In With the Old, Out With the New

We fingered Chardonnay as an excellent choice for a first date. The place is white tablecloth sophisticated without pretensions; it's the opposite of trendy but never fusty. The professional staff appears to have been around for years; they know the menu and the wine list, and they have long ago ironed out any timing issues. A gentle bustle allows for conversation, so you can (with subtlety, please!) show off your knowledge of California wineries and foodie trivia. There's activity enough (leggy blond tripping toward bathroom; boisterous Golden Girls staging reunion) to keep the occasional silence from feeling awkward: a steady stream of birthday celebrants, hotties, and boomers. The menu's varied enough to accommodate both your picky, lacto-ovo palate and her risk-taking gene. All the dishes we tried over two visits were pleasant and interesting, and some of them were flat-out great.

I suspect it's just that list of qualities that has kept Chardonnay in the black for so long, balancing precisely on the line between old and new. An entrée like pan-roasted Pacific bass with saffron couscous, shrimp, and three-vegetable salad ($33) off the specials menu is the Catherine Deneuve of dishes, potentially ageless — you can see the kitchen turning this one out in the year 2025, if there's any bass left to roast by then. Chardonnay serves it with large grain couscous, about the size of salmon caviar, which packs a lot more flavor and texture than the fine grain. Mixed up with roasted peppers, onions, and a pure green herbal emulsion it's absolutely heavenly, and great with the moist bass, served skin on, tail intact.

Other favorites: a rare tuna "taco" appetizer, where the shell is made from a green chili wafer ($15), tarted up with two-tomato and avocado "ceviche." Sautéed black grouper ($34, also a special) came ringed with roasted littleneck clams in a hearty, peppery broth made from chorizo, cipollini onions, lobster stock, and fennel. A beautiful wild mushroom filo strudel, flakey and unctuous, ($13, an appetizer) was a sensual way to begin a meal. And an herb-crusted rack of baby lamb chops ($38) was tricked out with lemony mashed potatoes, rosemary scented olives, roasted peppers, and a mint pea emulsion that fell together perfectly.

For dessert we had two pies that might have come straight off the rotating dessert case of a diner in Heaven: A dense, decadent chocolate cream pie with extra fresh whipped cream and Banoffee pie (both $9), invented at an English pub in the mid-'70s and imported to Palm Beach Gardens without a hitch. The recipe for the Banoffee reads like a list of my favorite ingredients: condensed milk, which has been "roasted" to make a kind of toffee (the "offee"); heavy cream beaten with brown sugar; and bananas (there's the "ban").

The Eucalittos could hold their own against the bistros and sushi joints jostling for space around them on the basis of their pie alone — and what a relief it is to see somebody, at least, prospering in this economy. Let's raise a glass (of Chardonnay, of course) to another good quarter century.