Variations on California Cuisine Take Flight in Unlikely Location

California cuisine has ceased to be a buzzword, and consequently is little heard of now.

The concept has not passed on, though, and the evolution toward a new and rather exciting style of cooking continues at a few spots around town and at many around the state.

Chef Deborah Helm, who has practiced quietly but fervently for several years at local eateries that allowed her to spread her wings to less than their fullest span, recently introduced an intelligent and contemporary menu in a most unlikely location--downtown’s newly renamed Kingston Hotel. Known through successive generations of owners as the Executive, the site has become, under Helm’s direction, an unexpected entrepot for the distribution of novel approaches to cooking.

Helm’s prowess with fine raw materials and strong, definite seasonings--herbs, chilies, raucous cheeses--evidently remains a well-guarded secret thus far. At 8 p.m. Wednesday, the crowd at Malcolm’s First Avenue (the dining room’s newest nom de guerre), consisted of five guests. With the two parties seated on opposite sides of the room, they enjoyed immense privacy, and felt almost as if they were dining in the wilderness. The situation may change should an appreciation for Helm’s elegant variations on California cuisine develop.

The hotel has been under the direction (and, it must be said, misdirection) of several proprietors in recent years, and, except for the cuisine, the dining room apparently continues to suffer from an identity crisis. Previous owners christened the room First Avenue in reference to the hotel’s address, and, because they installed glass partitions etched with that name, the current management was constrained in its own choice of names, hence the simple change to Malcolm’s First Avenue. The china, meanwhile, bears the crest of the defunct Cuyamaca Club, which until last year occupied the top floors of the hotel. (To further complicate the issue, informed insiders say that an outsider is negotiating to lease the Cuyamaca space and reopen it as a private club.)

Through bad times to the present, however, the dining room’s decor has remained striking. Fallen financier C. Arnholt Smith built the Executive during his reign as Mr. San Diego, and he reportedly wanted it to be as much a jewel box as the larger Westgate, which he also built. Rich wood paneling in the style of an English men’s club gives the room a fine elegance, and it is outfitted with the hunting prints that go hand-in-glove with deep-toned walls; a pretty crystal chandelier at the center of the room lightens the mood.

Goodby, Onion Soup

The current management must be given credit for allowing Helm to take off in a direction that ignores the usual onion soup, steak with sauce bearnaise and chocolate mousse menu that prevails at conservative businessmen’s hotels. The menu is printed daily, and a recent one started on a zesty note with a cream of broccoli soup enriched with chevre cheese and never looked back.

To team plain old broccoli with goat cheese is to simultaneously thumb one’s nose at traditional cooking and to say, “Hey, look at me!” Helm offered that invitation repeatedly with such dishes as grilled Bobwhite quail with red plum mustard, a salad of baby greens with “burned” walnuts and a remarkably elegant salad of grilled, thinly sliced king salmon arranged over greens, sliced onions and sprigs of cilantro and mint.

The menu occasionally seems to wander into the silly, as it may have done with the untried beer-battered shrimp with “sweet and tart strawberry cocktail sauce”; to pair strawberries with fried shrimp seems to be stretching. But the same appetizer heading also mentioned a wonderful dish of tangy, baked asiago cheese decorated with strips of grilled bell peppers and a tiny handful of exquisite Nicoise olives; it was like queso fundido gone Italian-Provencal, and was as delicious as it was clever.

Restaurants must offer pasta these days, and Malcolm’s offered two, a rather wimpy-sounding combo of fettuccine with chicken breast, feta cheese and white wine and a bolder version of linguine with Florida rock shrimp, sauteed peppers, linguisa sausage and asiago -and-garlic butter enriched with asiago cheese. (The repetition of asiago cheese is a way of using up the kitchen’s stock of a given ingredient, and careful menu readers will notice this habit at restaurant after restaurant).

Strong Flavors

Strong flavors also characterize the entrees. Grilled swordfish was finished with a coating of cracked black pepper and lemon butter, and a grilled veal chop with caramelized onions and apples and grain mustard sauce. Various shadings of spice-induced heat gave a real bite to the three entrees sampled, most notably to the dense-fleshed coho salmon baked under a Dijon mustard-bread crumb crust and sauced with a spicy parsley mayonnaise, a description that hardly calls for further comment, except to say that it was very good. A milder heat gave life to a clever, if stingily apportioned “mixed grill” of Hawaiian prawns in chili-lime “pesto” and scallops with a citrus-juice glaze; both were grilled perfectly, and the plate was lovely, especially because the prawns were served with the heads on.

The quietly spicy peanut sauce that made a bed for slices of expertly grilled lamb loin had a chutney-like quality, in which the peanut flavor predominated and the heat seemed an afterthought intended to heighten flavors in a decidedly off-handed manner. This was an excellent dish, which, like the other entrees, looked very pretty on the plate with its Japanese-style still-life arrangement of yellow wax beans laid over wide strips of carrot and zucchini.

The California cuisine motif of jumbling flavors continues on the dessert list. All pastries are made on the premises, which is an encouraging sign. The plum and macadamia nut tart was rather staid in design, but bright in flavor, and the fruit-filled won tons with vanilla gelato were nothing less than coy. The nature of the fruit in these triangular, deep-fried pastries was hard to determine because the heavy sprinkling of cinnamon sugar tended to obscure other flavors, but this was a refreshing and actually rather fun approach to dessert.

MALCOLM’S FIRST AVENUE

The Kingston Hotel, 1055 1st Ave.

232-6141

Credit cards accepted.

Lunch and dinner daily.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, $45 to $80.