Kings fusing healthful trend, fine dining at new Clearwater - cousins Sam King and Jeff King

PASADENA, Calif. - After crafting such fine-diing successes as 555 East, Ocean Avenue Seafood, I Cugini and Water Grill, cousins Jeff King and Sam King are hardly the Los Angeles-area restaurateurs one would expect to open a |health food' eatery.

In fact they haven't - at least not the stereotypical tofu-and-sprouts kind of place favored by holistic gourmets who wear Birkenstock sandals and drive old Volvos.

But Clearwater Cafe, the new Pasadena establishment launched by the Kings' Long Beach, Calif.-based University Restaurant Group, is a seafood-specialty operation whose underpinnings are unmistakably "healthy" and naturalistic.

Despite the restaurant's epicurean amenities and earthy elegance, URG president Sam King conceded that his newest concept is "kind of out there." He added, "The comments have been great, but some people are a little shocked."

Nevertheless, King's belief that consumers are increasingly concerned about health, ecological issues and food integrity has led him to sense that Clearwater Cafe could be the first duplicable, multiunit concept to emerge from URG's portfolio of high-grossing seafood, Italian and American dinner houses.

The new restaurant debuted a few weeks ago beside a courtyard in Pasadena's quaint Old Town district. Business at the 170-seat Clearwater, a $1 million refurbishment of a defunct restaurant site, so far supports King's vision of expansion as well as URG's goal for annual sales in the range of $2.75 million to $3.25 million.

Based on initial customer traffic, yielding per-person tabs of about $12.50 at lunch and $21 at dinner and wine sales comprising 16 percent of total volume, "we will definitely hit the bottom of that range," king said.

In addition to a 47-wine selection of West Coast vintages, Clearwater's guests find a menu offering everything from fusilli and risotto to fresh-shucked oysters, broiled mahimahi with basil-mashed potatoes and cioppino brimming with crab, prawns, clams, mussels and calamari.

There are even a few burgers listed among such signatures as Dungeness crab cakes, grilled swordfish with artichokes and olives in a Marsala sauce, pecan and King salmon with paprika and yogurt.

But one burger is ground turkey, and the other is a blackbean concoction; in fact, there is no red meat on Clearwater's bill of fare. Other tell-tale descriptions and declarations proclaim the restaurant's nutrition-oriented intentions.

Brown rice miso soup heads a list including clam chowder and vegetable with

pesto. Among the salad options are one of organic mixed sprouts.

Menu footnotes inform diners that many of the dishes are formulated so that fewer than 20 percent of calories come from fat, and that a range of dishes are "vegan" - containing no animal products.

A "farm report" box identifies by name and location the small, local growers that supply such items as organic mixed lettuces and herbs; Idaho farm-raised rainbow trout; exotic, organic banana varieties; and wheat grass and sprouts.

Wheat grass? Pans of the slender leaves - touted on the menu's long list of made-to-order juices as bursting with 17 amino acids, vitamins and disease-fighting chlorophyll - grow under skylights beside a glass-doored cooler holding kegs of unadulterated, microbrewed beers from eight small producers in Canada, Washington, Oregon and California.

If wheat grass juice - added garlic or ginger are optional - isn't for you, there are the naturally brewed beers and five "organic" vintages among the wine list's conventional choices. Smoothies blended from bananas, non-fat yogurt and organic apple juice are popular.

"We're selling a ton of smoothies," said King, adding that "we're probably going to add a liquor license here."

Clearly, Clearwater does not aim to alienate anyone. The symbols "%" and "v" that appeared beside the vegan and 20-percent-or-less-fat dishes during the restaurant's inaugural week were deleted in favor of the footnotes although a thick compendium of recipe analyses and nutritional breakdowns still sits prominently in the restaurant's foyer for curious patrons.

"We heard too much |healthy food' and not enough |seafood,'" said King, explaining the deletions.

While patrons craving steak must compromise, there are such alternatives to seafood as maple grilled breast of chicken with wild rice and autumn squash, a mixed grill of vegetables with creamy polenta, a chicken caesar salad and orechiette pasta with goat cheese, pesto and stewed root vegetables.

Guest satisfaction is enhanced by attention to such things by attention to such things as vine-ripening and other aspects of Clearwater's sourcing and puurchasing program, management said. Moreover, moderate price points and lower-cost a la carte side-dish options appeal to customers' value consciousness.

"This is our most product-driven restaurant," explained Mike Fink, managing partner of University Restaurant Group. "We're getting in some wonderful foods and produce. And people don't want to pay $40 just to eat a big hunk of meat any more."

Already known for the seafood expertise and supply lines of its Ocean Avenue and Water Grill proprieties, URG easily tapped those resources for the Clearwater project. But the company took extra steps to address what it perceived were mounting yet unmet demands for a more enlightened brand of foodservice.

Corporate chef Matt Stein was dispatched to the Culinary institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., to take its busiest course - nutrition - after which he and his colleagues scoured Southern California to establish purchasing ties with small specialty growers.

Ocean Avenue executive chef Kelly Mullarney, meanwhile, was reassigned to become general manager of Clearwater as the concept was shaped by various inspirations over the course of three years.

"We started reading about this homeopathic trend with vitamins and massage, and we started seeing lots of juice bars opening up in Seattle and down here," King said. He was also impressed by the best-seller status of such books as "The Juice Man" and another tome celebrating the virtues of a 10-percent-of-calories-from-fat diet.

"Fat has become the new drumbeat, the new paradigm; it's leading us down a path," King added. "Italian restaurants picked up on that in the '80s; they had style, but they also had olive oil" and other foods with "healthy" connotations.

In addition to the nutritional stance, Clearwater hopes to make friends as a result of its regard for ecology. An increased focus on reusable products extends to use of only recycled paper goods, the plastic containers in which seafood is delivered, the recyclable kegs of all beers and the restaurant's offer of "rewards" to patrons who return reusable food-to-go containers.

Naturally, such an old-hat amenity as matchbooks has been scuttled, replaced by matchbox-size packets of California wild flower seeds.

King pointed out that Clearwater's penchant for buying only the choicest produce is no more revolutionary than the philosophy of Alice Waters, a trailblazer in contemporary Californian cooking who has been provisioning her legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley that way for decades.

Nonetheless, Clearwater Cafe has yet to prove that its particular slant on back-to-nature gastronomy will break the unwritten rule that "health food, and fine dining are mutually exclusive realms. "I am a little concerned," King admited. I just hope people see us for what we are."

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