Now about the beer. Ocean Avenue Brewery is one of the many small brewpubs fizzing up around Southern California (there’s another, the Laguna Beach Brewing Co., just a few blocks away). Some of these establishments are behemoths–overgrown sports bars outfitted with wide-screen TVs and crowds of scrubbed college students. Ocean Avenue is no such giant, but rather more like a brew boutique; its single narrow room is washed with Italian-afternoon colors straight out of a Merchant-Ivory film, and in the back glows a CD jukebox that could be confused with a contemporary sculpture. The gleaming tanks for brewing beers seem more like objects d’art than hardworking machines.

Oh yes, the beer…well, let’s get the menu thing out of the way first, which is to say one can’t help wondering at the emphasis on Italian food. If you’ve ever had Italy’s anemic reproductions of beer, Ocean Avenue’s menu does not immediately make sense. Nonetheless, the thin-crust pizzas do go wonderfully with beer, as does a plate of calamari fritti accompanied by a cool, cilantro spiked aioli. And those wonderful aforementioned panini are dream matched for a tall glass of the house’s brew.

About that brew…but first I mist warn you off the pastas. The penne with porcini and a cream-lightened tomato sauce is a mess of flavors that no beer can reorganize; the pappardelle with prosciutto is a simple dish that, with its topping of grated fresh apple, sounds intriguing but really doesn’t make sense in the eating. Ocean Avenue is, despite its cinematic scenery, still a brewery, and the best things on the menu turn out to be the appetizers and clever sandwiches, because they all go so swell with the beer.

See, I did finally get to the beer, and it is good. Understand, I am not a big beer drinker; my father always gave me a taste of his Coors way back when, and that did not convince me to pursue the beverage when I came of age. But at the Ocean Avenue, two house varieties make me a late-in-life convert. The honey-wheat beer is lovely, its honey sugar converted in the brewing process, leaving only a whiff of the outdoors and the flavor of freshly made bread. I especially like the Red Sunshine lager, with its astringent bitterness that is not too little, not too much; it’s a gently bracing beer that is also by the way, colored as if it too were part of the décor in a Merchant-Ivory movie. It’s one of Laguna’s best creations. After, of course, the panini.-

-Kitty Morgan