matters, as there are magnificent vistas on all three sides of the restaurant. You can see ocean all the way to the Palos Verdes Peninsula from many of the tables, and east to downtown from some, but others don’t have much of a view at all.

You might think you’re getting lucky if you’re led to one of the “cabana” tables along the windows on the south side, but these big, curtained-off booths are best for big parties -- seven or eight people.

The margaritas are good, “hand-crafted” with blue agave Wabo Cabo tequila, a well-balanced house-made sour mix, salt on request. It’s a small pour for $12, served on the rocks.

Better a small, good margarita than a Kumquat Cooler. It sounds so good: muddled kumquat and limes with Hendrick’s gin. I love tart flavors, but this drink is so sour I can’t drink it; the server brings me a little pitcher of simple syrup, but oddly, even a good dose doesn’t improve it.

Why dwell on the cocktails? Because -- except for some wonderful, house-made pappardelle with market vegetables and an arugula pesto, some decent steak frites and a good dessert or two, it’s mostly downhill from there.

The restaurant is so noisy -- with bad loud music and people shouting to be heard over it -- that you have to wonder whether the idea is that the scene will drown out the food. The problem with the cabanas, in fact, is that there’s such a huge expanse across the table that with all that noise, you can’t hear those on the other side -- even if they shout. Drawing the gauzy curtains doesn’t help much.

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Funny menu items!

A soup called “Definitely not French!!! spring onion soup” actually tastes pretty French, but it doesn’t taste like spring. Chef E. Michael Reidt gives spring onions such a traditional treatment (they’re pretty thoroughly caramelized) that they might as well be regular, yellow Spanish onions. Meanwhile, the brioche crouton, which is actually quite good, is, um, French. But why repeat it with more brioche on the side?

Then there’s “That ‘Cobb’ thing everyone loves.” (Flashback to Hamburger Hamlet in the early ‘70s. Remember “Those potatoes” and “Eat the sides, I pray you”?) Here that Cobb thing is a deconstructed salad: dainty rows of chopped tomato, egg, bacon, avocado, blue cheese and chicken, then next to that a pile of dressed, shredded lettuce. A cute idea, but then what? Mix it all up? Just add a little of this and a little of that? Take tiny bites of bacon, then egg, then tomato? Who knows, but it doesn’t really work -- none of the elements are interesting enough tastes on their own, nor does Reidt give them any original spin.

Steak tartare and beef carpaccio, an appetizer duo, disappoints. The carpaccio is flavorful and appealing, but it’s not exactly carpaccio (raw beef sliced very thin). Rather, it’s seared rare beef sliced paper thin, just a few tiny slices. Next to that is a small mound of beef tartare that doesn’t have much more flavor than raw hamburger meat; it’s completely underseasoned. Tartare needs a little punch and texture, and this has neither.

“The spring fling” -- sliced rolls of smoked salmon, goat cheese, asparagus and green goddess dressing -- is nicely prepared but absolutely forgettable. Same with the other simple seafood appetizers, such as plump, firm, nicely cooked citrus-poached shrimp, served with rather ordinary horseradish-spiked cocktail sauce, or a respectable kampachi sashimi with ponzu sauce and spicy sirachi jelly.

On to the main courses. Black-trumpet-mushroom-crusted king salmon with fingerling potato hash and crab “guacamole” is a turnoff the moment it lands on the table: The salmon doesn’t really have a crust, but the guacamole does, and it’s kind of brown. Getting past that, the salmon, which the waiter says is wild, and arrives perfectly cooked to just past medium-rare, has that fatty, almost chemical taste of farmed fish, and a too-soft texture.

Another night, roasted Jidori chicken looks beautiful on the plate -- it’s an “airline cut,” the breast and attached wing. Jidori, which simply means “free range” in Japanese, can be very flavorful, but this breast isn’t, and the server valiantly offers to take it back to the kitchen to see if the chef can scare up some dark meat. When it finally comes to the table, it’s no more flavorful than the white meat.

What’s going on in that kitchen -- is the chef purchasing lesser ingredients, or is there a deflavorizing machine back there? Clearly, no one is tasting the food that’s coming out, and just about everything is underseasoned.

The best and priciest ingredients aren’t always a necessary requirement to making good food. In the hands of a good or even a decent cook, something as humble as beef short ribs can be wonderful. You brown them, simmer them for hours in stock, wine or even water with some herbs and onions , and they’re fantastic. You can even buy the meat in an ordinary supermarket -- it doesn’t have to be top quality.

So it seems like a good idea to try the bone-in short rib, served with horseradish, whipped potatoes and a pistou of vegetables. Especially because on an earlier visit, short rib was offered, curiously, as an add-on to several other dishes, including that lovely pappardelle. They’re underdone, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. And yes, underseasoned.

Best, as our trusty waiter tried to warn us, is to stick with the steaks. The 22-ounce T-bone is listed on the menu as “blue cheese crusted.” When it arrives, again, perfectly cooked medium-rare, there’s not so much a crust as a schmear of blue on top. Visually it’s a disaster. And the cheese does nothing for the steak, which lacks flavor.

Same with the New York strip loin. Usually that’s a flavorful cut, but here it’s rather dull. Still, the kitchen knows how to cook the steaks right, and the pommes frites are nicely thin, crisp and abundant.

It’s difficult to take much consolation in the other side dishes. Garlic mashed potatoes have been overprocessed to glueyness. Onion strings are soggy on two visits. My guests love the creamed spinach, which arrives in a little cast-iron crock, but I’m underwhelmed. I see their point, as the large leaves of spinach have some integrity, and it’s one of the few dishes that is seasoned just right. But it doesn’t come together with the ample cream sauce in which it swims.

Desserts are hit and miss. A bread pudding made with that good brioche is lovely -- soft, silky and refined. And the house-made ice creams are terrific (cardamom rocks).

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Where’s the chef?

CHEF Reidt came to the Penthouse by way of Sevilla in Santa Barbara. Sometimes hotels stretch their chefs so thin they don’t spend enough time in the kitchen; perhaps that’s what’s going on here.

I really wanted to like the Penthouse, and not just because Santa Monica needs a good, stylish, fun restaurant. Yes, there’s the cool design. The room is so appealing you want the food to be good. Or at least good enough.

But mostly, it’s the wait staff that made me want to like it, despite the pretentious homeland security treatment downstairs. And once you get past the hostess. One night she punished a friend and me for being late for our reservation by leaving us in the bar for a long time and pretending she didn’t know we had checked in. (How did we know? The bartender told us.) Anyway, safely inside the dining room, the attitude evaporates completely.

On my two most recent visits, the servers bent over backward to make sure my table was happy. It seemed to pain both of them that we didn’t seem pleased with our food, and they weren’t just eager to bring something else, they both seemed genuinely concerned. The wine service was just right. Both servers were so attentive and professional that they seemed out of place in such a noisy, sceney place. It seems there’s someone there -- a manager? -- with his or her heart in the right place.

In a town where great service is harder and harder to come by, it almost makes the Penthouse worth a visit.

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brenner@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The Penthouse

Rating: *

Location: The Huntley Hotel, 1111 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 393-8080; www.thehuntleyhotel.com.

Ambience: Loud, boisterous restaurant-lounge with sleek, beachy-chic design.

Service: The attitude you find at the door ends once you enter the dining room, where the service is attentive and professional.

Price: Dinner appetizers, $9 to $16; main courses, $26 to $49 (for a 22-ounce T-bone steak); desserts, $9.

Best dishes: Sashimi of Hawaiian kampachi; pappardelle with market vegetables and arugula pesto; pommes frites; bread pudding.

Wine list: A decent selection of Old World and New World wines. Corkage fee, $25.

Best table: The four-top in the southwest corner, with an ocean view.

Special features: Drop-dead views on all three sides of the restaurant; “cabana” tables.

Details: Open daily for breakfast from 6:30 to 11:30 a.m., lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner from 6 to 10:30 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking.

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.