Diner fare simple, homestyle comfort foods can be incredibly satisfying when done right. Fresh ingredients, scratch preparation, solid recipes and some sort of stand-out niche are all cornerstones of a successful operation. Then there are places like Loose Kaboose, which churn out the platitudinous, pre-fab piles of predictability.

Housed inside a trailer retrofit to resemble a freight train caboose, the place has limited seating and a small kitchen, yet offers a massive array of options on the typo-peppered menu. In last week’s article, I praised Surfer Sands (located on the same street less than a mile away), another place with limited seating and a small kitchen, for having a specialty and doing it well.

Loose Kaboose instead offers everything under the sun, none of it done particularly well (the beeping and door-slamming of the microwave were audible throughout all of my visits).

I assume that many tourists, especially children, are quite taken by the railroad-themed atmosphere with the various vintage signs and memorabilia, and the electric train which circles the restaurant near the ceiling. Good service, as always, goes a long way with me. The food, however, leaves much to be desired.

Clam chowder ($4.50 cup, $5.50 bowl) is thick and pasty, a sign of too much roux. It lacks the richness inherent in most of our local chowders.

Dinner salads ($3.95, $6.95) are comprised of a spinach and iceberg mix, factory croutons, a slice of tomato, black olives and pickled red onions, which I found to be a very nice touch. My main gripe is the available dressings. The options, none made in-house, are honey mustard, Thousand Island, ranch and bleu cheese. Until now, I’ve never been to a restaurant that doesn’t offer a vinaigrette, or at least “Italian” salad dressing, as a lighter option. Quite strange.

A crab cocktail ($4.95) was very disappointing. The Dungeness crab meat was tough, spongy, waterlogged and stringy, textures that betray its time spent in deep freeze. The clumps sat in cocktail sauce over salad greens in a soup cup. I should have been more suspicious of such an item priced so low.

Sandwiches were edible, but the menu is rather misleading as to the ingredients involved. The shrimp melt ($10.95) was more about the tomato, as it outweighed everything else. And instead of the promised cream cheese, the English muffin was smeared with Alfredo sauce, the garlic flavor distracting and incongruent.

The clubhouse ($8.95) was constructed using the lowest quality ingredients cheap pressed turkey, that ham with the bologna texture, American cheese, and Swiss cheese which turned out to be “American Swiss” or “white American.”

This was more unwelcome on the Rainbow Reuben ($8.95), a bastardization of the classic. Here it’s made with pastrami in lieu of corned beef, the fake Swiss, and the sweet pickled onions, which while enhancing the salad, further weakened the sandwich.

Burgers are acceptable. A mushroom and “Swiss” burger ($9.95) was overcooked, and the liberal application of mayonnaise made it an utter mess, but it was the burger I was expecting at that point.

Loose Kaboose offers fries, coleslaw, potato salad, onion rings, salad or fruit as sides. The rings and potato salad were OK, but obviously came in on a truck. French fries were average; not great, but nothing to complain about.

Dinners were more disappointing. Crab cakes ($16.95) were mushy and eggy. Oysters ($16.95) also had a soggy texture. I will attribute both dishes’ shortcomings to the way they were prepared on a griddle that wasn’t hot enough. Pan-frying or deep-frying would have at least provided a crisp exterior, whereas both crab cakes and oysters were merely warmed through, with no “crust” of any kind. The prices are in line with restaurants that prepare these dishes masterfully, so I feel quite comfortable expecting more.

Homestyle Country Fried Breaded Beef Steak ($10.95) was hands-down the worst dish of them all, and easily in my top 10 worst meals of all time. For a brief moment before ordering it, I took a look around and thought, “I’ll bet this place makes a great homestyle country fried breaded beef steak. I’ll bet it’s the one thing the chef really takes pride in. I’ll bet he’s back there pounding and dredging right now.”

But no. The perfectly oval, straight sided, dark brown, puck-dense “patty” in front of me was obviously stamped out just like millions of others before being frozen and boxed and fried for too long. I’ve had better TV dinners.

The canned brown gravy, reconstituted mashed potatoes and unseasoned corn kernels mired the dish even more. I have a hard time believing the owners of Loose Kaboose actually ate one of these and then deemed it worthy of their menu.

If you don’t wish to cook and are looking for someone to bring you food simply to provide sustenance and nourishment to energize your body so that you may live another day, I can recommend Loose Kaboose. They’ve got you covered.