Safari Finds Its Flavors More in the Bayou Than the Jungle

Safari is a very new restaurant with a rather long and interesting history.

This bar-cum-restaurant is the kind of neighborhood hangout and hideaway of which San Diego has far, far too few. It is reminiscent of the type of low-key, cozy places that flourished on New York’s Upper East Side before that area became so pricey.

Safari is casual yet a little urbane and sophisticated, which is altogether reassuring in this era of laissez-faire restaurants.

Its quiet and comfortable dining room occupies part of the ground floor of a militantly nondescript office building at 5th and Olive. Safari is a kind of reincarnation, and a rather interesting one at that, because it is a union of two separate former identities.

Limbo but Not Oblivion

Until a few years ago, Safari was a popular neighborhood bar located in an old residential hotel a few blocks up 5th; former patrons of the defunct Kiyo’s Japanese restaurant, which adjoined the Safari, will remember it well, because beer traveled in one direction and raw fish in the other. When the hotel tumbled before bulldozers to make way for progress (in the form of a parking lot), Safari vanished, but, as we now see, into limbo rather than oblivion.

The second identity that makes the new Safari a whole is that of chef Michael Jackson, who was proprietor of the former Jilly’s, a few blocks south at 5th and Hawthorn. (That restaurant, under new management, now is known as Fifth & Hawthorn.) Jackson, a dyed-in-the-wool and quite competent devotee of Paul Prudhomme, the New Orleans-based guru of pseudo-Cajun cuisine, brought the Safari-owning Pratt family a pleasant menu with which to complement its well-stocked bar.

A horseshoe of booths rings the small dining room, which is at the front of the house--the bar, somewhat separate, occupies the back half of the premises--and is decorated in a manner that vaguely suggests the jungle through its use of crocodile-skin-like wallpaper. It is a light, pretty room, though, and one not at all troubled by thematic excess.

The mood is quiet and polite, and much of the clientele seems so at home that the assumption would be that it is drawn from the neighborhood. This situation may change with the approach of the summer cultural season in nearby Balboa Park; Safari might not necessarily rank as a destination in itself for guests from distant parts of town, but it certainly is a very convenient stop on the way to an evening performance in the park.

The restaurant serves breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, which makes it something of a novelty in a town in which current practice largely restricts such extensive service to hotel dining rooms and family restaurants. Only the dinner menu was sampled for this review.

Jackson is a lot less Cajun with this menu than he was at Jilly’s, although his predilection for generous and occasionally hot seasoning comes out in dishes that are not necessarily of Louisiana derivation. There are the Buffalo chicken wings, for example, meaty appetizer tidbits heated with cayenne pepper, and the spicy lamb brochette, a skewer of tender lamb chunks cooked to the medium-rare and still-juicy stage. Garlic and a splash of very herbal marinade give the brochette an excellent flavor, and it is, by the way, available in both appetizer- and entree-size portions.

Go With the Soup

Among other appetizers are oysters, both raw on the shell and gussied up in the Rockefeller style; steamed littleneck clams; clams casino and a small order of Danish baby back ribs, a dish that also appears on the entree list.

Dinners include the choice of soup or salad; as is so often advisable, go with the soup. The green salad, a generous serving of mixed lettuces garnished with tomato wedges and carrot sticks, was bathed with a vinaigrette that contained far too much oil; the optional sprinkle of blue cheese was apportioned by someone who evidently treasures this cheese as dearly as others treasure diamonds, because precious little of it could be located on the salad.

The soups change with the day, and both of those sampled took first honors. A shrimp and crab gumbo featured a textbook-perfect (or Prudhomme cookbook-perfect) red-brown roux, which gave the soup a magnificent color. When one finally stopped admiring the color and dug in, it became obvious that the roux also gave the gumbo a light body and a teasingly nutty flavor. Hot with cayenne and aromatic with thyme, every element of the gumbo worked to bring out the briny flavors of the shrimp and crab, which themselves were present more as essences than major figures. The next night’s soup, a sweet potato/smoked turkey preparation finished with a jazzy accent of snipped chives, was quieter but just as satisfying.

A couple of daily fish specials (including, on one occasion, the inevitable blackened halibut) flesh out the relatively brief entree list. As short as it is, the list covers all the bases, commencing with a pair of pastas (fettuccine with shrimp in garlic and Parmesan cheese, and baked ziti with Sonoma County sausages and a robust tomato sauce) and continuing with calamari in lemon-caper sauce, sauteed chicken breast in an elaborate cream sauce, and a brochette of shrimp, chicken and steak.

There is also a grilled New York sirloin finished with a dab of garlic butter, and a much more interesting and quite enjoyable version, a pepper steak that supplements the traditional black peppercorns with the green Madagascar peppercorns, and finishes the whole with a fine red wine sauce.

Just Right for Sunday

A milder red wine sauce, this time flavored with shallots, brandy and a bit of mustard, dressed the sauteed pork tenderloin medallions, a nicely old-fashioned, homey-seeming dish that seemed just right for a recent Sunday supper. Pork appears rarely on restaurant menus, but it is nice to find it once in a while, especially when done as well as this.

The entree list concludes with trout and a sweeping bow in the direction of Prudhomme, who devised the unique sauce for this interesting and overall satisfying preparation. The sauce, a “roasted pecan butter sauce,” is spooned generously over a sauteed fish that Jackson has split and arranged, sole-like, flat on the plate. The only part of the trout that can be seen beneath its load of sauce is its tail, which waves somewhat at the diner as he moves in with knife and fork; the important stuff is down below, where tender flesh meets mellow, mildly nutty sauce. This is one of the few Prudhomme dishes that does not call for exaggerated spicing, and Jackson handles it very well.

The desserts, without exception, come from outside suppliers. The only one sampled was a caramel-walnut tart, of which it could be said that, if all desserts were this dull, those of us who suffer from sweet teeth would be a good deal thinner.

The wine list, on the other hand, is unusually well written for being so short. It is quite well-suited to the menu, fairly priced, and offers a very good selection of wines by the glass.

SAFARI

2770 5th Ave., San Diego

295-0504

Breakfast, lunch and dinner daily

Credit cards accepted

Dinner for two, with one glass of wine each, tax and tip, $25 to $45.