French Chef Puts Touch of Flair, Fruit, Imagination Into Sea Fare

Is it possible for a Frenchman to cook badly?

Certainly, although few seem willing to expend the effort required to transform good ingredients into an inferior dish. Most Frenchmen prefer to take the easy way out by doing things correctly.

One of the multitude who plays a well-tuned piano (the playful name French chefs have given to the stove) is Pascal Rifflart, the master of the kitchen at Rancho Bernardo’s new Sea Fare. His dishes have an easy grace, each one characterized by a simplicity of preparation that is possible only when the best raw materials are cooked by someone who has a true understanding of technique.

Guests can peer into Rifflart’s modest domain through a service window that opens onto the dining room, and it is an interesting diversion to spy on the chef and his assistants as they work. This trio, clad in starched, spotless whites, engage in a constant ballet of movement even when, as was the case early one evening, there are only eight guests in the dining room. Saute pans move rapidly back and forth across the range, and the oven opens and closes repeatedly as dishes are finished on the plate (the real French method, which ensures a hot dinner) just before being sent to table.

The fact that the kitchen is visible from the dining room does nothing to disturb that room’s quiet and orderly atmosphere. Sea Fare is another of those Lilliputian places housed in a nondescript strip shopping center, but the decorator did a rather nice job of transforming this storefront location into an intimate, cheerful space. A few fresh flowers and an oil-fueled hurricane lamp on each table give the restaurant a touch of class.

But what really sets Sea Fare apart from the hordes of huge, glossy, chain eateries that have infested this suburban neighborhood is the menu, a brief, daily changing listing of first-rate seafoods and meats prepared with imagination and a certain flair.

The very first item mentioned on one recent menu indicated that here was a kitchen that dared to be different. This soup, a cream of roasted pears garnished with strips of duck breast, was quite clever, if not exactly the sort of dish one would care to eat every day. Marked by a lovely texture and an undercurrent of natural sweetness, it tasted like an essence of warm pear; the duck, presumably added for contrast, did nothing for the soup and could as easily have been omitted.

Rifflart evidently has a fondness for employing fruit in savory preparations. Although the products of the orchard and berry patch do frequently appear in French cooking (duck in orange sauce would be one obvious example), this chef’s affection for fruit sometimes seems a touch too pronounced. Of seven entrees offered one night, four contained fruit: char-broiled ahi finished with pineapple-flavored butter and pink peppercorns; Norwegian salmon in a raspberry and champagne sauce; shrimp with apples and pine nuts, and roast duck in a sauce compounded from juniper berries and black currants. To precede any of these with the pear soup, and follow with the strawberry tart, was to have a dinner that was oddly sweet from start to finish.

However, this is a minor complaint, and it is in any case pleasant to enjoy Rifflart’s easy trick of cooking the chosen item to perfection, and then moistening it with a light, simple sauce flavored with the essence of a single element. The menu described the watercress beurre blanc that accompanied a beautifully finished filet of petrale sole as “delicate,” a well-earned accolade given the fact that though the light butter sauce had the pronounced taste of watercress, the green itself was not physically present. Rifflart had instead extracted its juices and used them as the foundation for the spoonfuls of butter that gave this sauce its name and body.

The same remarks could be made about the raspberry sauce that dressed the salmon, which itself was sauteed under an eye as accurate as a stopwatch. Tinted the merest shade of pink (intended, no doubt, as a nice compliment to the brilliant, orange-red flesh of the fish), the sauce resembled not at all the thick, jamlike purees usually offered under the name of raspberry sauce. Rather, this nicely bodied concoction seemed to consist of nothing more than fresh raspberry juices, extended with champagne and thickened with a bit of cream.

Whatever his affection for these pleasantly avant-garde sauces, Rifflart is quite capable of turning out excellent renditions of the more classic sauces founded on reduced stocks flavored with spirits. His lobster sauce (which, thinned with extra cream, would have made a good bisque), was deep in flavor, its undertones brought out by a pinch of cayenne; it made a good moistening for an appetizer of sauteed scallops. Similarly, the brown sauce that finished a nicely roasted loin of veal had the classic texture and flavor, in this case enhanced with a splash of Port and a sprinkling of minced truffle. A whole handful of mixed herbs--by the waiter’s count, 10 in all--was tossed into the creamy dressing that coated the crisp salads served as a prelude to the entrees.

The vegetable garnishes are varied and generous, and are colorful (in the sense that natural colors and the appearance of freshness are preserved and even intensified by the cooking process) in the way that only French and Chinese cooks seem capable of achieving. The kitchen prefers these finished in the al dente or underdone style, so that bright orange carrots and deep green pea pods have snap in their textures as well as their flavors. There was trouble, though, with the scalloped potatoes (as the menu modestly called this gratin of sliced spuds baked in a bath of nutmeg-scented cream) because the potatoes were quite hard. The answer may not have lain, however, merely in baking them longer; some types of potatoes simply do not take to the process.

Desserts, often nothing more elaborate than the choice of a fruit tart or a chocolate mousse cake, are supplied by one of La Jolla’s better bakers and are good. But given Rifflart’s talents, it would be interesting to see just what he could do if he turned his attention to the flour and sugar bins.

SEA FARE

15721 Bernardo Heights Parkway (in the Ralphs shopping center), Rancho Bernardo

451-2026

Dinner served 5 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, until 10 p.m. weekends.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, with a moderate bottle of wine, tax and tip, about $40 to $65.