A RE-EMERGENCE AT 30TH STREET BISTRO

One of the appetizers at the 30th Street Bistro is called beggar’s purse, three little variously filled pasta sacks tied shut with green onion “strings.” I was just thinking how they sounded rather like the crepe purses filled with caviar that were served at Joachim Splichal’s regrettably defunct Max au Triangle in Beverly Hills when I looked up and saw Splichal himself dining at the next table.

Joachim Splichal in Newport Beach? It’s not often that anybody from Los Angeles, particularly a major chef, drives all the way to Orange County for the food. The reason is the 30th Street Bistro’s owner, Claude Koeberle, who made a name for himself cooking at various Los Angeles restaurants (including Ma Maison) before he disappeared into corporate anonymity with the El Torito chain for a year and a half. This is more or less his re-emergence and there is considerable interest in the food world.

Of course, now I had to try the beggar’s purse. Upon consideration, I’d still take the caviar version, I guess, but it was delicious--voluptuous textured wonton pasta filled with foie gras, salmon mousse and peppery crayfish, accompanied by three sauces, the best of which was soy-ginger.

California stuff, you’d say. The carpaccio has California written all over it too, with its thin-sliced beef wrapped mu shu- fashion around enoki mushrooms and julienned daikon radish. Snails, flavored with Pernod and anchovies, come inside barely cooked cherry tomatoes. A gardener’s nightmare, perhaps, but a delicious explosion in the mouth.

In the California manner we also have some dishes that sound more classical than they are--structures of meat and vegetables named after desserts like charlotte (very good smoked salmon in that one). There is also a dish that’s been showing up on a lot of Orange County menus lately, sea bass with pineapple-saffron sauce. Exotic though the sweetness of the pineapple may be with fish, the flavors of pineapple and saffron are not at all disharmonious.

Mostly, though, this turns out to be very accomplished cooking within hailing distance of the haute cuisine tradition. There is a good bouillabaisse made with strong, moderately tomatoey seafood stock, plenty of saffron and a bit of hot pepper (though the hot pepper mayonnaise called rouille which you’re allowed to spoon into the soup is rather mild). Sauces are mostly beurre blanc or meat glaze with one or another flavoring. The classical mushroom concentrate called duxelles shows up a lot, often in a mound with almond slices sticking out of it, like a dinosaur’s back.

The two best dishes appear to be veal. One is small veal medallions with accompanying sweetbread slices of matching size in two sauces, mustard demiglaze and chive cream sauce. While that one is a matter of tiny, delicate morsels, the other is a very large and very good veal chop, a positive advertisement for the flavor of veal, in meat glaze spiked with a couple of green peppercorns.

Desserts are remarkably good. A feuillete filled with pears is made out of buttery puff paste in the shape of a plump fish swimming a pond of lime caramel sauce. Chocolate marjolaine, 12 layers of chocolate in various incarnations alternating with praline, hazelnut paste and whatnot, is a conventional chocolate blowout, but the best chocolate dessert is chocolate souffle pie, a fallen souffle full of melting chocolate in a pie shell surrounded by vanilla cream sauce. Beside this sort of thing, the apple fritters with apricot sauce unfortunately seem homely and rustic and rhum baba, a notably light and clean-tasting version of this old cliche, seems excessively tame.

The 30th Street Bistro is located in a famous, though at first glance unlikely spot, on a grimy back street. Originally, it was the home of the celebrated Continental restaurant Ambrosia, then briefly a more adventuresome place called Vintages, which was notable for a huge cellar of close to 500 wines. Vintages made a great splash and then sank rapidly last year, and the 30th Street Bistro has inherited not only its phone number but the wine list.

Koeberle is making the most of this with wine tastings every Tuesday starting at 4 p.m. (reservations required), and what might look like an oyster bar--and which can serve oysters--is technically a Champagne-and-caviar bar. And technically you could eat at the 30th Street Bistro and get out for less than a dollar, if you had the nerve to take a seat at the caviar bar and order one oyster, nothing to drink.

Otherwise, that would be hard to do, though prices are not quite stratospheric. Salads are $4.95 to $5.95, appetizers $5.95 to $28.50 (the caviar), entrees $15.95-$23.50. The Tuesday wine tastings are $10.

30th Street Bistro, 501 30th St., Newport Beach, (714) 675-1557. Open for dinner Monday through Saturday. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted.