Feasting with your eyes

Geoffrey’s MALIBU is a restaurant that doesn’t know how to pronounce its own name. “It’s ‘Joffrey,’ ” says one of the staffers at the bar. “He was a friend of the original owner.” There’s no checking with the original owner. “He died.”

To its credit, Geoffrey’s has been getting its name wrong consistently since it opened in 1984. At 20, chances are decent that the dining room is older than the date who followed TV cop David Caruso to his dinner table Sunday before last.

Enter the place, and the reason for its longevity stretches as far as the eye can see. This cliff-side restaurant is basically one long patio carved out of a Malibu hillside. There isn’t a table in the house that doesn’t have a drop-dead gorgeous view of the Pacific.

So the previous owner not only had a friend with a funny name, but good taste in oceans.

The opening hours tell the story of how at least some of the locals use it: Geoffrey’s opens for lunch at 11:30 a.m., earlier on weekends; in midafternoon, it never quite closes. Instead, it fades into early dinner service, which starts in earnest at 4 p.m. The languorous approach lends Geoffrey’s an agreeable sand-in-its-hair quality. Local friends describe it as a place for pre-dinner, between beach and home. “We come at 5, have a drink and a salad at the bar, then go home and cook,” they say.

This Malibu answer to tapas takes place in the bar. Here we learn something else about the previous owner. “His name was Harvey, Harvey, Harvey something,” says one of the staffers. If the name blurs, the man’s generosity doesn’t. A collection of drawings of hearts by movie stars decorates the walls, where head shots might serve in less whimsical establishments. They are copies, says the bartender. The previous owner convinced all the artists to donate originals for publication and sale in support of a charity for children with heart disease. There are hearts by Mary Tyler Moore, Sylvester Stallone, Anthony Quinn. (Woody Allen’s broken heart and Geena Davis’ terrier with a heart are the best.)

“Harvey Baskin,” says another waiter, or manager or employee of some sort. The previous owner was Harvey Baskin. Several years ago, shortly after Baskin’s death, Jeff Peterson, a longtime employee who worked his way up from busboy, bought the place.

Eating in the bar makes sense for another reason besides the joyous charity of the late Harvey Baskin and the respect the new owner shows in preserving it. The staff takes mixology seriously. Mojitos are good, ditto margaritas, same for Arnold Palmers and iced teas. A kid I know gives the Shirley Temples with two cherries a thumbs up.

Veering toward solids at the bar, Caesar salad is also good, in spite of the baffling substitution of a strip of filo pastry for the classic crouton component. The bartender couldn’t be nicer. He’s an actor, he says. Most of the beautiful young staffers look like aspiring actors, but the bartender says most are surfers.

That explains the Anglo valet parking guys, whose first language is English and whose favorite word seems to be “duh!” One really sees these car jockeys in action only at dinnertime and during weekends, when the place really fills up. It isn’t pretty. Geoffrey’s parking lot is nowhere near big enough to accommodate all its diners’ cars, so customers by the dozen opt to park on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway, next to all the No Parking signs.

Arriving for my first meal at Geoffrey’s, a Sunday dinner, I asked one of the valets if those cars were likely to get tickets. “Depends on what the sheriff thinks,” he said. Asked if that was an elliptical way of saying it was illegal, he stared at me and said, “Duh!” It was not surprising to learn my dinner guest had been “duh-ed” too, but by a different member of the crew. Maybe their almost universal irritability results from lack of oxygen. To keep the cars mobile in the crowded lot, the valets leave entire hillsides of cars running, as if to prime the ocean air with the first tang of exhaust before it’s blown inland.

When eating a meal proper, the trick is opting for a table as far as possible from the indoor mechanized waterfall, whose gush competes with the wild sound of the surf below.

There doesn’t appear to be a Siberia when it comes to good and bad service. Fleets of waiters are never far offstage: This is not a dining room where anyone is left wanting for long. The wait staff could not be more attentive. It is almost pathologically honest, even when telling you there’s no point in asking about choices of red wine by the glass. “There are more, but they’re not any good,” one aproned wag quipped after recommending an Estancia Meritage.

And so to the food. A newish chef, Bijan Shokatfard, took over at Geoffrey’s last year. He has been mentioned in these pages, but not for his cooking. An item on chef’s attire in this section last August remarked on his jacket with silk-knot buttons and a mandarin collar embroidered with his nickname, “Slayer.”

Nearly a year later, his style sense is still probably a happier story than his kitchen. The food it sends out is a joke. Whether you think it’s funny depends on whether you’re paying. It would be gratuitous to belabor the cooking’s shortcomings, but form requires a roll call of dishes sampled from recent meals.

At a lunch, a chicken salad was more mayonnaise than chicken, served in a croissant, with garnishes of a fanned avocado, unripe tomato and a heap of good fries. A nearly raw “medium-rare” burger came in a spongy baguette, only the edge of the meat attaining a dirty grill sear. A salade nicoise came on lettuce whose youth had been spent in a refrigerator and without the advertised new potatoes. It had none of that French classic’s quivering marriage of steak-like tuna, fresh lettuce, early season beans, new potatoes and deconstructed mayonnaise of poached eggs and olives.

The desserts were odd and unluscious. A cheesecake, advertised as “Montrachet,” suggesting goat’s cheese, had a deep, choking, dry, slightly tangy filling and was served in a crust of crushed Oreo cookies. It came in a pool of what, if memory serves, was supposed to be raspberry sauce but was in fact strawberry. Bland, pleasantly cool passion fruit mousse came in another fruity sauce that seemed to involve mango chunks. A bread pudding with rum was a large slab, the spirit undetectable.

A sort-of signature

Dinner produced the kind of dishes common in the 1980s and called by label-happy guidebook editors “Modern American cooking” or, in England, “Modern British.” Geoffrey’s calls its style “New American Seafood.” A simpler term would be ersatz. This menu is where even the best ingredients go to have their virtues swept away by bad handling and worse partnerships.

The best dish was stodgy crab cakes, not from local Dungeness crab but from imported Maryland crab. Ahi tuna, described as “sort of our signature dish,” involved fish gone gray from its marinade, served with a fish roe garnish in a minefield of fiery chili sauce. A classic beet and goat cheese salad was rethought into thin slices of yellow beets surrounded by a sauce from red beets, topped with a refrigerator-cold blob of chevre and garnished with a tangle of none-too-fresh micro-greens.

Of main courses, four scallops were served on piles of gritty risotto, which, according to the menu, had been somehow infused with foie gras and seasoned with “star anise infused pomegranate reduction.” The delicate quality of the scallops succumbed to gritty texture and muddy flavor. Worse than this was a simple seafood pasta, with under-seasoned tough pasta gone a bit floury, perhaps from refrigeration, rendered yellowish by the addition of saffron, maybe, and served with tomato concasse, prawns, tough mussels, a watery sauce. A rack of lamb ribs, probably not American and certainly not seafood, was the best main course, though the meat would have been better without barbecue sauce. Accompanying it was a stodgy bean puree.

Desserts included an apple tart with pastry so tough, the waiter set down a steak knife with it. “Here, you’ll need this.” A rich and really very good hazelnut and chocolate tart required only normal cutlery. The request that a lemon tart be served without apricot sauce couldn’t be met. “It’s underneath the tart,” said the waiter, as if this made it somehow less evident, more desirable. The tart filling was fine, the sauce had surprisingly little fruit and high acidity and the pastry suffered refrigerator fatigue, a syndrome that involves butter separating from flour.

The strangest thing about this New American Seafood is the absence of the best local ingredients. There were Maine mussels, Maine lobster, Hudson Valley foie gras, Maryland crab. There was passion fruit when the vines have only just begun to flower, the only strawberries in evidence were as garnish. No asparagus, no tender lettuces, no strawberry dishes from the bumper crop simply overflowing from farmers market stalls. In a state with the best goat cheese dairies in the country, the cheese in the salad and the cheesecake was dry and tasted like a cheap import.

A dinner for four with one of the less expensive wines, a good and fairly priced $66 bottle of Chablis from the French producer Drouhin; the glass of jammy local Bordeaux-style Estancia; and valet service came to $325.89. Two-course lunches for three without booze will come to more like $100. But call it $380 and $120 with tips, because the waiters who carry this food earn their tips.

That is not to say don’t go. Just watch the solids. Geoffrey’s has the five most important things a Malibu restaurant needs to survive: a great bar, a decent Caesar and location, location, location.

*

Geoffrey’s Malibu

Rating: Satisfactory

Location: 27400 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; (310) 457-1519

Ambience: Terraced dining over the Pacific. Drop-dead gorgeous view.

Service: Breezy and friendly in the restaurant; rude valets.

Price: Lunch appetizers, $7 to $18; main courses, $14 to $39. Dinner appetizers, $7 to $65; main courses, $18 to $36.

Best dishes: are liquid. Good drinks, including mojitos, margaritas and Shirley Temples. Caesar salad, French fries and chocolate and hazelnut tart.

Wine list: Hasn’t caught up with the most recent theme of “New American Seafood” but can produce a very decent 2002 Joseph Drouhin Premier Cru Chablis for $66. Corkage, $15.

Details: Open for dinner Sundays through Thursdays, 4 to 10 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays, 4 to 11 p.m. Open for lunch Mondays through Fridays, 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., and for brunch Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Valet parking, $4.50.

Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. ****: Outstanding on every level. ***: Excellent. **: Very good. *: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.

S. Irene Virbila is on assignment. She’ll return May 19.