ORANGE COUNTY STYLE : THREE TASTES OF ETHNICITY : Sampling the unusual in Vietnamese, Mexican/Southwestern, Italian cuisine

Orange County loves a feast for the eyes--and the palate. At one time, diners had to choose: lovely surroundings for a price or authentic ethnic food at a bargain. Happily, those days are gone.

Whether pinching pennies or splurging, you don’t have to look far for a beautiful place to enjoy a splendidly prepared ethnic meal.

Look at what’s happening, for example, to the Vietnamese restaurants so unique to the county. “Little Saigon” on Westminster Boulevard is the location of at least 60 Vietnamese eateries. Most are simple mom-and-pop diners, but they are beginning to catch on to the Orange County style: They’re starting to look gorgeous. (Their food always was.)

Grand Gardens is by far the grandest Vietnamese restaurant. Hidden away in a shopping plaza, the place is nothing like the usual Little Saigon eatery that’s decorated with tasseled lamps and travel posters.

A narrow courtyard graced by a stone waterfall and bonsai trees gives way to a spacious room full of light and bright with flowers. The mural on the far wall depicts a characteristic Vietnamese landscape of lush tropical farmland.

Exotic entrees of eel, goat and squab provide grace notes to the basic theme of Vietnamese cuisine: colorful noodles of all sizes, shapes and degrees of transparency. Many noodle dishes are eaten like a taco. You take a lettuce leaf in hand and use it to swoop up meat and noodles with herbs and pickled vegetables, perhaps dipping the tasty package into a “fish sauce” that smells like Worcestershire sauce without the tamarind.

A good example is bun cha : snowwhite rice noodles, a bowl of grilled pork (in concentrated pork broth), and a plate of lettuce, mint, cilantro, a spicy purple-leafed basil and strips of pickled carrot.

The Vietnamese are famous for shrimp dishes. Chao tom is a delirious offering, more or less a shish kebab of shrimp paste, formed not around a regular skewer, but a peeled length of sugar cane. You eat the shrimp and then chew on the shrimp-flavored cane.

Cang cua boc tom are gigantic crab claws that seem too huge to be real. They aren’t. They are real crab claws encased in shrimp paste, leaving the tip of the claw visible for use as a handle. This dish comes with a fetching example of Vietnamese vegetable sculpture: a cucumber cleverly carved into a green crab, with match-stick heads for eyes.

The classic Vietnamese restaurant dish is a traditional meal of beef served seven ways, always written on menus (and restaurant signs) as “bo 7 mon.” One course is thin strips of beef to be “rinsed” in sweetened vinegar in a hot pot and made into a lettuce taco (wrapped in translucent “rice paper”). Another course is a rich beef broth, and a third is a beef salad.

The rest are surprisingly different kinds of meatballs--long, thin and flavored with coconut; wrapped in an aromatic leaf; mixed with transparent noodles and so on. Everybody ought to have seven-course beef at least once.

Despite its superior decor, Grand Garden’s prices fall within the usual Vietnamese range. Entrees are priced from $3.95 to $14.

Grand Garden, 8894 Bolsa Ave. (not visible from the street), Westminster. Telephone 893-1200. Open for lunch and dinner Wednesday through Monday. No credit cards; cash or check only.

Mexican restaurants, too often the victims of cliche, can dish up the unexpected. El Torito is one of the more successful chains of Mexican restaurants in California, offering reliable, familiar Sonoran dishes. However, in Fashion Island--with the national headquarters of El Torito a few miles away--there is an El Torito unlike any other. Actually, it’s not an El Torito, it’s the El Torito Grill, with a completely different look: not dark Mexican baroque, but spare, whitewashed Southwestern, replete with desert plants and geometric Indian designs.

There’s a fascinating high-tech sight: a press that stamps out flour tortillas. You might see your own tortilla pressed and then cooked on a huge, slowly revolving tortilla griddle. You can also watch your meat being roasted--this is a Mexican restaurant with a mesquite-fueled rotisserie grill.

Although owned by a chain, this restaurant bears the imprimatur of one man--chef David Wilhelm, who a few years ago ran an innovative eclectic restaurant called Pave in Corona del Mar. Even then he was experimenting with variations of Mexican and New Mexican dishes, so it’s perfectly natural that here he provides not only the usual El Torito hot sauce on your table but also a sauce of barbecued peppers and onions flavored with vinegar and cilantro.

He also presents a delicious yellow pasta made from corn flour, rather like fettucine Alfredo with a hearty corn flavor and a slight red pepper bite.

His plates are always strongly colored, from the exotic yam chips (similar to potato chips), to the dark intensity of his refried black beans, to the rough, peasant look of grilled scallions. Everybody has blue corn tortillas nowadays; the ET Grill serves a huge plate of blue corn nachos and exquisite miniature tamales made from blue corn, stuffed with duck and served with a judiciously hot and terrifically rich red chili sauce.

Although not as geometrical and orderly as European haute cuisine , this food can be undeniably gorgeous. It’s vividly colorful, Fauvist in its contrasts: the grilled stuffed pasilla pepper, with its bright green skin (not fried in batter and all to the good), the jumbled hues of ceviche, the rugged heartiness of San Antonio fajitas with their beef and red onions on a sizzling platter along with a jicama salad, called pico de gallo , and black beans.

There are also unusual desserts; so-paipillas , like ruffled tortillas served with coconut ice cream and honey and, above all, the banana chimichanga , a banana swaddled in a tortilla and deep-fried, a glorious version of a banana fritter.

Very elegant people drive up to the valet parking here, but prices are quite reasonable by Fashion Island standards. At lunch, appetizers and salads are priced from $3.50 to $5.95, and entrees from $4.75 to $6.95. At dinner, appetizers and salads are priced from $2.75 to $5.50 and entrees from $5.50 to $8.95. Special entrees at either time seem always to be $9.95.

El Torito Grill, 59 Newport Centre Drive, Newport Beach (Fashion Island). 640-2875. Open for lunch and dinner daily. American Express, Diners Club, MasterCard and Visa accepted.

For fine Italian food in a gorgeous surround, you may choose to visit a hotel. Lacking a high-style restaurant row, Orange County is a place where a number of great restaurants are in hotels.

These restaurants can be very grand. Huge, spectacular places such Dover’s at the Doubletree come to mind. At the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel, however, Alfredo’s Ristorante somehow manages to be intimate as well as grand. With its sunken floor, beneath a skylight fringed with trailing greenery, it’s rather like a cozy den with echoes of ancient Babylon, complete with a harpist.

Italian food, of course, is almost always attractive. What could be more charming than a brace of quail on a tangy bed of grape leaves? What could be more colorful than a mixture of fresh and dried tomatoes against the whiteness of mozzarella cheese and the pale green shades of endive? Or pasta?

Here we have the Christmas color scheme of green chili fusilli with bright red tomato sauce and little ornaments of scallops, the elegance of lobster-filled ravioli sprinkled with red caviar, the rustic lushness of pasta alla carbonara with its speckling of pancetta bacon.

Alfredo’s loves sunny-colored sauces. Pollo alla Bolognese, a breast of chicken rolled with thin-sliced prosciutto and spinach leaves, is first roasted and then cloaked with a frothy, pale yellow basil and rosemary sabayon sauce. Among the appetizers, green-lip mussels poke up out of a saffrony broth in the cioppino soup, and a brioche pastry cup is filled with scallops in a dazzling gold saffron sauce, set off by a sprinkling of caviar. Among the daily specials you can sometimes find saffron-flavored pasta, yellow as egg yolk.

The desserts here are often particularly charming. Pera Toscanini is half a poached pear mounted in a whale-shaped puff pastry shell (on a thin, unexpected layer of Gorgonzola). The ultimate edible valentine is cuore di mascarpone , an innocent white heart of creamy mascarpone cheese in a pink strawberry sauce.

Despite the cozy appearance of the place, Alfredo’s is really rather fancy. Several items are prepared at table-side by members of the surprisingly large corps of dark-suited waiters. At dinner, appetizers are priced from $6.95 to $8.50, entrees from $12.75 to $22.50 and desserts from $3.95 to $5.95.

Alfredo’s Ristorante, Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel, 666 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa. 540-1550. Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner Monday through Saturday; Sunday brunch. Major credit cards accepted.