The simpler the better at McCormick & Schmick's

By KATHERINE IMBRIE
Journal Staff Writer

• See the menu.

In the more than eight decades since it was built as the city's premier hotel in 1922, Providence's Biltmore has had many incarnations -- and many restaurants, too. Veteran downtown-watchers may recall the eras of the Sheraton-Biltmore (the '50s), the Biltmore Plaza (the '80s), later the Omni Biltmore, and now the Providence Biltmore.

Along the way, some of the Biltmore's more notable restaurants have included, on the top floor, the Garden Room and L'Apogee, and on the bottom, the Falstaff Room, Goddard's, Stanford's, Davio's, and now the 51st link in a national seafood restaurant chain, McCormick & Schmick's.

It should be a prime spot for a restaurant to set up shop: A prominent corner in the heart of downtown, situated right next to City Hall and overlooking Kennedy Plaza and the Fleet Skating Center. Yet, as history has proven, it is not such an easy trick to make a hotel restaurant successful here. Each of the more recent entrants in the category has been greeted with fanfare and applause, followed sometimes in just a few years by a curtain fall and a quiet exit.

With high hopes for this fresh beginning at the Biltmore, a friend and I dined at McCormick's twice recently. Each time, we found the place lively, packed with large parties of people who were tucking into the menu offerings with gusto. But each time, we left wishing we'd liked it as much as they did.

Seafood is the specialty

The restaurant is large, about 8,000 square feet. An expansive bar area is the first thing you see upon entering, and there is seating for 200 people at tables and booths beyond it. The decor strikes a generically clubby tone with a lot of dark green fabric, polished dark wood, brass, glass, and thematic artwork -- in this case, fish.

As the Capital Grille chain is to beef, McCormick & Schmick's is to seafood. The chain, which was started about 25 years ago on the West Coast by Providence native Bill McCormick and partner Doug Schmick, stakes its reputation on a wide-ranging menu of seafood, flown in from as far away as Alaska and Hawaii or caught in local waters. (New Bedford scallops and Charlestown oysters, for example, are flown from here to McCormicks in the rest of the country.)

Lunch and dinner menus are printed daily, with a "fresh list" on top naming the types of fish that have just come into the kitchen. Menu items, though, don't change that much from day to day. We saw pretty much the same menu on our second visit as we had the week before.

According to information on the restaurant's Web site, www.mccormickandschmicks.com, the chef at each of the chain's restaurants has the autonomy to tailor the menu to regional tastes, to seasonal availability, and to his or her own inclinations -- the idea being to avoid the cookie-cutter feel of a large chain restaurant.

The executive chef in Providence is Robbie Cohen, who came here when the restaurant opened last summer, following a two-year stint at the McCormick's in Bridgewater, N.J.

Quality, freshness that impresses

There is certainly plenty to choose from on the McCormick's menu: Twelve appetizers, ranging from crowd pleasers such as Buffalo chicken tenders and coconut fried shrimp to lobster egg rolls and ahi tuna; six kinds of raw oysters; 10 soups and salads -- and more than three dozen entree choices, most of them seafood.

On both of our visits, we were impressed with both the freshness and the quality of the seafood we ordered. But in some cases, it was served with sauces and ingredients that didn't seem up to the same standard, or that overwhelmed the flavor of the fish.

A Maryland lump crab cake appetizer, for example, was a generous-sized portion loaded with good lump and delicate fin meat. That was plenty of good crabmeat for the $12.75 price, so it was too bad that it had been fried in too much -- or not hot enough -- oil, making it greasy. And something more inspired than the tartar sauce that accompanied it might have lifted it above the ordinary.

Likewise, a cup of seafood-and-corn chowder was chunky with baby shrimp, pieces of scallops, corn and cubed potatoes, but the base was pasty and the whole was not helped by being served barely warm.

A side salad was a delightful mix of super-fresh field greens, nicely dressed with a simple vinaigrette. But the chunks of blue cheese atop it lacked the punch of a really good blue cheese, and the toasted walnuts had little flavor. A Caesar salad of crisp romaine was made mundane by a dressing that had none of the clingy, creamy egginess of the real thing.

Like many New Englanders, my friend and I relish steamed clams, especially the tender and delicate ones from Chatham. So on a subsequent visit we tried McCormick's $9.95 appetizer version, which has them in a garlic herb broth. The steamers were fine, but they were overpowered by the amount of garlic in the broth. A hint of garlic might have been an enhancement to a plainly steamed clam, but not this much.

On each of our visits, we sampled six oysters from the raw bar: Malpeques from Prince Edward Island, Canada; Barnstables from Vancouver; and Charlestowns, which our waiter informed us are from a Rhode Island supplier who is exclusive to McCormick's.

The prices were reasonable: a sampler plate of six oysters was just $11.70. And their flavor was fresh and briny.

Would it be quibbling to wish for a mignonette sauce to accompany them that's a bit more subtle than this sharply vinegary one? Or for the oysters to be served on whole shells, rather than cracked or broken shells, as some of ours were?

Sauces fail to enhance dishes

For his entree on our first visit, my friend ordered the jumbo sea scallops with sweet-pea risotto and lobster sauce. Midway through our appetizers, though, our waiter told us that dish wasn't available and suggested the Block Island monkfish with port wine reduction sauce.

Later, my friend wished he'd asked for the monkfish to be simply grilled. The rich, creamy sauce, which contained dried cranberries and sliced mushrooms, seemed ill-suited to monkfish, and on top of that was served barely warm, colder than the fish was.

My choice of halibut was far more successful: A grilled fillet was nicely presented atop a mound of roasted corn in a mild butter sauce seasoned with saffron.

On our return visit, we did get the jumbo scallops. Again, the scallops themselves were fine, but the risotto they were served with was studded with kernels of arborio that were dried out and hard, and the whole lacked the smooth creaminess that marks a proper preparation of this dish. The pool of lobster sauce that surrounded it had a strongly pungent flavor that was off-key with the others on the plate.

Better was my casserole dish of Nantucket bay scallops, the smaller, buttery cousin of the sea scallop. These had been baked with a big dose of butter under a crumb crust, and confirmed my opinion that at McCormick's, the simpler the dish, the better.

Too-sweet ending to the meal

The service on our second visit was better than on our first, when our waiter did inform us that he was in training. That helped explain why he was less than knowledgeable about oyster varieties and served them to us without oyster forks. He was apologetic when the wait between courses stretched to half an hour or more, making the whole meal a 2 1/2-hour marathon, but he never offered an explanation for the delays.

The next server was more knowledgeable and adept, and he kept the courses coming without a hitch. And we did get oyster forks.

The wine list, which is extensive, is heavily weighted toward American and New World bottles, with plenty of reasonable choices in the comfortably modest price range of $25 to $40. (By contrast, the glasses are priced fairly high at $7 to $13.)

The low point of both meals came with our forays into the offerings from the dessert tray. Although they are all made in-house, the ones we tried were heavy-handed and overly sweet. We found ourselves picking desultorily at a sampler trio that included a fruit cobbler that was nine-tenths bland crust, a bread pudding that was all soupy custard surrounding a tiny nubbin of what the menu said was brioche, and a creme brulee that was the best of the three, in which a nicely crunchy caramelized crust topped a custard that only missed by not being as firm as it should have been.

A truffle cake, described as a flourless chocolate cake, was leaden, cold and oddly unchocolatey. Pieces of the same cake, sliced, were featured in the truffle sundae, which at least had great ice cream, made by Gray's.

A "twice-baked" apple pie was topped by a second crust that was a thick layer of melted and cooled brown sugar. Again, the best thing about it was the cinnamon ice cream.

Like much of the food we had at McCormick's, the desserts were not so much bad as unsubtle. For the type of fine dining experience that the restaurant clearly is aiming for, too many of the dishes we had were geared to the uncritical palate: too heavily sauced, too garlicky, too sugary, too much.

****

If you like the Bluefin Grille, Hemenway's and Big Fish, you might like McCormick & Schmick's.

****

McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurant, 11 Dorrance St., Providence. (401) 351-4500. Upscale chain. Reservations accepted. Smoking only at the bar. Wheelchair accessible. Highchairs available. Open daily for lunch and dinner, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday; 2 to 11 p.m. weekends. Weekday breakfast 6:30 to 11 a.m.; weekend brunch 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Credit cards: MC, V, AM, DS. Complimentary valet parking. Appetizers, soups and salads cost $5 to $14. Entrees are $12 to $30. Wines by the glass are $6 to $13, and by the bottle, $23 to $86.

****

Bill of fare

Dinner for two might look like this:

Crab cake $12.75

6 oysters $11.70

Salad $5.60

Grilled halibut $19.70

Monkfish $17.80

2 glasses Brancott Sauvignon Blanc $17.70

Dessert trio $9.95

Tax $7.62

Tip $19

TOTAL $121.82

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McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurant