Talented Home-Grown Chef Is Back

Doug Organ, the peripatetic wunderkind (and, at times, enfant terrible ) of San Diego cooking, has come home to roost, and not a moment too soon.

Older and perhaps wiser after a brief apprenticeship in the kitchen at the celebrated Taillevent in Paris, Organ has returned to his forte, which is serving San Diegans imaginative, thoughtful cuisine of the kind that nearly vanished from the scene when Gustaf Anders closed its doors.

Organ, who began cooking at Frederick’s in Solana Beach while still in his teens (and proved so talented that proprietor Chuck Frederick soon found himself working as sous chef under his own employee), is one of a tiny handful of home-grown chefs to have made a name for himself in the county. After spending some years at Frederick’s, he opened the much-praised but ultimately unsuccessful 926 in Pacific Beach.

Menu Proved Popular

With wine expert and partner Gary Parker, Organ opened the WineSellar & Brasserie in late December. The two originally expected the Brasserie to be something of an adjunct to the wine shop, and opened the restaurant on a restricted basis that included lunch service on weekdays and dinner on weekend nights only. Organ’s menus, however, generated sufficient interest that dinner now is offered Tuesday through Saturday.

The fact that dinner reservations can be difficult to obtain on short notice testifies to Organ’s popularity, because the restaurant is well off the beaten track on Waples Street, a short thoroughfare in the new zone of industrial and office developments springing up along the western stretch of Mira Mesa Boulevard. The wine shop occupies ground-floor space in the middle of an immense, warehouse-like structure, and the Brasserie is up the stairs in a pleasant, low-key room that looks across a wine bar at Organ’s open kitchen.

Organ pairs a standing menu with a daily supplement that lists several extra appetizers and entrees as well as the evening’s selection of desserts. At many restaurants, the most interesting dishes consistently will be found on the specials card, but at the Brasserie, both sides of the menu are reliable guides to good eating.

The showiest first course, the grilled lamb salad, is substantial, pretty and typical of Organ’s style, which can be regarded as updated classic French, and could be called, quite simply, contemporary cuisine. Slices of rare meat fan out over a bed of wilted spinach and other greens, with crumbles of salty, pungent feta cheese used almost like a spice to point up the flavors of hot, savory lamb and cool greenery.

One evening’s supplementary menu offered a ravishingly beautiful arrangement of braised rabbit livers and asparagus that was almost as beguiling to consume as to regard. The livers crowned a fleur-de-lis arrangement of all the things that rabbits like to nibble, including match-stick cuts of crisp apple, chopped tomato, leaves of Belgian endive and a lush bouquet of adroitly cooked asparagus. The livers, cooked very rare and served chilled from the refrigerator, would have been better at room temperature and superb served hot from the pan, with a bit of vinegar added to the cooking juices, but even as they were, this was quite a dish.

Elegant and Unusual Soups

The standing menu offers two elegant and unusual soups. A deep, murky taste underlies the roasted eggplant soup, a thick, suave puree that is “painted” with bands of pureed herbs and centered with a crouton spread with a piquant chopped olive mixture. The green gazpacho excludes tomato and is cool, creamy and redolent of cucumbers and herbs--the sort of variation on a theme that overshadows the original.

Special entrees have included such offerings as sea bass with green lentils (not common hereabouts) and rosemary, and a grilled, marinated rabbit served on a crisp wild rice galette , or sauteed cake. A grilled veal chop garnished with a compote of ginger and lemon was less demure than such chops can be, and likable.

Only two desserts were sampled, and neither was notable. The creamy rice pudding in strawberry sauce was nice in its way, but needed a little spark of something to bring it up--a sprinkle of cinnamon might have done the trick. A lemon tart featured a vividly flavored filling, but offered it in a tough crust.