RESTAURANT REVIEW : Fleur de Vin: A Little Provence in Pasadena

Fleur de Vin has a shrewdly chosen wine list and about a dozen wines available by the glass. It has a big bar and comforting old paintings on the walls. This is misleading.

What’s really going on here at the wind-swept corner of Raymond and Green streets in Pasadena is not some wine-drinker’s hangout but a Provencal restaurant. Or rather, a restaurant of Provencal and associated cuisines.

The cooking of Southern France is oddly under-represented in our part of the world, in view of the fact that it was part of the original inspiration for nouvelle cuisine . Like Italian food, it’s based on fresh vegetables and hearty earthy stuff like garlic and olives and mushrooms, rather than the rich ingredients of haute cuisine .

Here and there, actual Italian dishes have invaded Provence. Bagna caoda is one: a huge basket of raw vegetables, including whole fennel root with feathery leaves, to be dipped in a a pot of thin anchovy-flavored sauce. (Fleur de Vin also adds a pot of the typical Provencal garlicky mayonnaise aioli .) A salad made of mesclun, defined on the menu as “a whimsical mixture of several lettuces,” is basically Provencal. Those would be baby lettuces, of course, in a slightly mustardy dressing, earthily scattered with pine nuts and thick-cut bacon.

On the other hand, the one dish identified as Provencal, veal flank with Provencal vegetables, comes with the same vegetables as everything else: zucchini in tomato sauce; cold, cooked sweet peppers and a little square of gratinee potatoes. Here it looks as if we’ve finally wandered into nouvelle cuisine territory, the veal having been sliced and arranged in a fan shape, except that it isn’t sliced paper-thin and the sauce is a good old-fashioned one of reduced red wine and shallots.

Actually, a lot of quite successful dishes could pass equally well as nouvelle or exoticized Provencal. Which would you call the chicken breast on its bed of chanterelle mushrooms and leek greens? The breast of pheasant with its mushrooms and tiny little bit of tart black currant sauce? The seafood fricassee , with its clams, mussels and shrimp in a strong saffron cream sauce?

Something called ahi gazpacho, though, does seem to come from the nouvelle side, and not the most beloved strain either. It’s scarcely a soup at all, rather a thick cold sauce of pureed sweet peppers and green onions with a little square slice of raw tuna in the middle; a diverting appetizer, but you wouldn’t sit still for a large helping.

And the filet Roquefort, a tender bud of steak topped with melted Roquefort cheese accompanied by a moderately sweet port wine sauce, is unexpectedly Continental. Misconceived, to boot, since you’d have to scrape away most of the cheese to taste the steak.

The desserts are uniformly satisfying, except maybe the severely simple poached pear served in a little bit of wine-flavored syrup. Others include a nice sharp lemon tart, a quite good creme brulee and a rich and eggy chocolate mousse.

Above all, there is spectacular caramel ice cream. People who idly take their first mouthful without paying attention are likely to stop in mid-chew, transfixed by its impossible creaminess and wonderful fresh caramel flavor.

We need more Provencal food around here. Here’s a suggestion to help popularize it: It’s all but impossible to finish all the raw vegetables of the bagna caoda , so the customer should be allowed to take home the leftovers. Not in a doggy bag, of course, but a bunny bag.

Fleur de Vin, 70 S. Raymond Ave . , Pasadena. (818) 795-0085. Open for lunch Tuesday through Friday, dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Full bar. One - hour validated parking nearby. Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $50 - $67.