Revealing Nocturnal Niceties at Marston’s

Cover-up! Cover-up! A restaurant that’s open for dinner but doesn’t want you to know about it!

The facts: When a waiter at Marston’s recommended coming back for dinner, this columnist asked why dinner was not listed among the hours of operation. The proffered explanation: “We don’t want the place to get too busy.”

Ho-ho. Let’s see whether this story makes sense. In the first place, Marston’s serves dinner only one night a week. It does have an impossibly tiny parking lot, but that can’t be the objection because the night I went, every table was full by 6:30. Maybe this is just more of Pasadena’s keen zest for No-Growth.

But let’s backtrack. Marston’s is a charming little converted house decorated with Western genre paintings, located on a barren stretch of Walnut Street full of “No Stopping” signs, which don’t help the parking situation. A lot of its trade seems to ankle over from Pasadena City Hall. As the posted hours indicate, it specializes in breakfast and lunch.

Lunch is mostly sandwiches, notable for excellent ingredients, particularly the bread. The Rio Grande tuna is a sort of tuna melt with Ortega chiles, but the best part is the crunchy and deliciously toasted whole wheat bread. The BLT, made with thick bacon, is also on crunchy whole wheat toast. The reasonably thick and juicy burgers don’t come in the traditional milk-flavored bun but a chewy, bready bun, briefly fried in butter.

The menu goes on in this vein with club sandwiches, a jack cheese sandwich jacked up even further with smoky chipotle peppers and so on. But there are also some hot entrees, including two chilis. The Rio Grande chili is an excellent version of the old home-style chili, beefy, rather soupy, with carcasses of whole tomato in it. The White Lightning chili is a delicate, rather mannered chili made with white beans and chicken.

There are a couple of pasta dishes, including a peculiar but enjoyable one of “crab” (actually a mixture of 80% crab and 20% fish, as the menu frankly explains), onions and three colors of bell pepper mixed into a mass of angel hair, which is then fried. One of the best is spinach fettuccine with andouille (a nice, medium-hot smoked sausage that tastes rather like kielbasa) in a rich cream sauce.

The salads, with their soy dressing, seem rather bland, but a lot of entrees come with a very good jicama salad, if that is jicama (they don’t like to say). It’s sweet and not at all dry and starchy.

The desserts tend to rich chocolate things, including a chocolate bread pudding rather like the crepes smothered in cream and chocolate sauce that you found everywhere 15 years ago, and a slab o’ chocolate Grand Marnier cake. The best of the desserts is an excellent creme brulee. It could be a little sweeter, but the texture is perfect.

Now to dinner. The waiter who revealed the dinner cover-up gave me a menu from the previous Friday, and it sounded great. Pork medallions with orange mustard sauce, chicken rolled in macadamia nuts and sauteed, sea bass with honey-mint sauce, that sort of thing.

The night I went, though, what did I find? Prime rib, ahi with fresh tartar sauce, chicken breast with cheese and prosciutto. Decent prime rib, sure, but I suspect another cover-up.

Marston’s, 151 E. Walnut St., Pasadena. (818) 796-2459. Open for breakfast and lunch Tuesday through Saturday; for dinner Friday only. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Lunch for two, food only, $13 to $21.