Truluck’s is a Florida-based surf-and-turf house specializing in crabs — above all, Florida stone crabs, but also Maine Jonahs, Pacific Dungeness, never-frozen (they claim) Alaskan King, and even a bit of Maine Peekytoe and blue crab of unspecified geographic origin. Filling out the menu are other shellfish and fin-fish from all over, all non-endangered, along with naturally raised Niman Ranch meats and chicken. Truluck’s boldly moved where no restaurant has gone and survived — the Aventine’s notorious “corner of doom,” at the opposite end of this four-restaurant upscale food-mall from Japengo.

I’m no great fan of chains, but shellfish are a passion, and Truluck’s has been offering a summertime bargain “Date Menu” — appetizer, entrée, and shared dessert for two for $35 a person. I phoned to ask when “summer” would officially end. The hostess didn’t know and couldn’t dig up a manager, but she thought it would run through September. She’d have somebody call me back. No call ever came, but by the time I didn’t hear from them, I was already eating there to get in on the deal: they had some crazy little stone crabs, and I was gonna get me some. “Hey, Sam,” I emailed my most seafood-lovin’ buddy, “Can I give you the crabs?” I wanted to try some à la carte choices, too, so asked him to bring along a date (Sam’s a magnet for smart, lively women, always welcome table-company), and I’d play date-night chaperone.

Truluck’s looks like a transplant from some other place, some other time — specifically, 1947–1967. After passing the more modern-looking live tank of Dungeness on the way in, you slide past a large, dark bar with shiny black floors, piano in the corner, and a large, muted flat-screen TV beamed at the adjoining dining room. Like facing Medusa, you need to blindfold yourself not to look at it, lest its hypnotic powers turn you into a stoned couch potato. Big mirrors and plaster game-fish hang on the walls. At least, I hope they’re plaster. If not, that’s a lot of sawdust-stuffed endangered marlin. I prefer it stuffed Baja-style with sliced limes, pickled red onion, and cilantro.

The spacious dining room is brighter, mixing four-top tables in various arrangements and burgundy pleather booths and more petrified fish and mirrors on high. An eclectic loop of okay taped music was playing softly when we entered but soon gave way to the barroom’s pianist belting out pre-rock vocals loudly enough to drown out conversation, reminiscent of those torturous wedding receptions where hopelessly square parents have hired the band. Given the piscine menu, the entertainer should have updated the inescapable Dean Martin number to “When an eel nips your lip when you’re taking a dip, that’s a moray/ When a fish fangs your face while you’re floating in place...” His country-western version of blues great Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” ended with an appalling little Texas yodel before the final chord. It was a harbinger of the cooking to come.

The bread plate was mixed news: the baguette slices were stale; the brown bread was sweet, soft, and warm; the butter was warm, too, and spreadable.

All “Dating Menu” dishes are drawn from the à la carte choices, so even if this option expires, you can get the same dishes anytime (most food prices are moderate, unless you opt for luxury stuff). It offers several salads and a soup for starters — the latter, an interesting crab-and-corn chowder. It was dense and creamy, and oddly, a little smoky, with potato slices and tiny corn kernels — very likable. In this retro atmosphere, I couldn’t resist trying the “Wedge” salad (iceberg with diced tomatoes, crumbled bacon, a bit of Maytag blue). Its blue-cheese dressing was thin, sweet, not very cheesy. Wished I’d chosen the Caesar instead, or the Sonoma Greens. (But didn’t the menu say “local produce”? Sonoma is 750 miles north, near enough for baby goats and goat cheese, but we’ve got great greens a lot more local all over North County.)

For the à la carte starter, we chose rock-shrimp-and-artichoke beignets (fritters). They did look like darker-colored, overgrown N’Awlins breakfast beignets. Tender and mostly tasty, but uneven from one to the next, some carried a slash of hot spice, others were sweet; a few had excess batter. They came with habanero aioli dip, heavy and spicy enough to overwhelm not just the puffs but an army of hungry Visigoths — not bad when applied discreetly in bloblets. Like most other plates, this also offered net-wrapped lemon halves for squeezing, a useful fallback whenever the kitchen’s more elaborate concoctions failed.

While we pondered what to order, our server (a charming Aussie named Michael) brought out a tray of all available crabs and gave a memorized spiel about each. He swore the huge Alaskan King crab claws had never been frozen (nearly all this species are flash-frozen on shipboard before they ever reach land, according to an ex–Alaska crabber acquaintance). I was sorely tempted by the Dungeness, but at $24 per pound (average 1H pounds each), I gave up my Dungeness dreams. Florida stone crabs were off-season, but the Date Menu offered chilled “Texas Stone Crab Claws” (farm-raised by the company) instead, so we were guaranteed crustaceans in any case. As it turned out, all the pretty little stone crabs (with the tropical colors of a macaw) were gone that evening, though we’d arrived fairly early, so with our permission the kitchen substituted Jonah crabs. And now I know why nobody ever heard of Jonah crabs until a few years ago, when Peekytoe became a fad and cheaper Jonahs became a sometime-substitute for them. I learned this lesson most vividly when dealing with the leftover half-portion at home.

Jonah shells are totally tough — tougher than Rambo, tougher than Chuck Norris, tougher than Ah-nold. We’ve got crustacean Hulks here. All your lobster-dismemberment tools are of no avail. The only option is to bam them with a mallet until the shells are shards (as the kitchen did at the restaurant), which then get in the way of trying to eat the flesh, ’cause you have to peel all that flotsam off. Worse yet, the center of each claw has a “room divider” of tough cellulose, so you must scoop out the shreds of meat from each side — there is little hope of getting a big succulent bite of claw-meat from this species. After all that labor, half a portion left a scant half-cup of salty shreds, not nearly as sweet as Dungeness or blue crab. Maybe the stone crabs, if you can get ’em, are worth it.

The claws came with a little thin pink-mayo dip and a separate plate of thick grilled asparagus, topping mucky Parmesan mashed potatoes, which, as far as I could tell, had no dairy aside from the cheese, probably using potato-water for thinner. None of us detected Parmesan as a specific flavor, just the cheesy weight of it. And these were the standard starch with almost everything, in almost Claim Jumper quantities.

The menu also offered a choice of grilled Icelandic char, one of my favorite fin-fishes. It’s a pink-fleshed cold-water sea trout from the Bering Sea, with the richness of salmon but the subtlety of trout. But even so fatty a fish dries out when overcooked, as these thin fillets were, to the max. The menu said they came with black beans and rice (the beans AWOL) and with fried bananas, which were delicious. Smoked scotch-bonnet aioli was also MIA, leaving only a pleasant slick of cilantro oil for flavoring the fish-leather.

My chaperonal à la carte entrée was Beef Oscar (a variant on old-timey Veal Oscar), with Niman Ranch sirloin “topped with fresh Maine Peekytoe crab, shaved asparagus, and jalapeño Béarnaise,” served with more Parmesan mash. I ordered the beef “very rare.” It came rare. Okay. But the crabmeat and sauce weren’t elegantly piled atop the beef in traditional style, to savor their flavors, but mingled with the asparagus shavings in that staggering sludge of potato-cheese mush — a mess of starchy porridge.

This was the point where, like Dante at the Gate of Hell, I lost all hope, forced to recognize that the problem at Truluck’s was endemic sloppy cooking and plating, a seeming indifference to craftsmanship. The chain seems to have ambitions and offers fine ingredients but can’t do them justice because it evidently doesn’t teach the kitchen to treat those ingredients with respect. As a reader wrote in to the website a few weeks ago (complaining about San Diego eateries in general), it was as if the cooks were all gardeners a few days before they were hired and received insufficient training on the job.

So, this is not a “fine-food dining” seafood chain after all, but a “lotsa food slopped on your plate” chain. It’s misplaced, a poor fit for the chic Aventine ambiance anchored by Japengo and its professionally slim, stiletto-heeled-women, flirting with well-dressed men driving Bentleys — more apt for the SUV crowd at a suburban food-mall anchored by an all-you- can-eat buffet. Sam kept thinking it was based in Texas rather than Florida, since portions were so huge and starch-heavy. (In contrast, at most of the upscale restaurants where I’ve been eating “budget” dinners this summer, starch garnishes are minimal and carb-lite, creative, local-grown vegetable preparations are offered.) I’m in no position to snipe at anybody’s weight, but most of our fellow diners did indeed look like folks who valued quantity over quality. Even at a nearby birthday party of eight, they barely talked to their fellow celebrants but bent obsessively over the plates, shoveling it in.

We ordered a couple of sides, which only verified this impression. The King crab mac (penne) and cheese was heavy and glutinous, with a bit of fun from smoked Gouda as the cheese — still, basically, glop. The best dish of the evening was another side, Crab Fried Rice. This, at last, was light and clean, slightly sweet, where you could taste the crab and the individual vegetables (red pepper, mild green jalapeño, carrots, baby shiitakes) in the mixture. It was like a blessed brief return to 21st-century urban California, after a dinner mired in the heavy, careless luxuries of 1957.

We still had a shared dessert to choose. The Date Menu has a choice of chocolate malt cake and carrot cake. Waiter Michael brought out the whole dessert tray to tempt us further. It resembled a scale model for a downtown redevelopment project, numerous towering edifices of sweetness. We stuck with carrot cake, a wedge sized to serve as a container-port warehouse on the future waterfront. It tasted all-American straightforward — very sweet, with caramel sauce and walnut-shaped brown sugar puffs on the side. Sam’s date Jennifer took a few modest bites, as did I. These were sufficient, and we sent the bulk of it home with marathon-runner Sam, who is skinny enough to handle the calories.

As I said, I generally don’t love chains, so all the more important to compare Truluck’s to other local seafood chains. King’s Seafood in Mission Valley blows Truluck’s out of the water — fresh seafood, nice cooking (some simple, some dishes as imaginative as Truluck’s best — but better executed). Brigantine wipes ’em out, too — I’ve never eaten at an actual Brigantine, but their spin-off Zocalo in Old Town offers lots of light, interesting appetizers, along with better Puerto Nuevo local lobster than Puerto Nuevo itself, and their Miguel’s Cantina has Mexican-style seafood (in indulgently goopy sauces) cooked reliably tender. (I love bringing visitors with kids to the Coronado location — the young’uns fall in love with the food as well as the festive atmosphere.) And although Anthony’s style is too plain for me, their catch comes fresh from their own local fleet and processing company; the plates taste cleaner. And, of course, we’ve also got more remote-based fine-dining seafood chains like the popular Oceanaire and McCormick and Schmick’s. The edge all these have over Truluck’s is that the cooks respect the ingredients — and the eaters. So, given the local rivals — lots o’ luck to Truluck’s. Unless they whip their kitchen into competitive condition, I’ll wager that Truluck’s may have no luck at all here.

Bargain Bites
The big bargain news for September is, of course, Restaurant Week, September 13–18 (sandiegorestaurantweek.com), with three-course meals priced at $40, $30, and $20. You choose the ones you want, you call the restaurant to reserve.

The $40 menus are a chance to eat at top restaurants that may be otherwise off the charts financially. For instance, I’m booking for Grant Grill, which has a new chef whose work I want to try but is otherwise way beyond my newspaper budget in these leaner times — one meal there, I’d have to Tin Fork it for the rest of the month. My choice last year was 1500 Ocean. A.R. Valentien, Arterra, Cavaillon, El Bizcocho, Market, Nine-Ten, and Tapenade are among the other superb possibilities.

In the $30 realm, many choices are thoroughly excellent neighborhood restaurants (e.g., Kensington Grill, Kous Kous, Terra), where you’ll save about $20 on a fine meal in homey comfort — but some spiffy choices in this price range surprised me: Baleen? Bernard’O, with its great chef? Jai? J-Six? Splashy, silly Peohe’s, with its amazing view and dizzy tropical decor? Quarter Kitchen, with its new fall menu? View-endowed Red Marlin? And the lovely Roseville? Wow, times must be tough, indeed! I have, alas, not one recommendation for the $20 meals, most of them chain-y (as in dreadful Dick or scary Lon).

Another great source for bargain meals: the happy-hour pages in this paper. You already know that most listings offer bargain drinks, but some listings and several ads offer cut-price foods as well. Put on those bifocals (or take ’em off, if you’ve joined the presbyopian choir) and scan the fine print!

• 1.5 stars
• (Fair to Good)

HOURS: Monday–Thursday 5:00–10:00 p.m., until 11 p.m. weekends, until 9 p.m. Sunday.
PRICES: “Date Menu” prix fixe through summer (two courses, shared dessert); $35 per person. “Chilled Seafood Tower” priced by the piece ($2.50 oysters, $3 Jonah claws, tiger prawns $8, cocktails $3–$15); shareable starters, $7–$17; entrées, $17–$43 (plus market-price shellfish); sides, $5–$12.
CUISINE AND BEVERAGES: Seafood and steaks with large garnish portions of starch, featuring non-endangered catch, Niman Ranch (natural) meats. Vast, fun wine list, plenty by the glass, including four-pour flights; full bar.
PICK HITS: Crab-and-corn chowder; rockshrimp-and-artichoke beignets; crab fried rice. Good bets: Florida stone-crab claws in season (October–June); live Dungeness crab; Alaskan King crab legs.
NEED TO KNOW: Free validated valet parking. Live piano-bar music (miked loud). Business-casual dress. Retro (’50s) ambiance, without irony.