Dropping Anchor at Bayside 240 : Can a restaurant with a view make good with serious food?

What have we here? A clever display of seafood on ice: It looks like a baby shark thrashing the heck out of a mackerel for an audience of littleneck clams. Nice work, boys--leave your cards, we’ll drop a word to “Saturday Night’s Main Event.”

And what have we here? Behind the still life of wrestling seafood is a big gleaming display kitchen. At the tables (somewhat disturbing tables of blond wood that seem to slope downward toward all four edges) you’re handed a sophisticated California wine list. And Bayside 240’s menu, which changes slightly every day, is full of suavely up-to-date fancies like grilled orange roughy with artichoke puree and crispy lamb chops with thyme sauce.

It’s a menu that has “Culinary Institute of America graduate” written all over it, and Chef Thomas Tompkins did indeed attend that East Coast hotbed of avant-gardism. He plans to have winemaker dinners and so on. It sounds like serious restaurant time.

And yet there’s all that view out the huge windows: 180 degrees of ocean (counting what you can see from the busy, beachy bar as well as the restaurant side’s view), not to mention the vast panorama of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Crane your neck and look east a little--more or less back the way you drove, because Bayside 240 is toward the end of San Pedro Pier--and you can see a couple of other restaurants getting along without quite such gorgeous view locations.

The others are all chain restaurants, and that’s what’s amazing about Bayside 240. It has certifiably noble ambitions as a restaurant even though it could clearly get people out here to romantic view headquarters, as the chain restaurants do, serving food not much above the familiar surf and/or turf level. It works hard in the kitchen where the colorful, cartoony 30-foot mural or the driftwood dragon hanging over the bar might be be enough to augment the attraction of the view.

Tompkins’ menu is actually semi-familiar, or rather sometimes familiar. A lot of dishes sound Italian, regional American or possibly Chinese or Mexican, apart from the ones that suggest the avant-garde. But names can deceive.

For instance, the salmon pizza is less exotic than you’d think. It’s essentially Wolfgang Puck’s “Jewish pizza”--not on the Spago menu but often available there. This sort of “pizza” is served cold, covered with salmon and cream cheese, making it more or less a flattened-out version of lox and bagels. Or as it has been put, “at last a bagel with lox that’s big enough.”

The egg rolls are cousins to the pizza, scarcely Oriental items lavishly filled with lobster and cream cheese, though the vegetable rolls with charred ahi turn out to be sushi-like. The big, meaty crab cakes, on the other hand, are exactly as they sound, rather soft and rich, and very appealing.

Soups do not seem to be a strong suit at Bayside 240. The seafood gumbo, in particular, is very strange, but not for the usual reasons. The Louisiana-style roux that is the basis of gumbo is not undercooked, as California chefs are likely to make it; on the contrary, the flour has been fried so dark you can’t taste anything but what seems the aftermath of a kitchen fire. Without looking, I’d never have guessed there were shrimp in this.

The entrees are nearly all seafood, and of somewhat more even quality than the appetizers. The hot-smoked king salmon might be the best of them. It’s extremely smoky, and the mawkish tendencies of salmon when served hot are cut by both the smokiness and the fresh-tasting, mildly sweet-and-sour sauce of tomatillos, fried onions and honey.

Costa Rican mahi-mahi (a name to ponder) could hardly miss, baked in a tangy coat of Parmesan and Romano cheeses, nor could the luscious Molokai channel swordfish with its garnish of corn relish. Cajun red snapper (sometimes made with other fish such as black bass) is not exactly right out of the bayous, but it’s well grilled and comes with a novel jalapeno linguine in which the bite of hot pepper is just discernible.

Redondo stew is the obligatory huge bowl of seafood (approximately two each of shrimp, mussels, clams, scallops, crab claws and fish chunks). I can detect the garlic and maybe a little saffron in the garlic saffron tomato sauce, but there’s no doubt at all about the tomatoes. There are plenty of really fresh tomatoes in this one. Sometimes there is a dish of soft-shell clams (thin-shell would be a better name; you wouldn’t want to eat these whole like a soft-shell crab) that come in a thin broth intriguingly spiced with clove.

Petrale sole gets treated very gently--perhaps a shade too gently, though the dish is probably just the thing for light diners. In the center of the plate lies a big curled lump of sole surrounded by a dainty broth flavored with a bit of olive oil. The northwest sector is a Tic-Tac-Toe pattern of crunchy, barely cooked baby asparagus and poached red and yellow cherry tomatoes.

The Hawaiian ono with orange butter sauce is essentially for fans of Polynesian Cuisine. The fish is served scattered with chives on a riot of pineapple and orange slices, with a sunny smear of sweet orange-flavored sauce peeping out from among the fruit.

You have to remember that everything is a la carte. If you want a green salad, it’s on the list of side dishes; a nice one of pretty baby lettuces and some peeled tomatoes. There are also old-fashioned scalloped potatoes and particularly good French fries.

The desserts at Bayside 240 rarely aim at subtlety (the white chocolate cheesecake is an exception, smooth and scarcely sweet). There’s a chocolate fudge cake with a strong bitter chocolate flavor, and a banana extravagance called banana savannah, a sort of banana pie with a chocolate layer.

The most imposing unsubtle dessert is a sort of giant sundae called the thrasher, which recalls the glory days of the soda fountain. It’s a brownie topped with vanilla ice cream and surrounded on various sides with banana and pineapple slices, whipped cream and hot fudge sauce. I wouldn’t swear there weren’t nuts on it as well.

The menu sensibly recommends the thrasher for two people. One person could get thoroughly thrashed by it. Perhaps that still life by the door, the one of the shark whipping a smaller fish, is a warning.

Bayside 240 260 Portofino Way, Redondo Beach, (213) 374-8043.

Open for dinner seven days; brunch Sunday. Full bar. Validated parking; valet available. American Express, Diners Club, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $28-$78.

Suggested dishes: Maryland jumbo lump crab cakes, $7.95; smoked salmon pizza, $8.95; smoked roasted salmon, $15.25; Costa Rican mahi mahi, $13.25; deep chocolate fudge cake, $4.95; thrasher sundae, $7.50 (for two).