FRENCH, VIETNAM STYLES JOIN FOR CLASSIC TASTES

When I first got interested in food, I had a friend, a French girl named Marie-Christine. I had never done any serious eating in France and was gravely suspicious that California restaurants weren’t giving me the real story on French cookery. Marie-Christine was no help, though. Probably no Frenchwoman has ever been less at home in a kitchen. Her Maman, she said with unruffled artlessness, was the one who knew cooking.

Eventually Maman made a visit to California, and Marie-Christine got her to cook a dinner. There was no end of fuss and bustle as Maman and her dutiful Marie-Christine scoured the town for the right ingredients, the exact Provencal wine and so on. Finally the great day arrived, and Maman assured me that I was in for a rare treat, the hottest thing in Paris. It turned out to be Vietnamese food.

At the time I felt grievously shortchanged in my quest for the truth of la cuisine Francaise, but I learned something. I saw how highly the French regard Vietnamese food, and years later when I knew a little more about both cuisines I realized why. It is not merely the historical accident that the French were once the colonial masters of Vietnam. (Laotian and Cambodian cookery never achieved the same cachet.) The truth is that Vietnamese cuisine, which probably has the most restrained hand in Southeast Asia with herbs and spices, really does seem to accord with French culinary thinking. There’s a classicism about it that the French recognize.

A few of our local Vietnamese restaurants have French dishes on their menus, sometimes thoroughly French but often with a kind of Vietnamese accent. One recently opened place, Au Bon Temps de Saigon, seems to specialize in this general French-Vietnamese interface. In appearance, to be sure, it is not particularly French, just a modest mom-and-pop Vietnamese place with relatively sophisticated Oriental prints on the wall (elegant ceramics rather than waterfalls and bamboo) and a brisk, eager proprietress who seems to remind people of the Joyce DeWitt character on the TV show, “Three’s Company.”

Its system is to offer a different dinner menu of seven entree selections every week of the month, so you do have to know what week it is. All I can do here is tell you what was served during the restaurant’s third week of operation, which conveniently served a Week 3 menu.

Some dishes are explicitly French, such as beef bourguignon, which happens not to be the best French dish I’ve had here. The best was a coq au vin (by my standards, more a poulet saute vin blanc, cooked in white wine with a more characteristic French flavor that you usually get in French restaurants). The beef bourguignon tastes rather like chuck steak in red wine, with no sign of mushrooms or bacon.

Some dishes, of course, are quite Vietnamese. Lemon-grass-flavor chicken in fish sauce casserole is one of those subtle, long-stewed dishes with an aroma that is positively polished and mellow. Grilled pork marinated in fish sauce and garlic on skewers with bell peppers and green onions (like a couple of other barbecued dishes--ginger beef on skewers and seafood brochette) have the elegance and deceptive simplicity of the best Southeast Asian barbecued meats. Chicken in hoisin sauce (half a rather large chicken, as it happens, a sizable project to eat) wears a Chinese bean sauce lightly in the Vietnamese manner.

And every once in a while there is a dish with a genuine blend of French and Vietnamese ideas. On last week’s menu it was a filet of fish in Saigon provencale sauce--fish sauteed in tomatoes and onions subtly enriched with Vietnamese fermented fish sauce (which comes on the table anyway in a shaker bottle, a garlicky and mildly sweet version).

Lunch is rather a different affair, an all-you-can-eat affair, and, though a bargain, not as good as dinner. (I’ve had tempura with underdone batter, to tell you the truth, and I’m not a fan of the Vietnamese style of sweet and sour pork, where the meat is deep-fried in batter and served with a thin sauce and carrots). The best things are that white-wine coq au vin and the Saigon pork fried rice.

Rather unexpectedly, most of the desserts seem to be based on strudel. There are apple turnovers, lime turnovers, cherry strudels, tarts that are strudel with a topping of pastry creme and glazed strawberries. Altogether this is an odd, occasionally surprising little place (one night I found a plate of fruits and a cluster of incense sticks stuck in the curb outside the restaurant, seemingly an offering for the good luck I hope they have), and extremely reasonable. Dinner entrees run $4.50-$6.50. The all-you-can-eat lunch is $4.95 (coq au vin by itself is $2.95).

AU BON TEMPS DE SAIGON

7147 Katella Ave., Stanton, (714) 828-9300.

Open for lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday. No credit cards.