RESTAURANT REVIEW : City Grill: A Corner of Wildness in Long Beach

It’s Reggae Night in the World Trade Center. Tight, funky rhythms echo weirdly through the empty plaza, mingling with the suave swoosh of elevator doors and the flapping of banners of many lands.

The City Grill is the little corner of wildness in the red marble monumentality of this imposing Long Beach complex. It looks cartoony inside: Red-orange fluorescent lights curve around the margins of a turquoise ceiling spotted with mirror panels, and something like a miniature section of Stonehenge stands in the middle of the floor. Photographs and paintings, all involving bicycle handlebars, adorn the non-smoking section.

And there is often live music for the outdoor dining section, such as the reggae band pumping away in the vastness of the half-dark plaza. Could it be that there’s excitement in the food as well?

Could be. The menu is as eclectic as the idea of world trade itself: Italian, Chinese, Cajun, you name it. There are cruets of virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar at every table, in little cruet-caddies that also hold flyers advertising Winemaker’s Night dinners. Nevertheless, a reassuring homeyness hovers over everything.

There are more ambitious-sounding dishes listed but the best single thing here is the chili, available either as an appetizer or an entree. It’s a powerful, impressive, brooding sort of chili, more Mexican in style than Texan: strips of tender steak in a mahogany-dark sauce of ground ancho and pasilla peppers (and no tomato at all, so far as I can tell). It’s only moderately hot but full of the bricky-chocolatey perfume of the peppers; a concentrated mouthful, too noble to deserve adulteration with the pots of onion, cheese and sour cream that accompany it, though the corn bread is a handy way of sopping up all the sauce.

The rest of the appetizers are not quite in this league, but certainly solid. A grilled green pasilla pepper is filled with shrimp, corn and goat cheese. A couple of crab cakes made with a mixture of Louisiana and ordinary blue crab come in a lemon butter sauce that has a sharp mustard burn. You can get filo-wrapped goat cheese flecked with basil, or cheese ravioli topped with smoked fish.

The entrees run the gamut from plain pot roast to a semi-nouvelle dish of lamb, sliced up (not exactly with surgical neatness, it must be said) and arranged with some good Dijon sauce, resting against a little dike of ratatouille with about half a dozen more vegetables on the plate. The best of the vegetables are the roughly fried new potatoes with rosemary.

The gumbo has a suspicious look, served as it is with lemon wedges, but it turns out to be pretty good. There is a proper scoop of rice in the middle of an earthy broth full of crab scallops and shrimp, plus some peppery smoked ham. There’s even a little bit of okra, which California restaurants rarely think to include.

Where there’s Cajun food these days there is likely to be Southwestern as well, of course. The specials might include lamb with chipotle pepper sauce and sweet-sour chunks of cactus flesh.

The few Chinese dishes on this menu, which goes into great detail about their ingredients, have a rather denatured flavor. Stir-fried beef tips, with its combination of honey, sherry, vinegar, cilantro and vegetables, somehow comes out tasting Southwestern. Authentic or not, though, they’re fun, particularly the “mahogany duck” varnished with honey, soy and plum sauce.

The desserts feature one stab at haute cuisine, a very creamy creme brulee , but here the homeyness of the City Grill really takes over. Peach-strawberry cobbler has an odd crust, like the surface of a cake doughnut, and a load of thick whipped cream on top. It’s an unfair match, though--the strawberries totally overpower the peaches. Better are the soda fountain treats: a macadamia-and-chocolate brownie topped with a huge scoop of vanilla ice cream, hot fudge cascading down it, and a sundae with two flavors of gelato in a world of chocolate sauce and whipped cream.

This is an interesting restaurant for a World Trade Center, where you’d expect something a lot less imaginative. Good work, Long Beach, not least for the reggae band.

City Grill, 1 World Trade Center, Long Beach, (213) 499-7040. Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 5-10 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Full bar. Validated parking underground at Ocean Avenue and Daisy Street. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $30-$63.