GENERIC NAME BELIES SOME RARE FARE

The lady at the next table was opening her birthday presents. One of them appeared to be a black mink coat.

I’d never seen a mink coat change hands at a restaurant before, but the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton is certainly the place where I’d expect it. Although it is almost two years since the Ritz-Carlton’s splashy debut, and other grand luxe hotels have been built since with posh restaurants in them, the bloom does not seem to have faded from the Ritz.

Quite the contrary. When the mink scene took place, it was 9 p.m. on a Sunday, at most restaurants about as close as there is to the witching hour of the week, yet the place was packed. Although Laguna Niguel is not exactly the middle of Restaurant Row, there is no feeling that the Dining Room is supported mostly by guests of the hotel for lack of anywhere else to eat. This is not the sort of hotel restaurant where they automatically ask you for your room number when they bring the bill. No, what we see is Orange County itself out for an evening of luxury in a sort of 18th-Century drawing room, and not quailing at a menu where the cheapest entree is $24.

The menu has undergone changes since the first days, likely as the result of a new chef--the original chef was a sort of specialist in opening restaurants. Some old friends are still here, like the sweetbreads in port and caper sauce and the California field salad with toasted goat cheese (though the cheese no longer comes on rounds of bread), but many more have made their adieu. Generally they were novelties that didn’t have what it takes, like veal loin with foie gras on a peculiar corn crepe, swordfish in orange cream sauce with a puzzling artichoke heart and broiled chicken with red grapefruit sections. I kind of miss the old cream of tomato soup, though, even if I could never figure out the purpose of its whipped egg white and golden caviar topping.

The new dishes are nearly all very impressive, often benefiting from a remarkably good meat glaze sauce with a little flavor of carrot and celery in it. This thick, clear, reddish-brown sauce (enriched with butter) surrounds a beefsteak topped with foie gras, for instance, and it shows up in a dish of rabbit loin that is possibly the best thing here. The chunks of rabbit are glazed with a pale butter sauce and arranged on top of a sort of mesa of stewed shiitake mushrooms. Floating on the surrounding meat glaze moat are some little white rounds that you expect to be potato. Some are, but as a kind of gastronomic witticism some are turnip.

That dish also introduces two more themes of this menu, mushrooms and turnips. A pastry appetizer called millefeuille is filled not only with crayfish but lots of smoky morel mushrooms; they spill out into the morel-flavored cream sauce. Wild mushrooms add not only their usual flavors but a certain romance to “ragout of escargots, woodland mushrooms,” as if one had, in the course of a negligent wander through the woods, self-reliantly gathered part of the dinner now being consumed under the chandeliers.

That underrated vegetable, the turnip, shows up frequently, varying our usual contemporary diet of baby carrots and fan-sliced zucchini. Veal medallions in a veal stock flavored with sweet ground pepper and accompanied by little puff pastry shells holding crab meat (never let it be said that the Dining Room doesn’t know how to play to the stands) are adorned with turnip cut in threads.

A few more entrees. The duck with poached pear is remarkably good, not only for the pear (and a hint of pear flavor in the meat glaze sauce) but for the roasting, which gives the skin a smoky flavor like burnt sugar. Grilled chicken with rosemary may sound a little plain, but it has not only fresh rosemary and the usual meat glaze sauce (based on chicken stock in this case) but a fresh-tasting scatter of slightly underdone peas.

With so much that is exceptionally good here, I found myself a little disappointed in the steamed salmon with sorrel cream sauce. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was vastly mild. Ditto the monkfish pate that was one of the daily changing pates, and if I had my life to live over I’d probably try the shrimp cocktail with Armagnac rather than the somewhat cautious model with cocktail sauce.

On the whole, though, the Dining Room is still a top contender for the best restaurant in Orange County. The service is attentive and civilized and it’s very hard to go wrong with this menu.

Do bring your wallet, though. Appetizers and salads run $7.50 to $14, entrees $24 to $30 and desserts $4.50 to $8. Don’t look for any fantastic little bargains on the wine list, either. In fact, if you’re even thinking about bargains, think about finding them somewhere else.

THE DINING ROOM, RITZ-CARLTON HOTEL 33533 Shoreline Drive, Laguna Niguel

(714) 240-2000

Open for dinner daily. All major credit cards accepted. Reservations essential; reservation desk open 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.