Review: Leverock's reels them in with traditional, progressive menus

ST. PETERSBURG — It's what every restaurant wants: a devoted clientele that adores you, week after week, never tiring of your onion-crusted salmon and keeping the hostess going at full tilt. Opened in 2006, this south Pinellas Leverock's had a loyal audience of retired and older diners, all fans of the affordable, straightforward seafood fare. But after the early-bird-special hours, owners George Lewis and John Stross noticed that business fell off. Some nights after 7 it was a ghost town. So they brought in consulting chef Danny Cappiello to design a menu of lighter, more progressive seafood-centric dishes for an "After Seven" menu, aimed to draw in a young professional crowd. The gambit has worked. • It's a thoughtful approach. Every restaurant has to cope with the nuances of menu change. No one wants to alienate a core audience by scrapping beloved items, but time marches on, tastes change, ingredients come in and out of vogue. Leverock's After Seven menu contains olive tapenade, Thai chili sauce and Japanese seaweed salad, but the regular menu stays true to Leverock's traditionalists.

More than 50 years ago, Johnny Leverock won an oyster bed in a card game. Thus he started Leverock's Oyster Bar, a thriving seafooder in a former gas station that in 1980 was bought out by John Stross and Dick Tappan. George Lewis became co-owner a little later and they grew the business to eight locations, plus a franchise. These past years haven't been kind to the chain, and now the South Pasadena location is the only one (beyond the franchise spot in Cape Haze).

The building used to house a Ponderosa, and it retains that broad, barnlike feel, with memorabilia and seafood doodads salvaged from other Leverock's covering the walls. Servers are seasoned, matter-of-factly explicating the two-menu concept, taking drink orders and scooting on their way. This telegraphs the restaurant's aims: Two-for-one happy hour runs from 7 p.m. to close (and this from a restaurant that starts serving dinner at 3 p.m.).

Sure enough, by 7:30 p.m. there's a second-shift feeling in the dining room, a new seating in full swing with people ordering tuna sashimi ($8.99) with wasabi and ginger or Dynamite shrimp ($7.49), fried shrimp tossed in sweet-hot Thai chili mayo, like Bonefish's Bang Bang. The Maryland-style crab cake ($11.95 for one, $17.95 for two) is one of the best crab cakes I've eaten in I don't know how long. Absolutely no filler, it is big lumps bound miraculously together and given a delicate pan fry until golden edged: moist centered, sweet crab flavor without a big Old Bay or seasoning wallop to distract.

One of the best deals around is the wedge salad. It comes free with a number of entrees on the After Seven menu, but you can add it to your dinner for $1.75, a monster quarter of icy iceberg ladled with blue cheese dressing and festooned with bacon, chopped onion and fluffs of blue cheese. It's a great wedge at a super price (I was less charmed by the Caesar; not punchy enough).

Tapenade-crusted salmon ($13.95) is a sensible portion of fish, perfectly cooked, with a topping that slightly overwhelms its flavor. Cut back on the olive quantity in the tapenade (it also contains artichokes, roasted red bell peppers and capers) and it's a super dish, with a little balsamic drizzle adding sweetness and a zucchini-centric vegetable medley and garlic mashed potatoes nestled nearby. Sesame-crusted seared ahi slices ($13.95) are also elegantly rendered, wasabi streaks offset by more mashed potatoes and a sesame-oiled Asian slaw.

Paninis and wraps round out the After Seven menu, which aims to appeal to lighter appetites and the impromptu "let's go grab a bite" thought. I applaud Lewis and Stross' strategy. It's not reinventing the wheel, but more making sure you have a spare tire for what will hopefully be a long ride.

Laura Reiley can be reached at lreiley@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2293. Read her blog at tampabay.com/blogs/ dining. Reiley dines anonymously and unannounced. The Times pays all expenses. Advertising has nothing to do with selection for review or the assessment.