The Oasis Dishes Up French, Italian Cuisine

North County is by no means immune to the immutable laws of the restaurant business, of which the chief rule may be that places come and places go.

In an Encinitas shopping plaza built near the border with exclusive Rancho Santa Fe--at the point where Encinitas and Manchester Boulevards and Rancho Santa Fe Road come together, to be precise--is a restaurant that one year ago was called Shells, and now, under new management, has been rechristened Oasis.

Shells was a comfortable establishment with a pleasant mood and acceptable cooking, and Oasis is a comfortable establishment with a pleasant mood and acceptable cooking. The rules of the restaurant game allow for this sort of situation, in which a location’s name and look change, while the tone survives the transition in management virtually unscathed.

The new look seems not too different from before. Simple and clean-lined if not quite austere, the dining room relieves the whitewashed walls with light colored wood trim, and enough greenery inhabits the space to qualify Oasis for inclusion in a list of prototypical, Southern California “fern restaurants.” The mood would be utterly relaxed were it not for the harsh, glaring lighting, which makes you feel that you must sit up straight and not dawdle during dinner. The lighting certainly needs to be softened.

Nothing about the restaurant’s name commits the place to any specific style of cooking and the kitchen actually practices two not necessarily complimentary cuisines, Italian and French. In the case of Oasis, a certain union between the two seems effected by a large supply of white sauce, which appears in various dishes from both cuisines and crosses borders in the “pink sauce” (white and tomato sauces stirred together) spooned over the veal-stuffed ravioli. Tomato sauce, also by no means in short supply, reappears frequently, especially in a well-spiced manifestation that brings zesty life to the shrimp dish called “ gamberoni fradiavolo .”

The menu seems fairly evenly split between the two schools of cooking. The appetizer list, for example, starts out with incontrovertibly Gallic snails in garlic butter and moules (mussels) mariniere , moves on to a neutral, American shrimp cocktail and finishes up with two Italian favorites, squid in peppery tomato sauce and clams siciliana , flavored with olives, capers and tomato. The mussels, steamed and finished with a cream sauce lightened with white wine and made pungent by a good deal of chopped garlic and shallots, were plump and tasty and happy with the thin but strong sauce.

Entrees (with the exception of the pastas) include the choice of the house salad (good if unexceptional) or the day’s soup, but the menu offers several supplementary, a la carte selections in both categories. There is a Caesar salad, of course (it probably would be easier to list the restaurants that do not serve this plate of greenery than those that do), and an Italian salad that gets most of its pedigree from the garnish of Provolone cheese and sun dried tomatoes. Standing soup choices are lobster bisque and French onion; the latter, thickened with flour to the texture of light brown gravy and nearly explosive with the scent and flavor of thyme, comes across as remarkably strong and heady, but is nonetheless likeable.

The pasta list, slightly less expensive than the formal entree section of the menu, includes such offerings as angel hair in a basic, light sauce of chopped fresh tomatoes, garlic and basil; linguine with shellfish and squid in a choice of red or white sauces; fettuccine carbonara , here made with cream sauce rather than eggs, and fettuccine primavera , the garnish of sauteed vegetables either plain or in cream sauce as a nice tip of the hat to dieters, with whom the uncreamed version of this dish is a favorite.

Sauce choices continue on the entree list, which offers pepper steak with either green or black pepper corns and roast duck with raspberry or green pepper corn sauces. On the Italian side are such dishes as veal parmigiana, picatta and alla Marsala--the latter was tender, heavily laden with sliced mushrooms and finished with a good, solidly respectable pan sauce--and pollo Valdostana, or breast of chicken baked under layers of prosciutto, mozzarella and the house “pink” sauce. Also Italian, the gamberoni fradiavolo (this sauce seems quite a favorite here) is spicy, well-flavored and generous: nine large shrimp curled their tails in the bath of red pepper-spiked tomato sauce.

French choices include a saute of sweetbreads in a brandied cream that made up in generosity what it lacked in finesse; roast chicken in its own herb-scented juices; roast rack of lamb with rosemary and mustard; sea scallops in a light garlic sauce, and the inevitable filet mignon with sauce bearnaise.

The dessert tray, a collaboration of catered pastries, concentrates on fairly heavy chocolate offerings and could stand an upgrade.

Oasis

162 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road, Encinitas

Calls: 632-0072.

Hours: Lunch weekdays, dinner nightly.

Cost: Entrees $9.50 to $23. Dinner for two, including a glass of house wine each, tax and tip, about $35 to $70.