Making Tracks for Microbrews

ORANGE — Surprise: a microbrewery in the 19th century Orange train depot, right by the modern Metrolink station. It’s literally next to the tracks, so you can sit on a patio sipping microbrews and watch the trains whiz by, an excellently retro pastime for this historical town.

The original 1870s depot, with its beautifully restored tongue-and-groove wooden ceiling, is now the bar area, and home to four ceiling-high stainless-steel fermentation tanks.

The restaurant side of the operation makes a little play with the railway motif. One wall has two red lights and a railroad crossing sign, and the others are decorated with etchings on railway themes (along with some colorful modern art).

The tables are covered with butcher paper, upon which the waitresses write their names in crayon, the better for customers to summon them when needed. (Actually, this doesn’t always help. At peak hours, I’ve more than once found myself asking busboys to perform tasks that should have fallen to the waitresses, particularly those involving a complaint with a dish.)

Yes, there are sometimes complaints to be made about the food, but the beers, happily, are more than consoling. Brew master Tucker Fleming’s brews are always rich, flavorful and satisfying, though he has an odd fondness for a sweet, malty style. The best of them, Bavarian Dunkelweizen, is a lightly hopped dark wheat beer. Fleming makes a terrific, refreshingly mild Pale Ale, too, and it may be the most food-friendly of his brews.

In the microbrewery tradition (such as there is; microbreweries are a pretty recent phenomenon), Old Towne Brewing Co. serves a wide range of eats: salty appetizers, entree salads, pizzas, burgers and sandwiches, plus creative pastas and main dishes. For a brew pub, it has a most ambitious menu, stocked with dishes created by a man who goes by the professional name of Chef Travis.

A good number of the dishes are made with good ingredients and generously portioned, but others are flawed, and a surprising number are downright deceptively characterized on the menu. Southwest caliente chicken wings are supposedly marinated in caliente sauce and then roasted. Marinated they may be, but not roasted--they’re breaded and deep-fried. On top of that they’re excessively salty, even for bar food.

There’s a Mediterranean salad advertised as being garnished with a “confetti of spiced olives and toasted pine nuts,” but nope, no confetti here. I admit that it’s a fine bowl of mixed lettuces, grilled eggplant and ripe tomatoes, all doused with an intelligently balanced balsamic vinaigrette, but the confetti was what induced me to order it.

And the brew pub pizzas, “from our wood-burning oven,” are advertised in a way that skates dangerously close to false advertising. There is a wood-burning oven here, but that’s not the point. These pizzas are only finished off in the oven--they’re based on those puffy, insipid, pre-made Boboli crusts.

When things work well here, though, it’s full steam ahead. Asparagus tips and portobello mushrooms make a terrific combination, the components lightly sauteed in a butter and Marsala wine sauce and then sprinkled with Parmesan. The chicken tortilla soup is a spicy, hearty version with pieces of mesquite-grilled chicken in a rich, ruddy broth spiked with cheese, red chile corn strips and green onions.

Most of the entrees are just fine. On three occasions, the restaurant was out of a popular dish called achiote-rubbed halibut, but the fish dishes I tasted were delicious. One, char-grilled swordfish with red pepper confit, was a perfectly cooked slab of fish expertly basted with olive oil and garlic. Another was a giant filet of fried catfish in a crisp, complex cornmeal crust flavored with honey, jalapenos and Guinness stout.

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Chef Travis charbroils lean, tender baby-back ribs in a nice orange-tequila glaze, and he tops his enormous cowboy rib-eye steak with red chile onion straws. All entrees come with a choice of good black beans, stiff mashed potatoes that fairly reek of garlic, or a bland rice pilaf.

With the burgers and sandwiches, you have a choice of soggy French fries or annoyingly hard and crunchy sweet potato chips, which I suspect would be better if they were sliced thinner. Still, there are some good burgers. Try the Santa Fe, a huge mesquite-grilled burger topped with bacon strips, roasted poblano peppers, smoked Cheddar, red onion straws and chipotle pepper mayo. It’s meaty, messy and almost impossible to pick up, but you won’t mind.

If you can handle sweets on top of beer, you might fancy a few of the creative house desserts. The fruit cocktail tacos are crepes, really, stuffed with melon slices and berries in sugar syrup and topped with whipped cream. You can also have fruit straight up or garnished with a raspberry Goldschlager liqueur sauce.

My favorite is the caramel-covered banana burrito, a deep-fried flour tortilla stuffed with a banana slices, chocolate chips, candied walnuts and brown sugar, drizzled with caramel sauce.

And so goes the evening: trains, microbrews, confetti-less salad, stout-battered catfish and caramel banana burritos. It’s the Olde Town life.

Old Towne Brewing Co. is moderately priced. Appetizers and salads are $4.50 to $7.50. Entrees and pastas are $11.95 to $15.95. Desserts are $3.95 to $5.95. In-house brews are $3.50 a pint.

BE THERE

* Old Towne Brewing Co., 186 N. Atchison St., Orange. (714) 744-4181. 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-midnight Friday-Saturday. All major cards.