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Recent Changes Stir Orange County Fine-Dining Pot

Restaurants keep opening, many of them good, but when we spent time at the new Watertable in the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Hotel & Spa, we realized dish by dish that there are still culinary frontiers being conquered and ways to set the bar much higher. It has been one of the most eye-opening, palate-pleasing forays into fine dining on a comfort-food level that I’ve come across in a long time.

Watertable is certainly destination-worthy and should be on your dining calendar.

The restaurant has its own outside entrance, which is important for hotel restaurants. As you enter, there’s a marvelously comfortable library lounge on the left that begs great conversation over craft cocktails. To the right is a long bar, whose attractiveness is high on the ladder, and a large communal dining table. Beyond are the eye-catching dining rooms. Throughout, the art pieces, including pipes emanating from the ceiling and stretching down to a walnut table to tap for customers’ drinking water, are a unique pleasure on their own. Overall, modern meets rustic with a nod to the property’s Andalusian architecture. The various dining areas, tables on the loggias, cloister-like arcades with full walls of glass for expansive outside views, including the ocean, call to me.

Chef Manfred Lassahn, a veteran of some ultra-high-end fine dining establishments, is the linchpin for the food. I have actually tried most of the menu already. While we’ve seen all of the same superior ingredients he uses in the cuisine at myriad other restaurants, he’s redefined the way they are cooked and presented. His rethinking of what can be done with a food, a sauce, a recipe of ingredients makes for some quite interesting dining.

All three meals are served at Watertable, but let’s begin with lunch. The most fun is eating in the bar area and considering an avocado gazpacho or roasted tomato soup or a reconfigured salad.

Then perhaps a sandwich: You select the greens and veggies and the meat, poultry or fish—and voila, a singularly unique creation.

And then there are those Bar Jars. I smile just thinking of the name, and even more after tasting the nine savories tucked into $5 jars meant to be enjoyed at the bar or in the lounge, with or without some crusty bread.

Of the mélange, I now have a craving for the salbitxada spread of Catalan origin and comprised of toasted almonds, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and selected herbs; artichoke and goat cheese spread; Andalusian mix of eggplant, squash and peppers in olive oil; or the olive tapenade with mojama (dried, salted tuna).

The dinner menu includes some steaks—try the hanger steak atop excellent polenta and crunchy leeks. A Berkshire pork porterhouse has finesse via its honey and lavender brine.

Diver scallops are dressed with sturgeon roe and watercress. Several fresh fish and meats invite the diner to select the entree and the sauce to complement it. Suggestion: the line-caught halibut with that superb salbitxada sauce.

Sides like crunchy cauliflower with prosciutto and farro; cucumber and mint quinoa with oven-roasted tomato; and blistered mild chile peppers and pearl onions with warm seasonal stone fruit are also fascinating takes.

This is a fine-looking hotel and spa on its own, with a central “village” filled with an art gallery, shopping venue, and Pete’s Sunset Grille, where casual food meets beer and beachy cocktails overlooking the ocean. I am very fond of the expanses of lawn on this property and the serene seating spaces tucked away here and there for quiet reading or relaxing. A tranquil spa treatment and a very interesting dinner afterward could really banish the stress.

Watertable is a great addition to the Orange County dining scene, and I am already arranging to take many friends there.

Watertable at Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach: 21500 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Huntington Beach, (714) 698-1234.

CdM Trattoria

Alessandro Pirozzi and his wife, Mai, have just opened their third restaurant in South County. Pirozzi is in Corona del Mar; their others are the highly acclaimed Mare and Alessa, both in Laguna Beach.

This time, they’ve created a fully authentic upscale trattoria, just as you’d find in Napoli, Italy. It goes far beyond pizzas, even though Alessandro may have outdone those overseas dining spots in the pizza-oven category, as the new restaurant has one of the world’s largest hand-crafted ovens—it can bake 10 pies at once and reach 900 degrees. It was constructed in Italy and installed here by an artisan who traveled over to oversee the installation of the impressive dome-shaped structure that dominates the middle of the kitchen toward the back of the room.

Alessandro has become quite famous for his pastas, all handmade daily, and his beautiful presentations, plus his delicate sauces and unexpected dishes that are soulfully Neapolitan.

When I first twirled some of his limoncello pasta on a fork with a hunk of lobster, heaven was knocking. At Pirozzi, it’s on the menu with giant prawns.

The room, in a former KFC, is ultra-attractive, with brick walls, a convivial little bar, and a smattering of tables from which everyone can see the beautiful pizza oven and through the wall of windows that are flung open to the pedestrians and activity outside on Pacific Coast Highway. There’s also a small patio.

The menu features the best Italian prosciuttos—wild boar, duck, Parma, San Daniele, Iberico—on a charcuterie list, along with salamis—black truffle, venison, tartufotto, sopressata. The cheeses are also quite tasty, among them sottocenere, red Leicester, gorgonzola dolce and fresh burrata.

Among 15 amazing appetizers are wild boar sausage; calamari and shrimp in lemon-lobster sauce; quail stuffed with sausage and wrapped in prosciutto; lamb chops with gorgonzola-flavored polenta; mezzelune stuffed with braised short rib; butternut squash ravioli; organic beets with wild berry dressing; and flash-fried olives stuffed with fontina cheese.

Some main dishes are baked in the pizza oven, and the pizzas themselves tingle the taste buds in an aficionado way. Pastas made with meatballs and/or meat sauces—free-range beef, Kurobuta pork, lamb shoulder—join a variety of seafood and chicken. Should one have room, there are several meat, poultry and seafood entrees.

Who ever heard of nine desserts on a trattoria menu? True—and generous—Italian shines through again. Color this one delizioso in every way.

Pirozzi: 2929 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar, (949) 675-2932.

Las Brisas’ Future

My personal thoughts on what we might expect for Las Brisas under the ownership of parent company Real Mex Restaurants, which also owns the Chevys and El Torito chains, along with some other brand names.

Some of you may remember when the iconic Laguna cliff-side location housed the celebrity-studded Victor Hugo’s, the upscale dining getaway of the stars in the midcentury glamour era. By 1979, it had turned into Las Brisas, a legend on its own that has been playing out since.

It’s been reported that the parent company plans $20 million in upgrades and changes to its El Torito, Chevys, El Torito Grill, Acapulco and Las Brisas restaurants. I wonder what we might expect of the food, the ambiance, and the staff when the top brass takes on renovations and changes at Las Brisas.

Part of Real Mex Restaurants’ plans apparently include growing the Who Song & Larry’s Cal-Mex gastropub concept—one opened last month in Orange.

I would note that in addition to its fame for the ocean views and its myriad food fans, the breakfast served every day at Las Brisas is amazing and pretty much without peer (500 or so diners on weekends). The spread of continental and Latin dishes is very impressive. When someone says to me that Las Brisas is merely a tourist location, I mentally classify them as someone who really doesn’t know how to eat. Over the years, I’ve taken countless visitors, local friends, and groups of 30 or more on some occasions to Las Brisas, only to have them in awe of what they’ve been missing.

What we might miss in possible upcoming changes is some of the current staff. If that would include Fouad Ziady, who has run Las Brisas with the same pride as if it were his own restaurant since its inception, that would, in my opinion, be a grave mistake. Fouad is one of the most ethical and genuine restaurateurs. He is so highly regarded that his name is coming up as often as the buzz about possible concept changes. In fact, in different scenarios within a few days last week, people mentioned Las Brisas and pointed out Fouad as the central important name in the perception of it as a whole.

While some sprucing up of the interiors at Las Brisas might be welcome, I really wonder what we are going to end up with as a concept. On various occasions, Orange County has been grossly misunderstood in terms of our food philosophy and how we actually perceive and intertwine our lifestyle with that philosophy and dining habits. That happened with Katsuya in Laguna Beach, which lasted only a short time, despite a big-time boutique hotel designer and well-known national chef as the upfront names. It also happened when super Chef Michael Mina and his partner brought a sister restaurant, Aqua (their first famed one hails from San Francisco), to Monarch Beach/Dana Point. That failed.

Going way back to the opening of the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, I was told that a high-profile sociographic and demographic assessment agency from outside of Orange County was hired preopening and that its perceptions/reports failed to reflect what Orange County is really about.

I hope that the owners will carefully assess what Orange County wants and will support that and not enter the ballgame with an attitude that they know best and it’s their money, so they win.

El Cholo

Then we have the case of the El Cholo Mexican restaurant in Irvine being unable to renegotiate its lease with Newport Beach-based Irvine Company after 15 years.

Where have we heard that before? It’s another familiar story of restaurants having to close and/or move because the landlords make renewing impossible.

The restaurant will remain at the Jeffrey Road and Alton Parkway location until August and then move to the old Landmark location in Corona del Mar that’s changed hands a few times over the past decade, with most concepts being of the seafood and steak genre. No doubt, with El Cholo’s long background in Los Angeles and Orange County, this will be a better bet for the coastal crowd, but Irvine will be missing the Sonoran food that El Cholo is known for.

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