A Bon Appetit Year : Restaurants: Some well-known eateries closed, but many more fine restaurants opened in 1990.

A few gloomsayers in the local restaurant trade claim that for most restaurateurs, 1990 opened like a glass brimming over with Dom Perignon but closed like an empty bottle of white muscatel slowly rolling down the gutter.

This is a dramatic point of view.

The few weeks on each side of Jan. 1, 1990, saw the addition of well more than 1,000 restaurant seats in downtown San Diego, the great majority of them parked in notably good houses.

It is true that the year jerked to an uncertain halt with the closing of one of the downtown landmarks, Lubach’s. But this demise seems much more the case of a shrinking audience intensified by the failure to attract a younger one (everybody wants pasta, which Lubach’s did not serve) than a portent of hard times for the restaurant business.

Be that as it may, the loss of one of the city’s truly formal restaurants--a place that actually was a restaurant, as opposed to those that have misappropriated the name--certainly is unfortunate.

If there are additional major closings in 1991, they may be due much more to increased competition than to the present uncertainties about the economy. The San Diego restaurant pie is a large one, but even given the opening of the San Diego Convention Center it has increased in girth more rapidly than has the clientele base.

The success of such enormous new restaurants as Mission Valley’s Prego, which seats more than 300, and the downtown Fish Market, which seats something like 700, means that other places must be losing clientele, at least in dribs and drabs.

For diners, 1990 was a banner year, particularly for those who dine downtown and in the Golden Triangle.

Primarily due to the convention center, downtown and especially the Gaslamp Quarter were rocked by an explosion of new eateries.

The hottest member of the pack is Fio’s, whose servers may wear black garb disconcertingly similar to that of Mussolini’s Fascisti, but whose sweeping murals of Siena’s Palio races and up-to-the-trend Italian menu have made it a rendezvous for the young and chic. Chef Nancy Silverton’s exciting menu spends little time on formal entrees--although the Venetian-style liver with onions is ravishing--but lavishes attention on clever opening nibbles, classy pizzas from the wood-fired oven and such pastas as lasagna stuffed with stewed duck and gnocchi in rabbit sauce.

Just a few steps down F Street, a crowd equally young and chic instantly adopted Ole Madrid as its own. This delightful if noisy tapas bar, run by two Spaniards and a Mexican, features a wall-sized reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica” and an authentic cuisine seasoned with garlic, garlic and garlic.

It is more than permissible to make a meal of such snacks as the chorizo and cantinpalo sausages, the suave serrano ham, the tuna empanadas and the shrimp in garlic sauce, but many guests arrive in pairs so that they may sample the paella Valenciana, the seafood paella and the parrilada de mariscos (“seafood feast),” which are prepared for two guests only. Since everybody’s doing pasta, Ole Madrid serves fettuccine with shrimp, cream and an unusual flavoring of lemon and rosemary.

A few steps north from Fio’s on 5th Avenue is Falco, a charmingly anachronistic place with a semi-baroque atmosphere that somehow seems in step with the ultra-contemporary menu.

The chef and owner, Austrian-born Gunther Emathinger, offers a challenging but rewarding menu of such things as lobster strudel with tropical fruits and curry sauce, an exquisite stew of crayfish and sweetbreads and a grilled seafood sausage in bouillabaisse-style broth.

Those are the starters--the entree list includes such wild-but-tasty items as grilled chicken breast with black bean sauce and orange-jalapeno relish, and pork tenderloin slices with peanut souffle and a compote of rhubarb and ginger. Emathinger has the Austrian touch with pastries and composes a handsome tray.

A half-block and several light-years distant from Falco, the Grill on the Park, a branch of a popular Aspen restaurant, leans primarily to basic Americana and does it best with the fried onion loaf and the herbed, roasted chicken.

The barbecued baby back ribs are good, the pizzas issue from the currently requisite wood-burning oven, there are pastas (of course!) and the kitchen knows how to deal with fresh fish. Portions are daunting.

A bright light began burning down on Market Street with the Bayou Bar & Grill, the place that finally brought the true taste of New Orleans to San Diego.

The flavors are piquant but rarely overwhelming; chef-partner Bud Deslatte understands that to have the real Tobasco, a dish shouldn’t have too much Tobasco. The crisp shrimp Bourbon Street are happy with their sweetly hot sauce of marmalade, Creole mustard and horseradish, as are the crayfish swimming in the traditional, savory etouffe . The freshwater trout with creamed shellfish sauce is particularly fine, and the house special, Louisiana’s classic red beans and rice, should satisfy anyone who craves something of this sort.

The Fish Market, built along San Diego Bay on the newly named Tuna Harbor, is a truly grand undertaking that brought San Diego the sort of over-sized restaurants familiar to anyone who has visited other big city waterfronts.

Basically two eateries in one, the place features an extensive but informal menu and mood downstairs, and an even longer list in the pricier Top of the Market. Seafood predominates, but meat-eaters also are accommodated. The restaurant features an exceptional selection of oysters and shellfish, a fine choice of fresh fish and such specialties as an industrial-sized cioppino laden with Dungeness crab legs.

In the Gold Triangle, the opening of the Aventine complex and its instant restaurant row had a surprising effect on local dining, since the four eateries together sometimes attract crowds of a size of which restaurateurs in other parts of town can only dream.

Each is stylish at the minimum; the most striking of the four is the contemporary-Oriental themed Cafe Japengo, which features its own brand of cooking, a new style called Pacific Rim cuisine. The results are mixed, but the braised duck on slivered vegetables and the spicy pork and Japanese eggplant piled atop shoestring potatoes are excellent.

The neighboring Kiva Grill, a Southwestern-style place, shakes a mean Margarita, prepares an unusually good guacamole at the table, offers a dressy queso fundido and treats black beans almost as a cult item.

The stuffed “soft” tacos more than make the grade, but the true presentation piece, the layered chicken-and-tortilla torte Azteca, would be the dish of choice if one could dine here but once.

P. J. Wolf and Paparazzi, both under the same ownership as La Jolla’s popular Manhattan, are in turn an elegant, Eastern-style steak house and a moderately-priced Italian house constructed along the lines of a never-ending grand opera.

The Wolf menu, modified after opening to include a less expensive selection of dishes, is handsome, robust and well-prepared. There have been inconsistencies at the wildly successful Paparazzi, but the thin-crusted pizzas and generously sauced pastas usually are quite good, as are such entrees as saltimbocca and rollatini di salamini, both made here with pork tenderloin rather than veal.

Another notable entrant in the Golden Triangle, Panda Country, proved that elegance and Chinese restaurants need not be strangers. The formal service is welcoming and gracious, the menu well-written and usually well cooked.

Specialties include the house duck, which is stuffed with shrimp paste, crisped in deep fat and coated with a savory, pungent sauce; the Phoenix shrimp; five-spice spareribs and an amusing, banana-based appetizer called “Goldfinger.”

There were numerous important openings outside these two areas. In Rancho Santa Fe, the stylish Delicias introduced a menu written by famed Los Angeles chef Wolfgang Puck and his disciple, Serge Falestich.

The restaurant is full of flowers and color, themes repeated on plates that seem to blossom. The luxury menu is not always expensive, and includes designer pizzas (the smoked salmon with roe and dill is superb), suave pastas, an exquisite honey-and-ginger glazed duck and shrimp and scallops paired with a lush stew of saffron-flavored fennel.

In Hillcrest, Montana’s American Grill opened to a somewhat adoring audience that returns loyally for the extensive selection of contemporary offerings, virtually all of them grilled. (One of the few that isn’t, the gratin of potatoes, is the preparation to which every spud should aspire.)

The mixed grill plate changes daily and includes three items, among which may be a fine, marinated skirt steak and Anaheim chilies stuffed with cheese. The chocolate tart in caramel sauce may be the dessert of 1990.

Also in Hillcrest, Piret and George Munger of Piret’s fame came to the new Uptown District with Cane’s, a bistro that features an eclectic mix of designer pizzas, designer pastas and sandwiches and serious entrees.

In South Bay, Brendory’s in Bonita offers a fine mix of down-home Southern cooking and Cajun cuisine, although it does better with the former and serves excellent spare ribs, fried chicken and smothered pork chops.

Although new, the place has an old-fashioned, family-style atmosphere that is most appealing. Also in South Bay, the new management of Chula Vista’s La Mansion have updated the menu to include a variety of regional Mexican specialties, including the remarkably savory tacos al pastor , bacon-wrapped shrimp in tequila sauce and the serape indio , a thin steak stuffed with chorizo and cheese. Most guests seem to order one of the first-rate, hand-shaken Margaritas; they’re as big as they are delicious, and one seems plenty.