» RESTAURANT REVIEW

By Charly SHELTON

This week continues our series on hometown favorite restaurants adapting to the new normal of COVID-19 life. One restaurant that has taken very well to the concept of outdoor-only seating is Alissa’s Ocean View Bar and Grill.

The restaurant added additional seating where the patio previously ended so it now extends nearly the entire length of the restaurant. This cute little patio allows for socially distanced dining, in compliance with the new state regulations, while still accommodating a fair number of diners within the expanded space.

We were invited down to the restaurant to experience the outdoor area and what the restaurant has to offer, both for dining on the patio and take-out. And being a hometown favorite spot, of course we immediately ran into people we knew dining on the patio. That is what’s so great about Montrose – you always see someone you know. Having a new baby in tow, it was a great opportunity to show off, somewhere to see and be seen.

I have been to this restaurant many times and I always get my favorite two things: the fish and chips or the hangar steak. Although every time I come in and see the menu I consider getting something new, I always default to the old standbys because they really are the best fish and chips in LA, and how can you pass that up?

Owner Alissa Hwang came out to the patio and treated us to a sampling of the menu items; when I say sampling, I mean she brought out almost every single dish on the menu in full-size portions for us to try. It was a master class in exactly why defaulting to your old standby, however fantastic it may be, is depriving yourself of discovering a new favorite.

The appetizers included the fried pickles and popcorn shrimp. I will come back to the fried pickles and other dishes in a moment, but I need to get through the whole menu first. We had the beet and goat cheese salad with roasted golden and red beets, candied walnuts and arugula. Then it was sandwiches – the jumbo lump crab cake sandwich, the classic cheeseburger and the veggie wrap with grilled portabella mushroom, grilled asparagus, roasted red pepper, fresh spinach, avocado and the house-made vegan walnut pesto, all wrapped in spinach tortilla. Then we tried the newest dish on the menu, which was brought out at the reopening after the shutdown – penne pesto with sundried tomatoes, asparagus, feta and the walnut pesto. And of course, no trip to Alissa’s OVBG would be complete without the fish and chips and the hangar steak, my old standbys, which held up in competition with the other dishes.

But even more came out of the kitchen; from the entrees section of the menu was the pork chop topped with garlic-herb butter and served with garlic mashed potatoes and apple slaw, and the whitefish piccata – pan-seared whitefish served over fresh spinach and garlic mashed potatoes topped with a lemon-caper butter sauce. To finish off the meal was the outrageous chocolate cake – a three-tiered chocolate fudge cake – and a key lime pie tart, a creamy mini-pie. Whew, what a trip.

Despite having been at Alissa’s OVBG many times, as I said, I was only really familiar with two dishes. This broad journey across the Alissa’s OVBG menu showed me that not only is their kitchen widely varied to suit many different tastes, but also that I need to be more adventurous in my personal dining experiences. The whitefish piccata, a specialty dish brought in by owner Alissa Hwang when she and her husband, Eric, took over the business in September 2017, was not something I would have ordered and yet it is one of the best dishes on the menu, and one of the best seafood dishes I have had in a very long time. This was a special dish with importance to Alissa’s family and to do it just right at her own restaurant was a labor of love. And that shines through in this whitefish piccata in a way that can only be understood through the taste buds.

Meanwhile, the fried pickles are a dish that I had encountered in many a diner and roadside fast-food shack and they are usually all the same – soggy from the vinegar of the pickle while being over-fried in the breading to compensate. But not at Alissa’s OVBG. These are the best fried pickles I have ever had. Soft but crunchy panko crumbs for the breading and pickles that are neither vinegar-soaked nor dry, neither too dilly nor flavorless, just the perfect amount of in-between. What a strange thing to be the best at – making fried pickles – and yet they really are the best that I’ve had thus far. Another dish I would not have ordered but turned out to be fantastic. There are so many great things to talk about with the food at Alissa’s OVBG, but the confines of this paper can only hold so much.

I have always liked Alissa’s Ocean View Bar and Grill, and now I have so many more reasons to come back. Next time you’re down at the restaurant, either for dining on their newly extended patio or to order some take-out, do yourself a favor and order something you haven’t tried before. There are so many new worlds to see; why live with only your favorite? Alissa’s Ocean View Bar and Grill is located at 3826 Ocean View Blvd. in Montrose at Florencita Drive.

  Charly Shelton