Restaurant Review - Sink or Swim

There is something truly Disneyesque about the Oceanaire, and it’s an ambiance I appreciate. After all, the point of Disney, and especially its theme parks, is to submerge visitors in a fantasy. Maybe the real point is to sell those visitors ugly shirts to remember that fantasy, but we’ll put that aside for now. Oceanaire’s theme-park brochure would say something like, “Sailing the high seas in a bygone era of glamour and glitz.” When a fantasy like that works, if it’s really pulled off well, who wouldn’t want a T-shirt to remember it by?

Or at least a doggie bag. The Oceanaire, which is a restaurant chain with outposts in nine major cities, has selling points that include 1940s ocean-liner atmosphere, super-fresh seafood and ginormous portion sizes. In recent months, I had been hearing more and more whisperings of great meals to be had, and despite the fact that our previous restaurant critic, Bill Addison, had been less than thrilled with the place shortly after its opening last year, I decided to offer a chance for redemption, and revisit.

The Oceanaire claims to treat seafood like steak, which means being diligent about cooking time and doneness, and using an a la carte menu format. In other words, sides cost extra. There’s a lot that costs extra here, but on a good day, the fantasy makes it worth the bucks.

The dining room, which you enter after passing by a glittering raw bar, is a dream of mahogany backlit by eerie neon blue light. Waiters are dressed in costumes that evoke both chef’s whites and captain’s uniforms. Service is formal, and for the most part pleasingly so.

By far the best thing about the menu here is that there is a daily selection of oysters — usually around 10 varieties. For true oyster lovers, such quality and selection is hard to find in Atlanta, and this alone put the place in my good books. During my first meal here, I gobbled up six different varieties, savoring each one’s distinctive texture and brine.

Next came a charming dish of shrimp and grits, the grits rich with cheddar cheese, the shrimp lovingly courted by smoky bacon. Gobble, gobble, slurp.

And oh, miracle of miracles, a tender, luscious, moist swordfish steak, probably the best piece of fish I have had this year, and certainly the best treatment of swordfish, which is so hard to get right. The almost kitschy “Black and Bleu” presentation, with caramelized onions and a globe of blue cheese butter, works in this setting, as if paying homage to an era of fine dining that has passed, rather than being mired in it.

For dessert, I couldn’t resist another taste of reminiscence, and ordered the baked Alaska, which our server ceremoniously flambéed at the table. The flaming liquor left a nice char on the meringue, and the walnut ice cream was satisfying enough. But here came the first hint at what I would later discover was more of a trend than a fluke — the brownie base, so simple to ramp up to decadence, was flavorless and soggy.

The Oceanaire’s great disappointment is that days such as this, where some food is flawless and the dishes that aren’t make up for it with a huge dose of feel-good nostalgia, are not the norm. In fact, I’m convinced that my first visit to the Oceanaire was accompanied by an uncanny amount of luck in ordering. How else to account for the expensive ($11.95), shockingly bland side of mac and cheese that I was met with on a subsequent evening? Or the tough piece of Marlin “Oscar” served with woody asparagus?

I tried, in vain, to allow the place to redeem itself. But after a lunch bowl of forgettable clam chowder (and chowder is almost always an opportunity for a good chef or recipe to shine), and another entree of overcooked fish, this time in the form of grouper served with braised short ribs, it sunk in: Perfection is the exception, not the rule here. And at $36 for that overcooked grouper, even with its rich, luxuriant short ribs accompaniment, perfection should be included in the price. Nothing else is, after all. Those sides come in at anywhere from $9-$13.

My final hurrah at the Oceanaire was a slab of cheesecake, which was dropped at the table by a server with a glimmer in his eye. It’s not an uncommon look for the servers here; many of the dishes are so large that the staff seems poised to soak up gasps and exclamations. Apart from the “seasonal” macerated strawberries (in October?), the cheesecake was classically lovely, as creamy and rich and decadent as any I’ve had.

It was a nice finish to an encounter that was ultimately devastatingly disappointing. I had started with so much hope. Those hopes were dashed, but at least the ending was sweet, and there was enough left over for the doggie bag. “I spent big bucks at the Oceanaire and all I got was this tasty cheesecake.”