PAST IS PRESENT ON CANNERY ROW

The Old House in Old Monterey, 500 Hartnell St., Monterey. Open every night from 6 to 10 p.m. All major cards accepted. Valet parking. Reservations: (408) 373-3737. Dinner for two: $45 to $70 (food only).

The sardines have come back to Monterey too late. Declared useless and unwelcome, they are ignored while strategies are developed to lure the swarming tourists. Cannery Row, as John Steinbeck described it, would never do: “A poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. . . . Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps. . . .”

No more. The canneries have been primped and corseted into mini-shopping places, and there are small hotels, neat and luxurious and numerous, where (one imagines) Lee Chong’s grocery, Doc’s Western Biological Laboratory, the Palace Flophouse and Dora’s Bear Flag “Restaurant” once stood in all their scruffy glory.

So there is no profit in canning sardines anymore. But does no one simply cook and eat them? My friends from the Old House in Old Monterey looked interested.

“In Bordeaux,” said Emile Labrousse, the chef, “we grill them over vine cuttings. They are delicious.”

In a way, The Old House in Old Monterey is also attempting to reconcile the past with the present, but rather more adroitly than on Cannery Row where the city barely managed to halt a solid wall of hotels before it shut off a good part of the bay front.

Leonce and Carolyn Picot, with their partner, David Edgerton, own three restaurants in Florida; The Down Under and Casa Vecchia in Fort Lauderdale, and La Vielle Maison in Boca Raton. All successful. All award-winning. The Old House is a dance to a different piper.

The Old House is old California, historically the Stokes Adobe, dating from the 1830s. It housed the first bakery and the first pottery kiln. The first newspaper was printed there, and, in time, it became the center of the city’s social life. Most recently, it was the legendary Gallatin’s.

A house of five rooms--including the bar--on two levels, it has been charmingly refurbished with proper deference to the period--burnished antiques, tiled fireplaces, flowered carpets, paintings of country roads and lonesome horseback riders looking into the sunset--without sliding into quaint. The prevailing color is a soft, deep, glowing apricot. Flowers are everywhere. Tables are immaculately set. Waiters are well trained. It is sublimely quiet. There is perhaps a hint of French Provincial.

“If our cuisine must be given a name, let it be called French,” Leonce Picot says on the menu. “From that point we have departed in many directions.” One direction they have not departed is California contemporary. The dishes are classic--or classically based--well prepared and generously portioned. Their problem is to make this entirely defendable policy attractive to California, where they happen to be--and where they are happy to be. It is not easy.

The Monterey-Carmel area offers a magnificent backdrop for a restaurant, but it does have its peculiarities. The natives stay home during the winter months, for instance, and when they do go to a restaurant, they all reserve between 7:30 and 7:45 p.m. “I prepare 122 meals all at one time,” said Labrousse.

California plenty is almost equally challenging.

“When Leonce and I first came,” said Edgerton, “We drove through Carmel Valley past all the roadside stands, and we went sort of wild with just the idea of all that freshness. We imagined ourselves driving down country roads buying right out of the gardens. But, of course, we don’t; it is better from the markets.”

The chef is ecstatic.

“The herbs are so fresh, I can smell them from my kitchen when the truck drives up in front of the restaurant. This is paradise. The view of the bay . . . hummingbirds all over . . . wineries just like home.”

Even so, they are wary. Not yet sure of the dungeness crab, and unhappy with its short season, they fly in the stone and blue crabs they know. But their salmon comes from the Pacific, as does the abalone, and they delight in the mushrooms, the Carmel fruit and berries, the beautiful spinach, the fresh vegetables, the many lettuces, the quail, the prunes from Sonoma. (In Florida, most vegetables and herbs are grown hydroponically.)

At first glance, the menu is discouraging--too large, too handsomely printed, too permanent, too familiar: jumbo shrimp cocktail, Bengal chicken curry, beef stroganoff, veal milanese. . . . But did we tire of the dishes, or of the bastardization? A properly prepared cotoletta alla milanese is one of the great dishes of the world.

At second glance, individuality begins to emerge like a paper flower unfolding in water. A specialty--and surprisingly popular--is confit de canard, made by the chef in his own adaptation of the traditional southwestern French method of preserving goose or duck after they have lost their fat livers. It is a classic not often seen on American menus, which makes it a new experience--and a very good one, too, embellished with sauce perigueux.

Quail stuffed with zucchini, fresh rosemary, and mozzarella, and draped with sauce grand veneur, is an unstodgy blend of flavors, and the chef roasts his duck to a juicy finish and serves it with stewed onions, lemon, and baked apples. He has a controlled and sensitive palate: nuance rather than explosion. The steak tartare was suave, the hollandaise for artichoke heart and blue crab reticent, the stock for the seafood soup was delicate.

Even with onions, green peppers, tomatoes and garlic, I found the Pernod sauce for the shrimp to be deferential. Brutus is their version of a Caesar salad--made without anchovies, praise be--and it was as it should be, sharply crisp, with no dominating flavors. The smoked trout was fat, snowy, succulent, with an excellent horseradish sauce. Ice creams--wild honey, plum, chocolate--were wonderful. The blackberry tart was a little drab for some reason, although its pastry shell was fine. The only all-out failure was the abalone. But I did not hold it against them.

Integrity is the word that stays with me, a fine, solid gold word that, when augmented by excellence, and added to individuality: my definition of a great restaurant.

The Old House in Old Monterey is not there yet--great restaurants do not spring fully formed from the ground like Hawthorne’s army-- but the very sound foundation is clearly in place. Now they need only relax a little, think what to do with the sardines, and listen to the rhythm of California--which has nothing to do with Pied Piper dancing to trends. As Paul Bocuse once said, “The only food is good food.”