RESTAURANT REVIEW : Santa Monica’s Coral Reef a Culinary Free-for-All

First, there was Opera, inventive and pricey. Then there was Regatta, Italian and average. And now, at the prime beach-view location at the corner of Ocean and Colorado in Santa Monica, there is Coral Reef, a culinary free-for-all. The air of a Mediterranean cafe, cultivated by the two former establishments, is still faintly present at Coral Reef, though it now competes with a new ambience, that of the boisterous, ultra-democratic California sports bar and grill.

On a Saturday night, the Reef’s doing a lively business with a wide range of clients: families dressed in jeans and summer dresses, dolled-up dates, men in suits and folks who look as if they just strolled in from a walk on the beach. The bar’s hopping. Our waitress is an energetic young woman--and an excellent salesperson. She endorses dishes with such confidence and fervor, we think she knows what she’s talking about.

The Coral Reef menu is about as busy and varied as its namesake. There are 33 selections in the Raw Bar section alone, not all of them, however, raw. Chicken dishes include sesame chicken, jambalaya and “poultenschnitzel.” The fish of the day is served with a choice of seven different sauces, from herbal beurre blanc to flamed pineapple and banana. Is it any wonder that after a few visits, we feel as if we haven’t made much of a dent in the menu? Still, one rather quickly gets a feel for the food itself, which is abundant, nicely presented, occasionally good and frequently, albeit cheerfully, not so hot.

Two of us one night try the tuna and salmon tartare. Served on a steel platter atop a round dome of ice, with lemon wedges and little shells full of capers on the side, the tartares come in deep shells lined with avocado. The two kinds of fish have been chopped coarsely, mixed with scallions and dressing, so that both taste similarly unremarkable.

Rigatoni with grilled eggplant, spinach, broccoli and garlic is an enormous bowl of the big-tube noodles topped with hanks of chard, big broccoli flowerets and an indeterminate brown substance we took to be at least partially mashed-up eggplant.

I ordered the soft-shell crabs because the waitress had me convinced that I haven’t lived until I tasted Coral Reef’s. But the crabs, two hefty specimens breaded with flour and fried darkly, are topped with another oddly dark, garlicky sauce. While not the absolute worst soft-shell crabs I’ve ever had, they in no way deserve such unqualified endorsement.

Some people learn their lessons. I, however, allow our waitress to talk me into the lemon-lime pie for dessert. “It’s the freshest lemon pie I’ve ever tasted,” she says. This alleged paragon of pastry, which arrives accompanied by huge dollops of unsweetened whipped cream, turns out to be a firmly jelled bit of unexceptional lemon-lime pudding in a cookie crumb crust.

On succeeding visits, I studiously ignore any suggestions from the staff and make random forays into the vast menu where, I’m convinced, there’s probably something to please just about anybody. By chance, I stumble upon a perfectly delicious mushroom and asparagus salad, which is essentially a good, huge, juicy Caesar topped with lots of chewy mushrooms and lightly steamed asparagus spears. A slab of fresh mahi-mahi, expertly grilled, is delicious--but I’m glad I ordered the sauces on the side. The herbal beurre blanc is fine, but the baked mint and garlic belongs on roast lamb.

Roasted rosemary half-chicken is perfectly respectable, moist, tasty, sufficiently herbed. But the dish called Zuppa de Mussels--a strange, green, cheesy broth full of large, unremarkable New Zealand mussels--is less than satisfying. Jambalaya is a true hodgepodge: faintly sweet rice, dry chicken nuggets, bad-tasting sausages, tons of grilled onions, plenty of surprisingly fresh lightly cooked shrimp, and two inedible bright orange crawdads.

The culinary mistakes and misjudgments at Coral Reef are mitigated by reasonable prices and a general lack of pretentiousness. The lower prices, large menu and heterogeneous beach ambience will probably make the Reef more popular than either of its predecessors. Every so often a bright-eyed man, wearing a fluorescent yellow headband, a Looney Tunes T-shirt and a white apron--the chef, we presume--emerges from the kitchen to enthusiastically ask his customers how they like his food. This is a cheerful place--cheerfully good, cheerfully bad.

Coral Reef, 1551 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 393-9224. Lunch and dinner seven days. American Express, MasterCard, Visa. Full bar. Dinner for two, food only, $24 to $70.