PROFILE : Food Fun : After making a clean break from the criminal justice system, Sandy Smith now hosts diners.

Sandy Smith was fed up with being a restaurateur. He had sold his car, cashed out his life insurance policy, cleaned out his savings. Everything was sunk into his restaurant, the Rosarito Beach Cafe, near the mission in downtown Ventura. He measured his net worth in tortillas and beans. If you wanted a piece of him, you had to order off the menu.

“I wasn’t making any money,” Smith recalls, “I was tired of working so hard, I smelled like mesquite every day, I was irritable because I was tired. I just wasn’t happy with the whole thing.”

Rosarito Beach, he decided, was for sale. Let some other poor fool discover that owning a little cafe doesn’t match up with the romantic vision that lures so many entrepreneurs--especially if the owner is doing most of the cooking.

That was nearly two years ago. Smith still smells like mesquite. Instead of selling the cafe at the nadir of his burnout, he fired up his resolve and his grill, and now Rosarito Beach is smoking. The cafe is drawing critics’ acclaim and diners from at least three counties. Smith has two new investors, a renovation is on the drawing board, and within a year he plans to either knock out a wall or find a larger space. He and his partners have also submitted a bid to the city of Ventura to purchase the old Pierano’s grocery store, the distinctive brick edifice across from the mission, which they would like to convert to a restaurant-deli.

Now, Smith said, he is having fun.

Burly and red-bearded, Smith, 39, is a hulking presence in his small establishment. Rosarito regulars know the routine. He emerges from the kitchen in shorts and a T-shirt, sees a familiar face and hunkers down or straddles a chair for a chat. He will discuss with equal enthusiasm and expertise anything from California State University’s efforts to find a suitable spot for a Ventura County campus to the state of downtown Ventura.

In Smith’s case the talk isn’t idle. Four months ago he co-founded ACTIVE (Action Committee To Influence Ventura’s Environments), a grass-roots lobby that supported CSU’s choice of Taylor Ranch. He represents the group on CSU’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) advisory committee on site selection and was appointed recently to Ventura’s advisory committee on downtown redevelopment.

Born and raised in Ventura, Smith cherishes childhood memories of taking the bus downtown to shop at J.C. Penney, See’s Candy or to buy tamales at a little deli on Olive Street. The Ventura Freeway, Ventura Keys, Buenaventura Mall, Holiday Inn--none existed in those days. Five Points marked the east end of town. Downtown, he said, “had such a nice feel to it.”

And so downtown was where he wanted to place his restaurant. He knows that Ventura will never be the yawning seaside province he remembers. But the old section could regain its vitality, could once again have a nice, if different, feel to it. That’s why he wanted to see CSU build its university at nearby Taylor Ranch, to re-establish the area as the heart of the community.

Launching a successful restaurant is arguably the lesser of Smith’s two most significant professional accomplishments. In 1977, armed with a bachelor’s degree in humanistic psychology from Sonoma State University and a teaching credential from UC Santa Barbara, he landed a job as studies director for Ventura County’s Criminal Justice Planning Board. Within two years he parlayed that into a position with the district attorney’s office. There he was asked by Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury to develop a program to ease the psychological burden of crime victims and witnesses making their way through the criminal justice system.

A major thrust of the program, Smith said, was “making law enforcement more sensitive to the emotional needs of certain types of victims,” specifically victims of sexual assault, domestic violence and other violent crimes. “What we were trying to do in the victim/witness movement--and it really was a movement--was really change the whole criminal justice system, almost from top to bottom.”

Smith met his mandate so successfully that Ventura County’s victim/witness program became nationally recognized and became a model. Other communities studied it, with Smith’s counsel widely sought. He was interviewed on the “Today” show. And then he quit.

What started as a creative challenge unfettered by structure or precedent, he said, became a bureaucratic chore mired in politics and paper work. Worse, Smith said, he found it wrenching to constantly confront human misfortune. “The sheer number of children that are sexually abused day in and day out, the sheer number of women that are battered . . . it just eats at you,” he said. “You can’t help but have that kind of stress effect you in some way.”

Smith left the district attorney’s office in 1984 determined to put fun back in his life. Restaurant work during his graduate school days had been fun--waiting tables at L’Auberge in Ojai, bartending at the Hungry Hunter in Ventura--so opening a restaurant of his own seemed a natural. He did brief kitchen stints in two local restaurants during two years of preparation, and by December, 1986, the Rosarito Beach Cafe was a reality--a 90-hour-a-week headache, but a reality.

The restaurant is named for Mexico’s Rosarito Beach. The menu, like the Baja community, is oriented toward seafood, a discomfitting discovery for anyone looking for nachos and a No. 4 combination plate. Smith calls his fare “authentic regional Mexican.” Thick, homemade flour tortillas (sorry, no tortilla chips). Borracho beans (no refrieds). Three fresh salsas. Salmon, yellowtail, white sea bass, red snapper, mahi-mahi, swordfish--the menu changes frequently depending on which fish can be obtained fresh--marinated Yucatan-style in citrus juices, spices and achiote chili seeds, then mesquite-grilled. Or, if you prefer, poached in a caper-green, olive tomato sauce in Veracruzana tradition. Chicken mole, machaca tacos, shrimp enchiladas, crab and cheese relleno . . .

“People’s perceptions of Mexican food are nothing like what Mexican food is like in Mexico,” Smith said. “People will come in, and we’ll start talking about the seafood specials, and they’ll look up and say, ‘I thought this was a Mexican restaurant,’ you know, like they don’t have fish in Mexico or something. It’s hilarious.”

The uninitiated sometimes sit, look at the menu and walk out. “I’m not trying to get that market of people who want to go out and have a $6 Mexican dinner,” Smith conceded. “I’m going after people who want to enjoy a piece of salmon with a very innovative sauce, have a creme brulee for dessert and drink a nice bottle of wine.”

Clearly, Sandy Smith has made a clean break from the criminal justice system. He has acquired the temperament of a chef and he spares no effort to ensure that at Rosarito Beach there are no victims.

UP CLOSE: SANDY SMITH

Occupation: Owner of Rosarito Beach Cafe in downtown Ventura and community activist.

Favorite meal: Bucatini all’amatriciana (pasta in tomato cream sauce with hot peppers) and a bottle of Chianti at Pan E Vino Restaurant in Montecito.

Why he likes downtown Ventura: “I like looking out the window and seeing people from L.A. with lots of money looking for antiques. Followed by some real interesting character, a pack rat with a raccoon cap and a sign on his bike saying, ‘Your trash is my cash.’ ”

Quote: “If I ever make it big, I will owe it to Sam Ferraro who told me I didn’t have a chance of making it in the restaurant business.” Ferraro is owner of Ferraro’s Italian Restaurant in Ventura.