North Coast

The food and service in local waterfront eateries are usually secondary considerations. These types of kitchens—from Maynards in Excelsior to The Freight House in Stillwater—serve up a decent cheeseburger or chef’s salad. Their ambitions are slight, their detractors in direct proportion to their clientele’s level of expectation.

North Coast has its sights set higher. Chef Steve Vranian’s exit after just a few months opened the door for Ryan Aberle, the chef from the now-defunct Tonic. While his menu is dramatically different than Vranian’s, the results are the same: a restaurant mostly commendable for the real estate it sits on.

Some of Aberle’s starters are tasty: A pan-seared Thai–style calamari was well made, the ethnic flavors properly composed. A Boston Bibb salad with blue cheese and pancetta lardons was good, although not necessarily in the way the menu describes—“vine-ripened” tomatoes were definitively not, and the pancetta wasn’t crisped. Aberle’s lobster bisque was merely a sad potato soup with flavorless bits of lobster floating in it.

Many dishes on the menu are absurdly pimped. “Polynesian sea scallops” combines Chinese five-spice powder, overcooked scallops, morbier cheese, and a puckering passion fruit vinaigrette with limp, bitter frisée. American Kobe beef short rib burgers arrived as nuggets of stale beef short rib so dry that even soy glaze and caramelized onions couldn’t help us get them down. They were served on rock-hard toast circles.

Seafood ravioli was the best dish we sampled, but even they were underdone, served in a soy beurre blanc that separated on the plate. Perhaps the most insanely unworkable combination was a peachwood–smoked fillet of Angus beef on paprika-dusted sweet potatoes, served over plum jus. The cloying sauce, the undetectable wood, and the beef were not a match for the sledgehammer flavor of burnt paprika. For $25, I expect a dish to be thought through and executed with more care.

Lunch offers a few different burger options, pizzas, and sandwiches, all at a price that makes sense. North Coast offers one of the more beautiful settings of any restaurant in the region, especially in the summertime, when an afternoon spent at a lakeside table is its own reward. But Wayzatans have many options these days for a view and a meal. North Coast is a place that might be best off reining in its ambitions.