RESTAURANT REVIEW : Room With a Brew at Long Beach Eatery

At the base of the Belmont Pier in Long Beach sits BBC--the Belmont Brewing Company, microbrewery and restaurant. The patio has a great view of the pier, the beach and the sea, including the tiny islands and offshore drilling platforms with all their complicated, formidable machinery.

The BBC’s dining room provides a glimpse at yet another form of technology. Fat, gleaming steel tanks labeled Brew Kettle, Mash and Fermenters 1, 2, 3 and 4, behind a long bar, feed into another room full of smaller conditioning tanks. Products of this impressive equipment include the following social lubricants: the light JC Marathon, the amber Top Sail and the dark Long Beach Crude.

The restaurant itself is a bright, glassy establishment, full of sea breeze and pretty painted panels of exotic fish swimming deep in the ocean. Like a painting itself, a large aquarium houses a huge lion fish. The BBC service staff is young, cheerful and efficient. A few sports fans sip designer brews and keep an eye on the TV in the bar that is tuned, it seems, either to sports or music videos.

The BBC serves a recognizable homogenized California Eclectic cuisine--the kind of food standardized by California Pizza Kitchens and Crocodile Cafes.

Appetizers include an artichoke infused with garlic butter and topped with Parmesan cheese. The artichoke is fine, but the concept is a little silly--I mean, the Parmesan is all on the inedible end of the petal.

More straightforward are the steamed black mussels, delicately cooked and delicious despite a gratuitously rich wine cream sauce. The Caribbean wings have a good fruity heat to them, but they are not, as the menu promises, crispy. On the other hand, crab cakes are described as “lightly browned” and turn out to be seriously deep-fried--and bland.

I did, however, especially enjoy the peel-your-own shrimp in a spicy lime and black pepper marinade.

The fried goat cheese salad is an indiscriminate hodgepodge of ingredients--lettuce, black olives, peppers, celery, carrots, capers, sun-dried tomatoes and, of course, the fried cheese.

There is seafood stew in which fresh-tasting seafood is boiled in a very average, thinned tomato sauce. A smoked salmon-and-mussel pasta proves to be--like too many couples I know--an unfathomable combination. Better is the cheese-filled tortellini with discs of spicy sausage in a pinkish tomato sauce, though the dish would be much better, less cluttered, without the addition of marinated artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes. If the BBC stuck to its spare menu descriptions the food would be much better.

The lemon-caper chicken on a bed of delicious red chard is true to its description, and it’s a fine plate of food: a nicely cooked boneless breast lightly breaded and sauteed.

The fresh grilled sea bass is a lovely, fluffy piece of fish in a perfectly good cilantro cream served with herbed potatoes and a preponderance of steamed broccoli.

Desserts are big, basic and pretty good. The Beer Mug Sundae is a formidable dose of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and Oreo cookies. The cheesecake is lemony and rich, yet not too devastatingly heavy. For the apple tart, slices of the fruit are heaped on a buttery mattress of puff pastry, topped with vanilla ice cream and set in a pool of very light caramel sauce.

For beer lovers, of course, the restaurant’s brews may be all the dessert that is necessary. And for those who’d like to make their own judgments about the beer without undue expense or intoxication, the BBC offers samples free of charge.

* Belmont Brewing Company, Belmont Pier, 25 39th Place, Long Beach, (310) 433-3891. Lunch and dinner seven days, brunch Saturday and Sunday. Beer and wine. Major credit cards accepted. Parking in pier lot. Dinner for two, food only, $26 to $45.