When you go to 42nd Street Café and Bistros website, the opening banner proudly proclaims, finally a restaurant that both locals and visitors love and in all honesty, after dining at this restaurant for many years, I cannot think of a description more apt.

If a tourist asked me where to get a great burger on the Long Beach Peninsula, I would say, 42nd Street. An outstanding cup of clam chowder? Forty-second Street. A night out for a special occasion? Forty-second Street. A delicious breakfast or lunch during a busy work day? You get the picture.

Owners Blaine and Cheri Walker have spent 26 years in the restaurant industry, both as owners and as chefs, and their commitment to culinary excellence, combined with their desire to provide locals and tourists alike with a singular experience, are to be applauded. According to the about us synopsis on their menu, the Walkers envision their restaurant as sort of a modern-day roadhouse: a tavern, inn or club on a country road, says Webster. And I find this a charming idea a place where folks of any ilk can mix and mingle and be, while enjoying some of the best food the Peninsula has to offer. The atmosphere is elegantly comfortable, like dining in a good friends dining room. The menu features great depth and breadth, including down-home, comfort-food favorites like beef stroganoff and country-fried steak, but also elegant and sophisticated dishes such as butternut squash and gorgonzola-stuffed ravioli with apples and madeira.

We were served by Jean Marc Bourgouin on the heels of his Coast Weekend 2012 Readers Choice Award for Best Server. As a regular of the restaurant, I have been lucky enough see him in action on multiple occasions, and there are few restaurants that I look forward to eating at for both the food and the service. He works the busy dining room as artfully as a dancer and with a certain painstaking, romantic attention to detail and a je ne sais quois that is often lost in the modern restaurant hustle and bustle. He elevates restaurant service to an art, and truly makes each diner feel important. Also, who wouldnt want to hear him recite the specials in that lovely accent?

Each dish we sampled was perfectly executed and without flaw.

To begin with, each table receives a basket of house-made bread along with a sweet marionberry and orange compote, as well as a savory corn relish. A first appetizer of calamari fritti, flash-fried calamari tubes and tentacles with lime wedges and creole mayonnaise, was an absolute sensation, and I say this as a person who does not typically like calamari. The crisp breading, though, with the chewy calamari and the buttery, pungent mayonnaise was simply perfect, and I was quite sad when the last tentacle had been snapped up.

Next was a special appetizer, a salmon tartare spiked with capers and lemon rind atop crostini and accompanied by pickled green beans. I ate each bite with a rather puzzled expression on my face Im not sure, on an intellectual level, how, exactly, all those flavors could possibly jive, but jive they did, enough so that I wish the dish had a permanent home on the menu.

When we ordered our entrées and were asked about salad selections, it gave me pause to consider that not many high-end restaurants offer this anymore, favoring instead to break up each menu item a la carte, and I appreciate restaurants that still include a salad or soup with an entrée.

My first entrée of seafood stew was, on this evening, cooked as cioppino; the restaurant changes up the stew broth nightly and has often featured it as a curry with yellow saffron broth and as a creole-infused creation. The cioppino was exquisite: salmon, mussels, clams, shrimp, white fish and scallops adrift in a sea of tangy yellow onions, tart tomato and a rich, red-wine base. The flavors were intense and assertive, richly spiced and completely satisfying.

A second entrée of the restaurants popular eight-hour pot roast, slow-roasted with mushrooms, onions and carrots and served with mashed potatoes and pan gravy and sweet squash purée on the side was also a toothsome, savory treat comfort food on overdrive.

Dessert was an apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, which served as the perfect accompaniment to the delectable, mellow pot roast, as well as a chocolate rum cheesecake, as decadent and rich as the cioppino.

Of course I am merely adding my voice to what is already a chorus of praise; the restaurant has been lauded by local and national publications alike, including Sunset magazine and Travel and Leisure magazine. Forty-second Street Café and Bistro is a local treasure, and it gives me great pleasure to award it my highest rating of five stars.