RESTAURANT REVIEW + PHOTOS: Camp David in Little Rock satisfies with style

Pretty much only two things survived the total rebuilding of the restaurant in the Holiday Inn Presidential Center, Sixth Street and Interstate 30 in downtown Little Rock: It's still in the same hotel, and the name is still Camp David, a nod to the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.

The new restaurant, too, is a nice retreat, with the pleasant bar area to the right as you enter, and properly spaced-out tables in the dining room, low and high -- most of the latter with USB ports and plugs for those with laptops who might be working or conducting small-scale business meetings while they lunch or dine.

There's a lot of light-toned, polished wood, on the floors and on the walls (insetting one of the flat-screen TVs into the feature wall, surrounded by attractive artwork, is a very nice touch).

Hotel-restaurant menus and prices can be a crapshoot, but here you have a wide choice of good, solid food in decent-size portions and at very reasonable prices. Add very good service to that mix and you'll enjoy your dining experiences as much as we did.

The menu offers more than a dozen starters; nearly a dozen soup and salad choices; steaks, seafood and chicken dishes; a trio of vegetable entree options; a Southwestern section (including fajitas, nachos, tacos and quesadillas), a wide range of burgers and sandwiches and a lunch/brunch daily buffet ("Southern-style" Mondays, Italian Wednesdays, seafood Fridays and so on).

Sometimes simple is plenty successful -- take, for example, the Shrimp Cocktail ($7.95, which the menu for some reason pluralizes as "Shrimp Cocktails"), five medium-size, perfectly textured tail-on shrimp artfully arranged around the rim of a goblet filled with a nicely tangy cocktail sauce. (Why restaurants insist on serving an odd number of shrimp when a couple are sharing is perhaps subject for investigation some day, but we'll let it lie here.)

Because in its past incarnation Camp David's menu featured American entrees but a range of Asian appetizers, our Camp David Spring Rolls ($6.95) were a surprise. They're not Asian any more -- thin wrappers surround roast beef, spinach and Swiss cheese, which we would have known if we'd actually read the menu description. They tasted fine, but are probably not something we'd order a second time.

Our soup du jour ($5.95, bowl only) was a country potato, rich, thick and somewhat grainy in texture with a good balance between potato chunks and bits of bacon. But it needed one more flavor dimension -- sprinkling a little black pepper helped a bit. We can't quite say what it actually needed, though, only that it wasn't there.

Two of the three entrees we tried were simple, and all three succeeded. Top of the list would be the Lemon Pepper Tuna ($16.95), a perfectly sized portion of sushi-grade tuna steak (our friend the dietitian says a portion of meat or fish should be just the size of a pack of playing cards, and that fit this fish exactly).

It came out barely seared and still cool in the middle, just the way we'd ordered it, and the lemon-pepper seasoning was just right. It came with a good-size pile of tasty yellow rice, but we'd have also liked to have had a green vegetable (besides the sheaf of lettuce on which the tuna rested); the side salad the menu promised never showed.

Our 12-ounce rib-eye ($23.95) was similar in size, perfectly cooked (medium rare, as ordered); it came with a good-size, nicely loaded baked potato.

Though pleasing, our Bourbon Chicken and Shrimp, served fajita-style ($15.95), was a bit of a puzzlement. There was plenty of food on the skillet, but the tangy bourbon sauce came only on the Cajun-seasoned chicken breast, not on the shrimp, which the menu claimed were to be blackened, but weren't. The sauteed mushrooms and onions turned out to actually be the best things on the plate.

Service, as we mentioned, was excellent. On both dinner visits we had the same waiter, who managed to be friendly, helpful and efficient; on the latter visit he had some help from a manager in keeping drink glasses full and running still-hot food from the kitchen.

Weekend on 08/31/2017