L’Affaire Uses Low-Key, Continental Tone to Appeal to Price-Conscious

Every time it seems that the public is turning a permanent cold shoulder to traditional cuisine, along comes a place like L’Affaire.

This Encinitas restaurant’s full name is L’Affaire With Continental Cuisine, a title that accurately describes its mission of serving chicken, veal and seafood prepared according to typical bourgeois recipes from France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. The large and moderately noisy dining room was jammed last Friday, and the fact that so many diners seemed engrossed by such dishes as coq au vin , chicken cordon bleu and Wiener schnitzel suggested that the decline in the number of restaurants serving continental cuisine is due as much to prices as to changing tastes.

Places such as mid-town San Diego’s oddly named but spectacularly successful The French Side of the West have proven that traditional meals certainly can be served at low prices, but by and large the checks at French and other formal restaurants have zoomed nearly out of sight. L’Affaire, like the French Side, seems to have assured itself a steady clientele by the simple expedient of offering a meal of several reasonably well-prepared courses at a relatively low price.

Anyone who dined at Loma Portal’s long-running Cafe Chanticleer, which closed a year or so ago, will recognize this menu at once and assume that chef Erik Pedersen wields the saute pans. He in fact shares them with co-chef and partner Josef Rennleitner, a former executive chef at the Islandia Hotel, and together the pair have written an appealing menu based on the happy Cafe Chanticleer premise of something for everyone.

The premise stated that a restaurant that offered a single chicken dish could as easily offer a dozen or 20, which was the figure that distinguished Chanticleer as the place for chicken in San Diego. The menu at L’Affaire mentions a mere 15 choices, although the lengthy daily specials list sometimes includes another chicken dish or two.

This list opens with one of the simplest classics, chicken a la Francaise , which translates as a flour-coated breast that is crisped in hot butter and finished with a little lemon. Many of the others are merely variations on this basic theme, and include chicken in orange, Marsala, curry, cacciatore and Champagne sauces, as well as a Greek version that includes oregano and lime in the seasoning, a house special doused with pink peppercorns and whiskey, a Ukrainian bird with garlic and herbs and, finally, a baked chicken Dijon that is coated in mustard and crumbs.

Since what is sauce for the pullet can be sauce for the calf, L’Affaire offers six treatments of veal scallops, including Marsala, piccata , cordon bleu (stuffed with ham and cheese) and L’Affaire, which finishes the sauteed slices of meat with a sweet-and-sour raspberry sauce. Among other entrees listed on the standing menu are salmon in roasted almond butter, a seafood stew, pork tenderloin in green peppercorn sauce and grilled, crab-stuffed trout.

Meals include both soup and salad, a particularly generous gesture given that the chicken dishes average $9 and that the most expensive special of a recent visit, rack of lamb, cost $13.50. The selection of soups is reminiscent of the age when soup was considered a necessary opener to a meal, and restaurants prepared a dozen or more daily; L’Affaire recently offered five, including an unusual and well-flavored spinach with clam, and a silk-textured but robust potato-leek soup. The salad, served family style as a bowl of greens topped with shredded vegetables, all of it drenched with a sweet but vinegary dressing of no distinction, had no special merits.

Given the size of the standing menu, the length of the daily specials list is rather surprising. The chef-partners display a certain heightened degree of culinary ambition here, but nothing is outside the fairly low-key, continental tone that they have set for L’Affaire. The list recently included several appetizers, a course that might seem put outside the pale by the inclusion of both soup and salad in the dinners, but one that was welcome in the case of a puckery capponata . The L’Affaire version of this chilled Sicilian stew of vegetables included the usual tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and celery, blended in much the same way as a Provencale ratatouille but made lively by the presence of capers and spiced olives. Once again, however, the hand that poured the vinegar could have done so with more discretion.

Among special entrees were sauteed, coconut-crusted shrimp in curry sauce, lamb loin in raspberry sauce and a sirloin steak with blue cheese--a pungent accent that can really draw out the flavor of good beef and turns up on too few menus.

Both dishes sampled were specials, including a rack of lamb that could have been given a more elegant browning in the oven, but was nonetheless juicy and nicely picked up by a sprinkling of herbs. A lobster Newburg, touted by a server as an infrequent house specialty that ought not be missed, was agreeably based on the fresh local lobster currently available and was certainly enjoyable, but had nothing to do with a genuine Newburg. That dish denotes chunks of lobster in an egg-yolk-thickened cream sauce flavored with sherry, the whole typically piled luxuriously over a bed of rice or toast points. L’Affaire instead returned the meat to the shell and extended it with bay shrimp and scallops (nothing objectionable about that, since it enlarged a serving that cost only $11.50, a bargain for lobster), and used just a mild, cream-enriched seafood stock for the sauce.

Desserts are made on the premises and stick fairly close to the path of least resistance. Caramel custard, chocolate mousse cake and cheesecake all seem like naturals for this menu, as does the apple strudel, although the strudel sampled seemed to have been worn out by a long day sitting on the tray.

L’AFFAIRE

267 N. El Camino Real, Encinitas

436-4944

Lunch and dinner daily.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, $30 to $50.