The Ugly American

Gilberg has a few nice moves with seafood, too, like the garlicky head-on shrimp, and the seared dayboat scallops with chunky bacon-laced chowder and puffy popovers, and fried oysters with an addictive celery root-spinach salad.

But he has a special touch with beef, including possibly the best prime-grade steak deal in town. His ginger- and soy-marinated "Belvedere" - a wonderfully marbled chuck cut patented by Wells Meats - comes with a skillet-seared crust over a lavish smear of black truffle bearnaise. At $22 (and with a brilliant side of twice-baked potato stuffed with sweet creamy crab), this dish should draw surf 'n' turfers of all ilk, from the Pennsport neighbors to visitors from the no-man's-land of the nearby Riverview complex.

They can top it off with an excellent cheese plate that features rare farmstead gems like "Up in Smoke," a soft maple-smoked goat from Oregon.

Neither should Goncalves' ambitious desserts be missed, even if they're as inconsistent as Gilberg's menu. Some promising efforts fell flat, like the homemade apple pie in a calzone-thick double crust served with a daring scoop of salty cheddar ice cream that was unfortunately out of whack (or was it "weck"?).

But she also bakes some real winners, like the Key lime pie, the profiteroles stuffed with chocolate pudding, and the fudgy brownie that deconstructs a Reese's Cup - warm, dense cake topped with peanut butter ice cream and pureed banana sauce.

My favorite, though, was the carrot cake, which was really a carrot cube, dense and moist with homespun rooty sweetness and glazed in sour-cream frosting studded with nuts. It doesn't get more American than this. And as reinvented classics go, this one's anything but ugly.