Dining on the Edge

In terms of gastronomy, I’ve heard the Stonehouse at the posh San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito mentioned in the kind of awed tones usually reserved for the likes of retired three-star super-chefs Joel Robuchon or Fredy Girardet. The place is a Santa Barbara institution, considered the epitome of fine dining. After all, Jack and Jackie Kennedy honeymooned there, and the resort can boast a long list of other luminaries who have dropped in for visits.

I dined there for the first time recently, and found that California cuisine has gone to the extreme edge here.

Of course, if you were a real stick-in-the-mud, you could opt to begin with something classic--an ounce of Beluga caviar, say, with all the fixings for $98. Or choose, as I did, a perfectly acceptable terrine of foie gras, albeit served with a few paltry toasts and a wizened piece of black truffle.

But a hot smoked quail is tasteless. Lobster roll is simply that, a petite roll piled with a pallid lobster salad. And a warm mushroom salad is marred by the mushrooms being tossed with goat cheese, which turns gummy when the two meet.

And what to make of the vertical pan-roasted veal chop with a couple of buttermilk-dipped onion rings swinging from the end of the bone and a spiraling cone of sweet potato puree sweeping up its flank like some demented, very tall frostee cone?

Believe me, I tried, but I can’t imagine how even the deft and always ladylike Jackie Kennedy would go about dismantling her “Lobster, Lobster, Lobster”: a silly tower of lobster shell, rice, more lobster, a “claw” sausage perched precariously and horizontally on top of the structure--and a broiled lobster tail draped across that. (The tail, however, was virtually raw. An oversight or lobster sashimi?)

Maybe I’d feel different if the food was wonderful, but its taste barely registers. The people in the kitchen need to redirect their energies. Bottom line: The food has to be delicious. If not, this sort of hyper-expensive, overwrought California cuisine verges on the emperor’s new clothes.

BE THERE

Stonehouse, San Ysidro Ranch, 900 San Ysidro Lane, Montecito; (805) 969-4100. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Valet parking. First courses at dinner $7.50 to $98; main courses $23 to $39.