<i> Prix Fixe</i> at This S.D. Bistro Means a Deluxe Meal at Affordable Price

Just about anyone with a pulse can recall the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s, which, in the case of restaurants, led to what could only be called a glorious explosion of possibilities.

This zest for spending also led to a remarkable explosion of prices, but now that the 1990s have struck, it seems that the junk bond dealers have played their last trump and that a degree of reality has settled in.

The news in recent months from New York, where upwards of 30,000 Wall Street workers have lost their jobs, is that restaurant prices have been slashed in response to the slump in expense-account spending. The three-martini lunch isn’t dead, just cheaper.

Such East Coast happenings always hit the West Coast a little late, but they do show up sooner or later, and we may be about to get a break in the cost of a good dinner out. One sign may be the return of the prix fixe (fixed priced) dinner, which is tentatively rearing its more affordable head at a few spots around town. The lovely thing about un diner prix fixe is that it offers two or three courses at a price generally below that of an entree ordered a la carte .

Mid-town San Diego’s The French Side of the West offers nothing but prix fixe and has been a mad success since it opened two years ago. Another 2-year-old that just now has begun to experiment with the concept is Paul Dobson’s handsome St. James Bar in the Golden Triangle.

The menu offers starters priced from $4.50 to $9.50 (except the caviar listings, which understandably cost much more) and entrees from $17 to $27. The new nightly choice of two prix fixe dinners include soup or salad and entree at $16.50, and since the kitchen prepares these with the same high-quality ingredients and garnishes them just as lavishly, a luxury dinner has become relatively more affordable.

The choices recently have included such things as a Provencal saute of calamari (the sauce here interpreted as a little tomato and a lot of garlic) and a simply remarkable duck confit laid over a sauce too modestly described as a “horseradish cream.” The duck, slowly simmered in its own fat (of which it has a great deal) and juices, and then left to steep and gain virtue for a few days, had a burnished exterior and wonderfully rich, juicy flesh.

The kitchen sliced the breast and arranged the pieces in a crescent below the leg-thigh portion; the whole was underlain by a stiff, beurre blanc sort of sauce seasoned with just enough horseradish to make it sharp. The sharpness, of course, worked to cut the unctuous richness of the bird.

The restaurant also soon will introduce an expanded menu with the entree list divided into “bistro” and “Dobson’s favorites” sections. The bistro portion will include entrees into the $14-to-$17 range, such as duck, frog legs and seafoods; the higher-priced rack of lamb, venison, lobster and veal dishes more traditional at this restaurant will be listed in the second category.

This restaurant has matured nicely since chef Christian Vignes succeeded his fellow Frenchman, Jacques Pastor, at the range. Vignes has retained the high tone of the menu while expanding it considerably, and the daily-changed list now typically offers nearly 20 entrees.

Vignes has to some degree reintroduced classic haute cuisine , which he tempers with more contemporary offerings. Among the classics would be sauteed beef tournedos with a forestiere (mushroom) sauce made of costly morels; a roasted breast of free-range chicken with garlic and thyme sauce; grilled veal chop with grain mustard sauce, and Alaska halibut in the charmingly old-fashioned Veronique treatment, which calls for a white wine sauce finished with grapes.

In a slightly more modern vein, Vignes recently offered sauteed frog legs with a chive-garlic sauce of pungent potency; there are those who might feel a little squeamish about this particular meat, but it really is quite delicate, and this particular treatment does it full justice. Another offering that updated a classic approach was a roasted tenderloin of pork, sliced and garnished with a sweet-sharp sauce of griottes , or bitter cherries. The same sauce would be happy with duck, which is why it worked so well with a rich meat like pork.

More modern entrees would be sauteed duck breast in a citron sauce tricked out with candied lemon zest and the poached Maine lobster on a bed of sauteed spinach. The spinach, chopped almost to a paste and butter-fried to an unexpected crispness, was arranged in a precise triangle under the shelled beast, which in turn was coated with mildly anise-flavored Pernod sauce. In this context, the spinach had an herbal effect that, in tandem with the herbal liqueur in the sauce, gave a new, slightly wild (or gamy) taste to the lobster.

This full-on French menu also offers long lists of starters, commencing with caviars, snails and smoked salmon and growing more interesting with Quilcine oysters on the half-shell, the newly available, genuine prosciutto ham imported from Parma, Italy (it is, unexpectedly but deliciously, quite sweet) and a large selection of soups. This category always includes a cream soup or two and the house signature dish, mussel bisque baked under puff pastry. Another regular is vichyssoise, the curse of the banquet circuit but here so velvety in texture and rich in flavor as to explain why bowdlerized versions have become ubiquitous.

The salads also are quite interesting, and run to such things as baked goat cheese layered atop designer greens and grilled sea scallops with costly mache lettuce. A really fine offering is the salad of sauteed sweetbreads, each nugget crowned with a truffle shaving, arranged over baby greens and doused with a citrus-flavored dressing; this might be a good starting point for anyone who has wanted to try sweetbreads but has been unwilling to commit to a full entree order. The salads mentioned here are in the $7.50-$8.50 range and may not be ordered with the fixed-price dinner; the house salad served as prelude to that meal is nonetheless a good, well-garnished tumble of greens and vegetables.

St. James Bar offers a tray devoted to house-prepared sweets that includes fruit tarts, a creamy cheesecake or two, the richly chocolate and coyly triangular “Golden Triangle” and an even more chocolaty terrine of the bittersweet stuff, doused in a minted custard sauce and irresistible to the last spoonful.

* ST. JAMES BAR

4370 La Jolla Village Drive

453-6650

Lunch served weekdays, dinner Monday through Saturday; closed Sunday.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, $50 to $90.