Del Mar Restaurant Adds a Velvet Touch To Vietnamese Fare

Del Mar’s elegant Greystone Inn recently changed hands and became The Velvet Inn, itself a restaurant of some formality and pretension to grandeur.

The Greystone served a stylized, mannered French cuisine, very reflective of the tastes of chef-proprietor Andy Watling. The French touch at The Velvet Inn comes from the Gallic accent given the delicate cuisine of Vietnam during the long French colonial period.

The source of the restaurant’s name is not immediately apparent. But it seems likely that the management believes, correctly in this case, that its kitchen has a velvet touch with the varied and subtle dishes that make up the Vietnamese repertoire.

There is, by the way, an iron fist inside the velvet glove, in the form of service that wants to take the order now, now, now . This is a relatively formal and expensive restaurant, and its guests should be able to consider themselves present for the purpose of dining, not feeding.

An almost ephemeral quality marks Vietnamese cooking, which at its best is gossamer light and ever so delicate; even its heartiest dishes could be considered so only by comparison, because nothing really seems hearty.

There is an underlying simplicity as well, one not at all immediately apparent to the Western eye. A dish, for example, may number a dozen or more ingredients, each with its own taste and all of them combined elegantly inside a rice paper pancake, but most will be fresh, uncooked vegetables and herbs, teamed either with bits of a single hot meat, or with cold examples of several.

Probably the most popular dish offered by Vietnamese restaurants is the spring roll, an appetizer that looks quite like the Chinese egg roll, but is an altogether classier proposition. A thin, won ton-like skin encloses a suave mixture of crab meat, shrimp, black mushrooms and bean thread noodles; these little packages then undergo a brisk crisping in deep fat, and thus far do sound quite like egg rolls. The difference arises at the table, where guests wrap the rolls in cool lettuce leaves and then splash them around in little bowls of nuc mam, the fragrant dipping sauce made from a fish base that the Vietnamese use as freely as some Americans use ketchup. The juxtaposition between hot roll, cold lettuce and pungent sauce makes for quite a treat.

The summer rolls are even more stylish, because they replace the fried skins with fragile sheets of rice paper, a favorite Vietnamese wrapper. Crescent-shaped splashes of pink show through the translucent wrappers; these are shrimp, which team with minced ham, egg, long delicate strands of rice vermicelli and various shredded vegetables to make a particularly savory stuffing. Since this dish is meant to be cool and refreshing, it is served with a contrastingly spicy sauce, a blend of dark bean paste spiked with chili oil, with chopped peanuts thrown in for extra interest.

Stuffed Squid

Among other appetizers are stuffed squid, a platter of mixed barbecued meats and deep-fried, won ton-wrapped shrimp. This last is dressier than it sounds; the won ton skin shatters at the first bite, leaving an especially juicy shrimp to be dipped in a smooth sweet-sour sauce.

The menu offers several salads, a dish less necessary here because of the amount of greenery and vegetables included in so many of the other preparations. Nonetheless, they are likable for their arrangements of thinly sliced cucumber, various shredded vegetables, meats and shrimp, all tossed in a decidedly sweet but still quite delicate dressing.

The restaurant’s Western orientation shows most clearly in the soup category, which offers only six choices, unlike the neighborhood-style Vietnamese eateries in East San Diego and Linda Vista that offer a hundred or more soups, usually served in huge bowls and meant to constitute an entire meal. Best bets here would be the sweet-and-sour soups that immerse fish or shrimp in a clear broth that sparkles with the tart pungency of tamarind juice and the subtle flavors of mixed spices. (The Velvet Inn also is unlike most neighborhood places in its prices, which run noticeably higher than elsewhere. This is partly a function of location, no doubt, and seems justified in light of the kitchen’s insistence on quality raw materials, and the relative elegance of the decor.)

The entree list runs to less length than it might, although the selection is more than sufficient. The grandest dishes would be the whole, stuffed crabs flavored in both Vietnamese and “French” styles, but the most enjoyable, at least for novices, are the finger foods, such as the chao tom.

This classic dish calls for a paste of fresh, highly seasoned shrimp, which is wrapped around sugar cane and grilled over charcoal. Diners tear strips of the paste from the cane, wrap it in rice paper pancakes with fresh mint leaves, pickled shallots, bean sprouts and bits of carrot and turnip, and dip the savory little bundles into nuc mam . The various temperatures, textures and tastes add up to a dish of elaborate sophistication, even though its components are in themselves quite simple. The same rice paper and garnish treatment is given to the grape leaf-wrapped ground beef rolls, juicy morsels of sharply seasoned meat broiled to a delicious crispness on the charcoal grill.

The beef “fondu,” in this case paper-thin slices of meat cooked at the table in a boiling vinegar sauce, is less interesting than it sounds, and much less satisfying than the beef marinated in lemon grass. This hybridized dish recalls Vietnam’s French connection in the use of butter (almost unknown in the Orient) as the frying element for the thin slices of beef, which gain a delicately pungent flavor from the lemon grass, and an added fillip from a heavy sprinkling of sesame seed. Guests cook the meat themselves in a silver dish set over Sterno, and then wrap the slices, along with the garnishes mentioned above, in translucent pancakes.

The menu offers relatively few noodle dishes, but the pork with fried egg noodles takes up the slack quite nicely. A noticeable sweetness tinges the rich brown sauce that moistens the meat and mixed vegetables, to which the golden, vermicelli-like noodles serve as crunchy foil.

Because classic Vietnamese desserts have little in common with the Western concept of a meal-closing sweet, The Velvet Inn omits these in favor of a fine, delicate flan, a little round of custard set adrift in an orange-flavored sea of caramelized sugar. The Vietnamese-style iced coffee, a strong drip brew poured into a glass filled with ice and condensed milk, makes a light and handsome dessert by itself.

THE VELVET INN

2236 Carmel Valley Road, Del Mar

481-3257

Dinner served nightly.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, with a glass of house wine each, tax and tip, about $30 to $50.