Finally, the Genuine Taste of the Bayou Seeps Past Impostors

San Diegans may think they know everything germane to the topic of rice and beans. But many will find themselves slogging through new gastronomic ground when they encounter the Louisiana red beans and rice that garnish the oyster, shrimp and andouille sausage po’ boys served at the new Bayou Bar & Grill on Market Street.

A number of pseudo-Cajun and phony “New Orleans-style” eateries have imposed themselves on this city in the past decade or so, and the mid-1980s also were tarnished by the “blackened” fish craze. But, finally, anyone who wants a taste of real Louisiana cooking can fork it up at a place that probably could do business on the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Canal streets.

The crayfish etouffee, the seafood gumbo and the red beans and rice are all cooked with that blend of bayou murk, Mississippi mud and Mardi Gras spice that makes New Orleans cooking the most foreign, exotic and beguiling of America’s home-grown cuisines.

The Bayou Bar & Grill replaces the former Play Bill’s in one of the attractive old buildings on the fringe of the Gaslamp Quarter. The bar and dining room have been remodeled into brighter, lighter and more inviting spaces. The feeling isn’t exactly French Quarter--that sort of mood would require more broken bottles in the gutter, and quite possibly a hawker at the door--but the menu more than compensates for any lack of “Big Easy” ambience.

What distinguishes the jambalaya and gumbo from the versions offered by earlier New Orleans-style places is chef and co-owner Bud Deslatte. He is half Cajun and half Creole, a pedigree that Louisianians immediately understand to mean his maman was from the bayou country, and his papa was born in New Orleans.

Deslatte grew up with the long-cooked roux , the shellfish, bell peppers, thyme, onions, garlic, file powder, spiced sausages, patience and verve required by this hybrid cooking style, and he translates it quite handily to downtown San Diego. Even more important, his heritage makes him fairly immune to the contrived “ nouvelle -Cajun” style concocted and popularized by heavyweight New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme.

More than anything, New Orleans means seafood, and the appetizer list leads off with a quartet of thoughtfully racy shellfish offerings. The first among these, the oysters en brochette, sounds tame but provides an immediate introduction to piquant Creole flavors. This dish wraps oysters (like all the Bayou Bar & Grill’s seafood, they are flown in fresh from New Orleans) in bacon, which is a standard treatment, but then plunges them into a very light batter and then hot oil. These cook up into crisp mouthfuls that taste exquisite when dipped in the creamed Creole mustard sauce, a variation on New Orleans’ famed remoulade.

Deslatte must cook his shrimp as briefly as possible, because they are unusually tender. His batter-crisped “Bourbon Street” shrimp are succulent, and quite happy with their sweetly hot sauce of marmalade, Creole mustard and horseradish. Barbecued shrimp arrive in the New Orleans style, basted with butter, white wine, garlic and black pepper.

Gumbo actually is a term that encompasses a number of soups, varying from the delicate to the robust, but it generally is understood as the thick, seafood-based variety, which is the kind served by Deslatte. An essential criterion is that it be as opaque and mysterious as swamp water, a condition fulfilled at the Bayou, which serves up an almost chewy brew laden with shrimp, oysters and bits of andouille. A bit of spicing soon makes itself evident, as it should, but it doesn’t assault the taste buds in the way that the new, ersatz Cajun cooking does. The dish seems to lack crab, however, an ingredient that can unify and hone the flavors of this soup in a manner analogous to the effect of a black truffle upon a fine brown sauce.

A truly fine green salad precedes all entrees; vinegar seems absent, the greens moistened primarily by oil but perked by a noticeable amount of salt. A sweet finish is given by sprinklings of poppy seeds, pan-roasted pecans and Mandarin orange segments.

Deslatte said he largely rejects the nouvelle -Cajun imperative to over-season as “a tourist gimmick.” Having said this, he still offers several “blackened” dishes, done, however, much more lightly than called for by the original style. His Louisiana freshwater trout is lightly spiced and pan-seared, then finished with a creamed melange of crab, shrimp and crayfish tails. It is thoroughly succulent. The “Creole cordon bleu” tops a lightly blackened chicken breast with cheese and a thick cream sauce spiced with the New Orleans smoked ham called tasso .

No ingredient specifies the New Orleans touch so unmistakeably as crayfish, the fresh-water shellfish that Louisianians alternately call mud bugs, crawfish and, when feeling French, ecrevisses . A favorite and grand recipe is the etouffee, a moderately spiced stew that calls upon all the favorite Cajun ingredients--flour browned slowly in fat, tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic--and crams the dish with as many crayfish tails as the chef can peel. Deslatte makes a fine etouffee , arranged around the traditional mound of snowy, firm white rice and sprinkled at the last moment with chopped scallion greens, a true New Orleans touch that adds a final, lively flavor to nearly every dish on this menu.

The Mardi Gras pasta seems primarily a bow to the demand for pasta on every restaurant menu, but it gets the flavors right by combining shrimp and crayfish with mushrooms, cream, tomatoes and light spices as a sauce for fresh egg linguine.

Tournedos royale is the sort of dish that would turn up on the famous New Orleans breakfast menus, which resemble dinner in everything but the time of day at which they are served. Small, twin beef filets are coated with black pepper, sauteed, dressed with a little bearnaise sauce and mounted on freshly fried French bread croutes . If this last touch seems minor, it really brings a fine dish together.

Other classics include the soft-shell crab stuffed with extra crab meat and served with a spiced tartar sauce; shrimp Creole, a tamer dish than the etouffee but one that incorporates many of the same flavors; jambalaya, a paella-like rice stew that, like gumbo, comes in many variants, and the classic red beans and rice.

This last, listed as “Monday’s feast” in reference to that day’s one-time status as “laundry day,” is hearty and filling and may be happiest when served as a side dish with the po’ boys rather than as a main course. The po’ boys, on a snack menu available until midnight or 1 a.m. nightly, are classics of their kind and consist simply of lengths of French bread spread with mustard dressing and stuffed with fried oysters, shrimp or sausage, and lettuce and tomatoes. The late-night menu also offers a sausage-spiked hamburger and a trio of designer pizzas.

The desserts run to Southern extravagance in the form of wildly rich chocolate and peanut butter mousse pies (the combination version neatly solves the question of which to order); the bread pudding, on the other hand, is dull and heavy.

BAYOU BAR & GRILL

329 Market St.

696-8747

Dinner nightly from 5 p.m.

Credit cards accepted.

Dinner for two, including a glass of wine each, tax and tip, $35 to $70.