Nautical Garble

Restaurants burst from lots of divergent structures: old houses, offices, warehouses, dry cleaners, even factories. Sometimes the theme of the restaurant takes cues from its environment. The Old Mill Inn in Fair Park–built for the 1936 Texas Centennial and World’s Fair as an example of a modern flour mill–comes to mind. But mostly the structure’s history is erased or reshuffled in service of the restaurant’s concept.

J. Pier, a new restaurant in downtown Terrell, is a jumble of all these possibilities in one tight concrete box. The nautical theme absorbs cues from one of the circa 1873 structure’s incarnations: a water plant. It has revamped the structure to serve the theme of the restaurant, leaving elements of the building’s history to…well, that’s not entirely clear. Maybe the expense of eradicating those elements was too daunting.

Owner Johnny Green says he was always angling for a water theme. “I’m just a nautical person,” he deadpans. “I like ships and oceans and fish and all of that.” That is evident. The walls are filled with trophy fish, harpoons and portholes among other things, much of it from the antique store Green operated in the building before he decided to turn it into a restaurant. A lighthouse relief reaches from the wall on the second level. The sweeping walls rising up some 40 feet hold murals: one a rendition of a Queen Mary that is somewhat tugboat in stature; the other a schooner sloshing through the waves. Green says these impressive murals were brushed not by a professional artist, but by an auto parts salesman, coating the walls with ever more kitsch.

The lounge area at the front of the restaurant (with a convenient bar service window) is furnished with red fold-down seating, presumably yanked from a movie theater.

And then there’s that steel beam crane hovering above the dining room. In addition to its role as a water plant, which supplied water and coal to the North-South Railroad, according to Green, the J. Pier structure served other purposes. At the turn of the century it was an icehouse storing ice carved from Elmo Lake (Terrell City Lake) in winter to be dispatched in summer. It’s hard to imagine doing this now, as winter North Texas air seldom blows cold enough to slush a highball. (Must be Texas cattle’s methane contribution to global warming.) In 1910, the city of Terrell bought the building and operated it as a power plant until 1957. The crane that was used to hoist and load transformers onto trucks is still in the dining room.

Then it was Green’s antique store. Green says he has owned several restaurants over the years, mostly in the Hill Country, but also one in Dallas that he declines to name.

But while J. Pier doesn’t necessarily mesh seamlessly with its quarters–no matter how good the auto parts salesman’s brush control–the menu is true to the nautical concept. Roughly 65 percent of the menu is fish and related water creatures. And they often arrive in dramatic fashion. Lobster risotto, oven-roasted oysters and sautéed black tiger shrimp were all delivered in white ramekins inserted into tiny racks hovering them over tea lights. Yet the culinary impact is of varying caliber. Sautéed black tiger shrimp were supposed to arrive with lobster ragout. But our ramekin contained just a pair of shrimp, their stark tails dangling uselessly over the edge of the container’s lip. So we sent it back and it returned with a skimpy little crowd of green stalks to give those tails a little terrestrial color. Shrimp were tasty.

Oven-roasted oysters came with a deliciously rich and savory beurre blanc submerging scraps of caramelized onion. But the oysters were undercooked, with textures diverting little from the raw. Warmth was the only textural feature that distinguished it from the ice cold and freshly shucked.

The weakest entrant in this trio was the lobster risotto soaked in saffron jus. Instead of creamy, the risotto was hard and undercooked. Instead of sweet, moist and firm, the lobster was stringy with a fishy waft. My bet is the meat was carved from a frozen bum.

In light of the menu’s heavy seafood bias, the highlight of the grilled Chilean sea bass doesn’t even have fins. Or gills. It has roots, or is a root. The sun-dried tomato gnocchi that dots the plate is as flawlessly prepared as it is innovative. After the potato pasta is shaped and boiled, the dumplings are seared, doused with cream and baked in the oven to reinvigorate them with moisture. The resulting knobs are firm and moist with a whisper-thin savory crust. Though no slouch, the sea bass didn’t flake cleanly, and the flavor was a bit shy on sweet richness.

Tony Gardizi, a former Riviera chef who also drafted the menu for the short-lived Buddha Bar, commands the kitchen. Gardizi stresses his food isn’t New American, or even classic. He calls it global–not exactly earth-shattering. “Fusion, but not scary fusion,” he clarifies. “We want people to recognize what they’re eating but at the same time have different elements that they haven’t tasted.”

Hard to know what those elements might be, but I doubt what we discovered in the steak was what he had in mind. Black Angus rib eye was marinated for some five days in a medley of rosemary, thyme and basil before it was grilled and dribbled with a brilliantly savory and well-balanced Burgundy thyme sauce. But these spa treatments couldn’t cure this rambunctious cut, loaded as it was with gristle, fat and stringy fibers at the same time it was vacuumed of flavor. A side of fingerling potatoes, like the gnocchi, was stellar. It seems Gardizi may have discovered prime spuds.

Starch in the roasted halibut faltered. Pearl couscous, layered with barely perceptible slivers of portobello mushroom, flaunted a delicately rancid flavor. Halibut was delicious and delicate, flaking easily with a thin crust embracing its moist cleanliness.

Stuffed shark is one of those things Gardizi wants people to recognize while presenting unexpected flavors. The thin piece of fish is fashioned into sort of a burrito shape and is jammed with…our server said artichoke, but we found only one tiny shard. Shrimp was hard to find, too. This was all slathered in a “Hungarian sauce,” a sautéed white onion, paprika, sugar, heavy cream and butter composite. The fish itself was a little rubbery, and it had an off taste: Perhaps it had been previously frozen or, more likely, not properly prepped to neutralize the ammonia wafts.

Carrot cake is both unrecognizable and saddled with flavors that are unexpected. Instead of the typical dense slab of cake loaded with butter frosting, Gardizi bakes it in muffin pans, slices it and assembles the stuff in a bowl, almost like a terrine. He then covers it with a white chocolate broth to give it an implicit richness it doesn’t actually possess–ingenious, but it so successfully defies expectations that it might confuse more than it dazzles.

Though the food is far from faultless, J. Pier is charming as hell–a kind of destination roadhouse that tries to smooth out its edges by slipping into a prom dress that crashed into the wrong decade. The staff offers–in fact, encourages–tours of the premises, which is riddled with little rooms and coves. There’s even a dining cellar that Green says he had to dig out by hand, hoisting the dirt out of a hole in the floor via a pulley-operated bucket. Concrete walls are brushed with swell faux brickwork. Never underestimate the inspirational power of spark plugs and head gaskets.501 E. Moore Ave., Terrell, 972-524-3098. Open for lunch 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday; Open for dinner 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 5 p.m.-10 p.m. Friday & Saturday. $$-$$$