A Fish Tale

<p>Fish Story, the latest gem among the great restaurants (Morimoto, Celadon, Angele) crowning the Riverfront and Napa Mill developments at the foot of Main Street in Napa, is the sea-soaked brainchild of the Lark Creek Restaurant Group, a restaurant management company that seems to get just about everything right.</p><p>Consider, for instance, the selection of raw oysters on the menu. Besides the regular selection of Steamboats, Walker Creeks and Miyagis at six for $15 and a dozen for $28.50, there is a higher tier labeled “premium” that includes Summerside oysters (six for $19.50; 12 for $37, 4 stars ) from the south side of Prince Edward Island across from Malpeque Bay. They're served on a tray of ice strewn with rockweed — the native seaweed of the North Atlantic coast — and lemon wedges.</p><p>These oysters are briny like Malpeques, but meatier because their cups are deeper. The premium tier also includes little, clean-flavored Beausoleil oysters from Neguac, New Brunswick, with pretty black and white shells, and unique Kusshi oysters (the name means “precious” or “ultimate” in Japanese, depending on whose translation you use), which are our familiar Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas), grown in British Columbia on trays that are frequently shaken so the oysters tumble and grow deeper shell cups.</p><p>If it's clams on the half-shell you're after, you'll find Massachusetts Top Neck Clams (six for $12 or a dozen for $22). Top necks are also called cherrystones, and are two to three inches in diameter. Little Neck clams are smaller, while quahogs are larger — but they're all the same kind of clam. Soft-shelled clams, a different genus and species, also known as steamers, full belly, or Ipswich clams, are sweet and tender morsels that grow in the cold waters along both coasts. You can order them as Fried Ipswich Clams ($14 a plate, 2½ stars) accompanied by good house-made tartar and cocktail sauces. They're twisty and especially crunchy hot from the kitchen.</p><p>The nautical theme of this fish house starts when you walk in and the hostess gives you a menu that begins with the day's maritime weather for the Farallones Gulf and Cordell Bank between Point Reyes and Bodega Bay.</p><p>The restaurant was designed by Mark Stevens of San Francisco-based Architecture & Light. The bar area is beautifully designed to suggest the interior of a fine ship, with a curvy, polished wood bar; hanging shelves made of chromed metal and stocked with liquors; indirect blue light emanating from the top, and globular hanging lamps. There's a room with ale-making tanks that will eventually produce house ales. Next to it is a bulletin board with pictures of folks with fish stories to tell. These are recounted in their captions — and many actually seem real, although a fish story is, of course, a fish story.</p><p>But there's no exaggeration about the way fish is handled at Fish Story. Of all meats, fish is the most delicate, and it's handled gently and with restraint. Nothing “cooks” fish more delicately than a prolonged bath in cold lime juice — the technique that produces ceviche. The Ceviche ($10, 4 stars ) of the day on a recent visit was raw rock-cod chunks soaked in lime juice, jalapeños, red onion and avocado, a soft and squishy triumph paired with its textural opposite, crunchy fried yucca chips.</p><p>You can eat in the bar area, but if you wander down the passageway by the ale-brewing tanks, past the tank of live crabs and the tank with live lobsters clattering around in it, you come to a beautiful dining room with lots of glass so you can look across the Napa River.</p><p>At noon, the woman taking reservations for this dining room said that there were no tables available at all from when dinner started at 5:30 p.m. until after 9 p.m. I arrived at 5:30 and again asked for a table but was refused. At 6 p.m., only seven of the room's 26 tables were occupied. At 7, there were still unoccupied tables. This isn't hospitality, it's hostility, and Fish Story deserves better. If the empty tables were due to no-shows, then I should have been notified and welcomed into the dining room. Actual service of food to table was quick and friendly.</p><p>In the dining room, glass partitions allow you to see the cooks in the kitchen. In the bar area, you can watch sports on two flat-screen TVs. The full menu is served in the bar after 5:30. The wine list is very fairly priced. A 2008 Jean Marc Brocard Chablis, excellent with fish, is $35, and a Gruner Veltliner from Austria is $29.</p><p>Dinner started with a luxurious New England Clam Chowder ($6, 3 stars ), its flavor rich with smoky bacon, clams, diced potatoes, celery, dill and two little drop biscuits. This was followed with a traditional but rather ordinary Caesar Salad ($8.50, 2½ stars): whole inner leaves of romaine lettuce dressed with run-of-the-mill creamy sauce, croutons and finely shredded parmesan.</p><p>You'll find crab cakes on many menus, but none as zippy as the Hand-Picked Dungeness Crab Cake ($12.50 for one, 3½ stars). The cake itself is a plump disk of mostly crabmeat and bits of sweet vegetables rolled in crumbs and fried a little too hard. But the habañero tartar sauce that accompanies it is really fiery. If you like spicy heat, this will set your benchmark.</p><p>Not every fish dish is from the sea (and incidentally, the place also serves red meat). Grilled Idaho Trout ($18.50, 3 stars ) is a farm-raised fish that's laid open and deboned, then turned filet side down onto a hot grill for the few moments it takes to cook. Then onto the plate skin side down so you can easily lift out forkfuls of the delicious white fish along with potatoes and haricots vert finished with warm vinaigrette made with toasted almonds and bacon.</p><p>Portuguese-Style Clams and Pork ($13.50, 3 stars) isn't truly Portuguese if it contains chorizo, as the menu says, as chorizo is Mexican sausage. Real Portuguese spicy sausage is chourico. But the combination of sausage, cherrystone clams, crispy Berkshire pork shoulder, peppers and tomato-y sauce is delicious, no matter what you call the sausage. It's very New Bedford, where chourico hangs in every butcher shop. As long as Fish Story is visiting coastal New England, it also offers a Maine Lobster Roll ($21.50, 3 stars), as if there's any other kind. It's in the proper top-loading roll, with lots of lobster, celery, pickles and mayo. But here's a little secret: The lobster roll at Willi's Seafood in Healdsburg is even better and it's two-thirds the cost.</p><p>Finish dinner with old-fashioned Butterscotch Pudding, the restaurant group's signature dessert as 1940s as a deck of cards with tartan scotties on the front. Who knew they still made pudding like this?</p><p>To sum up: Napa acquires a wonderful seafood restaurant to go with its other first-rate eateries.</p><p>Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for the Sonoma Living section. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.</p>