Another On Tap

This town has staked its claim as the microbrewery capital of the Southland with three major entries: Belmont Brewing Co., Yard House and Dockside Brewery.

The ambitious new kid is Rock Bottom Brewery, the 20th in a Colorado-based chain that stretches to Maryland. It has been packing them in since Day One. Maybe people like the clubby, modern design: swank parquet floor, dark wood booths, exposed ceiling ducts, cacti sprouting from huge terra cotta containers, soft lighting.

They certainly like the beers, which have such catchy names as Pelican Red Ale and Black Seal Stout. Regular patrons drink from their own steins suspended on hooks above the long bar.

For all the good, fresh beer (try Signal Hill Gold, pale and spicy with citrus notes in the finish), Rock Bottom Brewery wants to be taken seriously as a restaurant. The menu is loaded with steaks, chops and creative Southwestern dishes, not the usual brew-pub selections whose purpose is to make customers thirsty.

Some of the food is mighty good, including a tender, meaty rib-steak chop and a clever take on vegetarian enchiladas, rolled around a surprise mixture of red chiles, sweet corn and potatoes.

A few problems need to be worked out. Service can be slow and erratic, and that goes double if you’re on the windy patio facing Ocean Boulevard, where a busing station might improve the situation drastically.

So would a few busboys, but evidently the chain doesn’t believe in them. The company’s philosophy, one harried lunch waitress said, is to be “customer-oriented but employee-empowering.” Maybe empowering the waitress to clear her own tables is fine for the rock-bottom line, but it’s not so hot when there’s a pile of dirty dishes in front of you and you can’t get a glass of water.

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Things run more smoothly in the kitchen, where the only problems are the excessively doughy pizzas and the greasy deep-fried dishes.

The appetizers are radical for a brew pub. Juicy, flavorful salmon cakes (two crab-cake-sized discs) are dressed with an expertly prepared chipotle mayonnaise. The light tomato-basil quesadilla is a crisp baked flour tortilla daubed with walnut pesto and sprinkled with pungent Asiago cheese and chopped Roma tomatoes.

Traditionalists can order hot beer pretzels, four soft twists crusted with salt and served with a grainy, penetrating, stout-flavored mustard. You could also order fried onion slivers, but I wouldn’t. The thinly sliced sweet onions in a seasoned buttermilk batter came to the table sodden with oil.

Alder smoked salmon fish and chips is another might-have-been. The large filets of mildly smoked, delicately flavored salmon suffer from a greasy pale-ale batter. More appealing in the same batter is the old-fashioned Monte Cristo: two enormous hunks of sourdough stuffed with ham, turkey and Swiss, batter-fried to a light golden brown and served with pleasantly sweet red currant jelly.

At lunch, Rock Bottom Brewery is crowded with local business types who seem to favor the Greek, Caesar and wild mushroom salads. Lunch is also good for Rock Bottom’s burgers and sandwiches, Dagwood-scale creations that nearly fill their oversized plates.

The hickory burger is 8 ounces of chopped sirloin on a crusty bun with bacon, smoked Cheddar and lots of barbecue sauce. The smothered steak sandwich, grilled sirloin marinated in red ale, is served open-faced with a sauteed mushroom and onion topping. Brewmaster’s bratwurst is less interesting, but I’d order the dry white veal sausage again for the full-flavored rye bun it comes on.

Dinners can be accomplished, particularly anything from the grill. The 16-ounce rib-steak chop is the best piece of meat, a steal at $18.95. The 8-ounce tenderloin with roasted garlic, also $18.95, isn’t far behind; the smoked filet mignon is slit down the middle and stuffed with roasted garlic cloves. Ask them to serve the sauce on the side; it’s a powerful one, made from Jack Daniels whiskey and Gorgonzola cheese. And you won’t go wrong with the aged top sirloin, though at $15.95 it doesn’t seem as as good a value as the other steaks.

Buffalo fajitas are tender slices of buffalo meat sauteed with onions and bell peppers and served with flavorful black beans and fragrant Spanish rice.

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Among the pastas, the two best are cavatappi--chicken and pesto with a spiral macaroni--and Southwestern shrimp and chicken, a sky-high pile of tomato-basil fettuccine tossed with spicy shrimp and chicken breast, Anaheim chiles and a rich, roasted-red-pepper cream sauce. Consider sharing.

Consider sharing the desserts, too. No one person could eat the foot-long slice of moist carrot cake dotted with a buttery caramel sauce. I like the stout-flavored aged Cheddar cheesecake, too. Deep-dish apple pie, a single-crusted version full of Granny Smiths, has a nice cinnamon ice cream on top.

In Long Beach, four might be the lucky number.

Rock Bottom Brewery is moderately expensive. Starters are $3.95 to $6.95. Salads are $2.50 to $8.95. Entrees are $13.25 to $18.95.

BE THERE

* Rock Bottom Brewery, 1 Pine Ave., Long Beach. (562) 308-2255. Food served 11 a.m.-midnight Monday-Saturday; noon-midnight Sunday. All major cards.