Photo: Joe Putrock

Conway’s Way
By B.A. Nilsson

Pearl
1 Steuben Place, Albany, 433-0011, www.pearl albany.com. Serving lunch Mon-Fri 11-4, dinner Mon-Wed 5-9, Thu-Sat 5-10. AE, MC, V.

Cuisine: eclectic continental
Entrée price range: $16 (chicken piccata) to $23 (filet mignon)
Ambience: Fancy bank lobby
Clientele: upscale urbanites

As you leave busy North Pearl Street, rounding the corner to Steuben Place and the entrance to the new restaurant Pearl, an attendant will open the door for you. This sets a threshold of expectation that remains high as you pass a busy bar en route to the dining rooms. There’s another bar inside, this one a long elegant sweep of dark wood where exotic martinis are served. A pianist plays nearby. The two dozen or so tables are divided among the bar area and a pair of plain-featured rooms.

With an extensive renovation, new staff and new chef, the restaurant inside (but not owned by) the Steuben Club has transformed into one of Albany’s newest fine-dining locations. Kevin Conway, known for his eponymous restaurant on Yates Street, helms the kitchen and offers a menu reminiscent of his earlier establishment. But the fun and elegance of Conway’s have been subsumed into what feels like a corporate environment. The food remains terrific, but service is inconsistent and the ambience, despite the makeover, isn’t entirely comfortable.

One of the dining rooms, for example, is lit by recessed overhead lights, which is overly stark—and probably would have been starker had some of the bulbs not been burned out.

A two-page dinner menu offers seven appetizers, a pair apiece of soups and salads, five pasta features and 19 entrées, the last-named further divided according to meat type. One of the prize entrées has been a Conway signature for years: Sophie’s Duck ($19), born during his apprenticeship with Sophie Parker and featured on his subsequent menus (sometimes as “Dink’s Duck”), features an apricot glaze over a partially boned half duckling, its breast sliced and fanned over the wild rice accompaniment, the leg crisp and juicy. Forget the sweet orange sauces of yore: This is a true enrichment of the flavor of the meat.

Conway keeps the palate hopping with unexpected combinations of flavors, such as the collusion of sausage and clams in an appetizer of littleneck steamers served in a garlic-infused white-wine broth. His preparations of gravlax and portobello mushroom crepes have traveled from earlier restaurants, and he sometimes offers a duck liver pâté ($12) that’s prepared as a loaf, but still hints at a sinful creaminess.

Soups are another specialty, and because we’ve enjoyed Conway’s lobster bisque over the years, it was nice to encounter it again here ($6); New England clam chowder ($5) was another indication of his prowess.

For a combo of sweet and tangy flavors put forth by several sources, an appetizer of scallops brochette ($8) does its magic with horseradish and honey mustard among the agents, the scallops themselves (plump morsels wrapped in bacon) accompanied by sun-dried tomatoes.

Salads are offered only à la carte; both the house salad ($5) and the Caesar ($6) are classics, the former served with a cherry vinaigrette, the latter a textbook example—especially if you order the optional anchovies.

Cream is not spared in the tortellini Aimee ($21), with a sauce that’s liberally laced with basil. Plump bits of crabmeat and lobster nestle with huge shrimp in a good-sized portion that later afforded a leftovers meal.

Scallops florentine ($20), although listed in a different menu section, is another tortellini-based dish, again with a basil cream sauce, this time enhancing sautéed spinach, mushrooms and roasted red peppers mixed in with the sautéed scallops. They don’t get much richer.

A special of grilled mahi-mahi ($24) featured a cold salsa-based topping that didn’t work the same magic as other entrées: The flavors seemed to mingle only grudgingly. But the veal osso bucco ($21), another Conway staple, was better than I remembered it: a deep, dark sauce edged with cabernet sauvignon infusing the tender shanks of meat.

During the course of two visits, we ordered a soup special, an appetizer special and an entrée special, and each was priced higher than the highest menu price for corresponding items, which can feel like a sneaky way to part you from your money when those prices aren’t specified—as was the case here.

“At any given moment, someone in the dining room wants something. It’s your job to figure out what that is even before the customer realizes it.” So I was instructed in my waiter training, and I usually can spot servers who also have been so trained. At Pearl, service is enthusiastic but sporadic, and during each of two visits we spent more time in a server-free dining room than felt comfortable, a situation easy to correct by running a captain- waiter system. That’s also the most elegant way to take care of the floor, assuring that nobody ever is neglected.

Even when your food finally arrives, it’s served off the arm. Although I saw some backup support from busboys and other waiters, it wasn’t consistent enough to ensure that parties received their courses at once. Tray service usually solves this problem.

The best restaurants usually are run by benevolent despots. You need someone fully in charge with vision enough to establish a style that covers front- and back-of-house operations and an attitude that inspires the staff to follow that vision. Pearl is headed in the right direction, and once the focus on the floor sharpens, it should be a triumph.

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