RESTAURANTS : You’ll Have Fun, Fun, Fun Down at the Sand Dancer Grill

Nothing is new or shattering about Sand Dancer Grill, a coral-pink adobe that adds yet another bizarro architectural buzz to the Newport Beach stretch of the Coast Highway. But it is fun.

Sand Dancer Grill belongs to the Rusty Pelican restaurant chain, and, for the moment, you could say it’s an experiment. Every nut and bolt of this place was probably planned in a boardroom somewhere, from the cut-out Navajo design on your high-backed wooden chair to the number of grams of blue Curacao the bartender pours into your sky-blue margarita. If the concept takes off, we may see more of these places. If not, look for a Southwestern rug sale on Newport Boulevard sometime in the near future.

I’m betting that won’t be necessary. This isn’t an entirely original spin on the Southwestern motif, but the whole effect is pretty breezy, and a lot of the dishes are terrific values.

The prime location certainly doesn’t hurt either. The restaurant looks out onto pleasure boats moored in Newport Harbor, and the panoramic windows and lodgepole ceiling recall a Mexican resort hotel dining room. A great deal of the cooking here is done on an open grill. Service is performed by a young, energetic team that is ever-so-eager to please.

One evening, we were greeted at the door by a young man who seemed almost overjoyed to see us, despite the fact that the dining room was full. On another occasion we were faced with an unreasonably long wait. (Sand Dancer Grill takes no reservations.) The management, unfazed, plied us with a pizza and blended drinks at the chic, singles-happy bar.

Once you are seated at your oversized wooden table (everything is oversized here, from the rotisserie chickens to the long tall Sally pepper shakers on the tables), you’ll be handed an easy-to-read one-page menu resting in a wooden frame. It’s rather a pity that the original menus the restaurant opened with have been withdrawn, because they were clever and attractive--colored sandpaper adorned simply with the names of dishes. But this is a volume restaurant, and the waiters complained that having to describe every dish slowed down service several minutes per table. The menu you are left with is still pretty basic, but the dishes are described on it, eliminating most of the Q and A.

The one non-menu item here is a curious appetizer, something the restaurant calls its onion blossom. Essentially, we are dealing with a batter-fried onion here. The top has been sliced off, and chunks have been pulled out to make it look like some sort of mutant sunflower. The thing tastes good, all right, but it’s a bit unwieldy. The onion pieces are not detached from the base, and when you attempt to pull off a “petal,” you usually get more than you bargain for.

Salads and pizzas are mostly unimpressive, although the house soup, called Two in a Bowl, is great. This yin-yang soup of thick black bean and intensely flavored pureed chicken seems as much Asian as Southwestern. Swirls of flavored sour cream and ancho chili mayonnaise make it richly delightful.

But wedge salad and tomato and onion salad are both far too bland, and the pizzas, despite being wood-fired and appropriately smoky, have too much cheese and too little flavor. Wedge salad might be the least labor-intensive salad I’ve ever had. It’s a quarter of an iceberg lettuce, knot and all, dumped unceremoniously on a plate and doused with an insipid Roquefort dressing.

Thai chicken pizza suffers from a cloyingly sweet curry-cashew sauce, obscuring the good ingredient--roast chicken, carrots, bean sprouts, cilantro and chopped peanuts. In the pizza department, you’d better stick with familiar ideas--the sausage and pepperoni is nicely tangy. The special pizzas, such as the oily shrimp pesto model we tried one evening, need more work.

No doubt you smelled the bionic chickens turning slowly on the rotisserie when you were walking in. These whole chickens are the least expensive and possibly best things on the truncated entree list--the only other choices are lamb, steaks and fish. All entrees are served a la carte--a kindness, as we’ll see--and all except these chickens come from the restaurant’s charcoal grill.

The steak options are fine, a tender 3/4-pound filet mignon and a flavorful, if slightly fatty, New York strip weighing in at 14 ounces. It’s probably a bad idea on the restaurant’s part to serve the steaks, Nouvelle Southwestern style, in a pool of swirled sauce Bordelaise. The sauce gets cold by the time it reaches the table, and would be better in a sauce boat.

The fish, such as the mildly undercooked salmon, are good too, but the saffron cream sauce accompaniment is bland. Perhaps we had bad luck with the seven-bone New Zealand lamb rack, suffused with garlic and sweetened to perdition with a jalapeno mint sauce. The sauce can be scraped off, but I found this meat both gristly and flavorless, two faults impossible to ignore.

That leaves the chicken, and it’s a bargain--not only tasty, but a real mouthful, 3 1/2 pounds of meat and bone covered with crisp, heavily basted skin. Perhaps now you can understand why vegetable and potato are served a la carte here.

Should you opt for either vegetable or potato, incidentally, you’d better not be alone. The vegetable dish, typically broccoli or cauliflower (and a steal at $2.95), easily serves three. And twice-baked potato, a huge Idaho job stuffed with butter, sour cream, Parmesan and garlic, is excess personified--exactly, it would seem, the quality Rusty Pelican is counting on to break new ground in the ‘90s.

Sand Dancer Grill is moderately priced. Salads and appetizers are $2.95 to $4.95. Pizzas are $8.95. Entrees are $9.95 to $13.95.

* SAND DANCER GRILL

* 2607 W. Coast Highway, Newport Beach.

* (714) 646-0201.

* Lunch 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday; dinner nightly 4 to 10 p.m.; brunch Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

* American Express, MasterCard and Visa.