Title: Skates on the Bay
Author: ENU

Skates on the Bay, has a new ExecChef in East Bay native Adam Brown, as of Sept 2012

Skates on the Bay
100 Seawall Drive  Berkeley, CA
http://skatesonthebay.com/menu.php?id=dinner#3 
Review date: February 2012

Skates has long been one of the better-regarded restaurants along the Bay. This is not saying much, of course, as it's always been true that the better the view, the worse the food. Still, it's been a fairly reliable place to eat. The food has always tended towards the salty, as there's a large bar attached, but it's never been over the top and we were prepared for it.

Skates rose to the top of our list to try as we wanted to see how their new Executive Chef, Greg Lutes, from the well-regarded Waterfront restaurant in San Francisco, has made his mark over the last few months. There's a fairly large regular menu, along with a separate page of nightly specials. 

Our friend Mel joined us, so we were able to try a good variety of dishes. We started with their prototypical crab and artichoke dip, which is no longer as unique as it once was. Now most restaurants offer it and frankly, several do it better, such as Townhouse/Emeryville. 

Skates' version is nicely tart but without much crab flavor. It's also a little flat in taste, and is better with the rosemary-scented foccaccia that serves as their housebread, rather than the warm but plain foccaccia that comes with the dip. 

Carlos, Inez and Mel started with soup. Carlos had the lobster bisque, Inez had the clam chowder, and Mel had the French onion soup. Inez liked her chowder, and Mel was prepared for the saltiness of the Parmesan crust on the French onion soup, saying the broth had a nice beefy taste to it. Carlos' bisque was mostly salt-flavored; he thought it was poorly done. There was very little lobster taste to it, and what there was seemed mostly of lobster base, not shells.

I started with the Maytag blue salad. It was crisp shredded romaine of very good quality, with none of the tough dark green leaves that so many restaurants use as a cost-cutting measure. The Maytag blue is genuine Maytag – again not always true – a truly wonderful cheese. The addition of crumbled hard-boiled egg mellows out the sharp saltiness, and a generous sprinkle of toasted slivered almonds gives the final touch. 

There was no oil or additional dressing used, and nothing was needed. This is one of the better salads I've had recently. Not up the exquisite level of Mustard's/Napa fresh-picked greens, but definitely worth ordering if you love a good blue. Nothing earth-shaking, but a nice change from the usual.

Carlos got the 19-oz prime rib, which they salt-roast and then sear. This traditional technique gives it an extremely salty exterior, and a bit too much grayish 'ring' under the crust. A better technique would be slow-roasting and I'm not sure why Skates doesn't do that; almost all restaurants have switched over to this method as you can hold the cooked roast in a convection oven for almost 36 hours without overcooking it. 

He received a good thick 1-1/2" slab, however, so points for that. It's almost as good as the prime rib we like so much at Townhouse/Emeryville, but falters because the au jus tasted like brown salty water, so far as Carlos could tell. And the meat was swimming in it, instead of the jus being served in a cup on the side, as most places do.

Mel got the seafood étoufée, a mix of scallops, tiger prawns, mussels, clams, with andouille sausage over cheese grits with braised greens. She finished everything but the greens, using a good drizzle of the accompanying Creole sauce (also known as 'red gravy' – see: http://www.gumbopages.com/food/sauces/creole-sauce.html).  The cheese was not evenly melted through the grits, which underpinned the seafood (normally this recipe is served over rice). Étoufée is a drier stew than gumbo, which has a soupier consistency, but both have common ingredients except for okra. There are many recipes for okra étoufée, but by itself okra is not usually added to an étoufée.

Inez and I both ordered the 'small plates' size of lamb chops, which wasn't small at all. Four American lamb chops off a rack are grilled with too much fresh rosemary, overpowering the meat which is so much milder in taste than Australian range-fed lamb. These small plates are quite substantial, and have a little smaller portion of starch and no vegetables, but otherwise could be easily mistaken for a regular entree plate. They are also priced only a couple of dollars below regular entree prices.

The chef, BTW, is deeply in love with crème fraiche and buttermilk. It's used extensively through the menu, in soups, sauces, and in the mashed potatoes that are mounded underneath the chops.

I also ordered the small plate size of the smoked sirloin Chateau, smoked over applewood and served with a harsh mustard-garlic aioli which I left untouched. It was five nicely rare slices of lightly smoked steak, with slices of roasted fingerling potatoes, lightly perfumed with fresh rosemary and thyme (unlike the overdose used on the lamb). I loved both the potatoes and the steak, although my companions weren't of the same mind. Mel called the steak "different" and Carlos said it confirmed that he just doesn't like the taste of wood smoke.

Mel got the cheesecake, which was misnamed as New York style but was really a tall Philly-style, drizzled with raspberry syrup and a tiny pouf of light whipped cream. All of us approved of this; we find a true New York cheesecake to be too heavy.

Carlos chose the Key lime pie, which came with lemon sorbet(!). It was a typical restaurant version, too sweet, with the usual commercial stabilized pastry cream, not the whipped cream a home cook would use. Mel, Carlos and I considered the lemon sorbet a ridiculous addition, and ignored it. Inez took a few spoonfuls of the sorbet but wasn't terribly impressed.

I tried the pear bread pudding, which was one of the more poorly conceived versions I've encountered. There was hardly any fruit in it; what miniscule slivers of pear I did find were crunchy and raw. There wasn't enough custard to soften all the giant bread cubes, and the promised cinnamon ice cream was more like vanilla with the faintest hint of cheap cinnamon. Skates serves the bourbon butter sauce on the side, a good thing since it's sickeningly sweet. I left it off – it was indifferent by itself, and did absolutely nothing for the bread pudding. 

The only thing the pudding had going for it was that by itself, it was the right level of sweetness for me: just lightly sweetened. All that was needed to bring it to a higher level was the fruit being used more generously and a better quality. That's not much to ask for, but apparently is more than Skates is capable of these days.

Carlos said his regular coffee was awful, but my decaf was decent, being fresh and reasonably strong, if not the highest quality.

Skates was never a perfect experience in the past, but we remember both food and service as being a level above what they showed this time. The food seemed tired, as if it were a passé chain restaurant....and sure enough, after some digging on the Web when I got home, Skates is part of a very large holding corporation which also owns Kincaid's/Oakland. We reviewed Kincaid's on August 2011 but weren't impressed. Carlos loathed the 'deconstructed' Wellington at Kincaid's, and in fact the exact same dish can be found on Skates' menu.

Service was cheerful but amateur. No one serving had any idea who had ordered what. There were four of us but they only brought three appetizer plates. We had to constantly ask for water refills. The final less-than-upscale touch was when Inez and I asked to take part of our entrees home – and they brought us boxes and left them on the table!

When you are paying these prices, handing your customers a box so they can pack up their leftovers is dumbfounding. I'm tempted to say it's on the level of a cheap Chinese restaurants, but even our most recent visits to inexpensive Asian restaurants (Shin-Shin, Ly Luck, and Nong Thon) have had the waiters whisking the serving dishes off the table and returning to us a bag with filled containers. Apparently this is too much trouble for Skates' staff to do, even at these inflated levels.

Whatever reputation Greg Lutes had at Waterfront, he's in it strictly for the money now at Skates. This was overall a "C-minus" effort from a restaurant that formerly was a "B" level. The fact that its professionalism at the front of the house has so severely declined into the "we don't really care because we know you probably don't come back very often" attitude, pretty much wipes them permanently off our list. 

If you want boats and water, go to Scott's/Oakland or Bay Grille/Berkeley. For a stupendous view, go to Meritage (which we will be returning to sometime this year): pay more, but get better service with food that is usually very good and often makes it up to the excellent level.
But don’t come to Skates. Please, please….don’t bother coming here.

Four people: Four starters, three salads, three entrees, three desserts, three beverages, with tip was $264.