Yarrow Bay Grill/Cafe: Hardly The Same Place

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XX Yarrow Bay Grill, 1270 Carillon Point, Kirkland. ($$$) Hours, Grill: Lunch ($8 to $15) 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays; until 2:30 p.m. Saturday. Dinner ($17 to $27) 5:30 to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday; until 11 p.m. Friday, Saturday. Lounge, full bar. Major credit cards. No smoking. Reservations: 889-9052. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Upstairs/downstairs.

The Yarrow Bay Grill (upstairs) and the Yarrow Bay Beach Cafe (downstairs) are twins, fraternal but hardly identical. They share a common corporate management but they have different chefs, vastly different menus and decidedly opposing notions of decorum.

Both, by the way, are stepchildren of Ray's Boathouse on Shilshole Bay (three of Ray's four investors started the Kirkland venture in 1989).

The Grill is upscale but not stuffy; a stylish Northwest seafood dinner house, with lots of red-meat excursions and an air of relaxed sophistication. It's busy. A 45-minute wait for an unreserved table on a midweek evening isn't uncommon.

The Beach Cafe is smaller, crowded, raucous and operates (especially near the bar-lounge) at a near screech. To say the service downstairs is informal is a gentle understatement.

"I'll have a glass of the Worden Chardonnay," I said.

"Have you had the Worden?' asked the waitress.

"No. Is something wrong with it?"

"Nooo. It comes in a box. Some people like cheap white wine."

"I only like cheap red wine," I huffed, and got a glass of so-so French Merlot.

From Thai to steaks

Vicky McCaffree is the upstairs chef. Her menu, developed over a four-year tenure, is fusion cuisine: mussels in Thai red curry, Thai-style Crabcakes, Portobello Mushroom Tempura with a soy-mirin dip, etc., along with less venturesome standards that won't frighten the natives: New York Steak, Hazelnut Crusted Rack of Lamb, a Northwest Bouillabaisse, and so forth.

They've added calamari to the menu. Shortly after the Grill opened, the corporate transplants from Ray's were stunned to discover: "They don't eat squid on the Eastside." They do now.

Nick Musser is the top toque at the Cafe, which features a polyglot international menu from waterfronts around the globe. The featured accents at present are Brazilian. You can get a heck of a bowl of Feijoada y Farofa (black-bean stew with mixed sausages, pork and cured beef) for a mere $8.95, topped off with a brisk chili lime sauce.

In general, you can expect quality ingredients, competently handled. But there are glitches that taut supervision should eliminate.

Dinners at both places start with baskets of sourdough rolls that are, frankly, cold. Not tepid, not room-temperature cool. Cold. They arrive under a napkin, possibly to keep them from shivering. On the other hand, the goat cheese in the Chevre Salad ($6.95; tossed with baby organic lettuce in a pleasant balsamic vinaigrette) is baked and nicely warm.

Fried Calamari ($5.95; available both up and downstairs) are dusted with seasoned flour, very lightly fried and served with a rousing lemon-basil aioli. Quite tender, they go down like popcorn. But one of them (served downstairs, where they are called Calamari Fritti), unfortunately, still had a quill - the squid's plastic-like spine - running through it.

Mediterranean Mussels ($8.95) are usually the sweet, oversized bivalves that have become popular here the past two seasons. Ours, however, were regular-sized, but served in a pleasant Thai sauce, dotted with cilantro and diced tomatoes.

Pleasant spinach salad

Enjoyed a Spinach Frisee Salad ($7.95), with bacon, chevre, crispy-fried shallots and a honey-mustard vinaigrette. Sliced shiitakes were surprisingly bland.

Baked Salmon ($19.95) was served daringly rare, in an olive-herb crust and a lemon-saffron vin blanc sauce, over a roasted red-pepper linguini. The olive crust was good; the fact that it still had an olive pit lurking in it wasn't.

Seared Ono (also $19.95) came with wasabi creme fraiche, a sweet mustard sauce, plum soy and two rather uninteresting rice cakes.

In the Cafe a night later, three of us gave high marks to a New Mexican artichoke dip ($6.95), a Paella Espana ($13.95) and Garlic Baked Prawns with feta and fresh basil ($10.95), although the latter arrived with three scoops of a dense wild-rice couscous.

Would have lingered longer over coffee, but a happy, persistent din drove us out.

(Copyright, 1996, John Hinterberger. All rights reserved.) John Hinterberger, who writes the weekly restaurant review in Tempo and a Sunday food column in Pacific, visits restaurants anonymously and unannounced. He pays in full for all food, wines and services. Interviews of the restaurants' management and staff are done only after meals and services have been appraised. He does not accept invitations to evaluate restaurants.