Fairy Tale Ending

Once upon a time two young chefs, Tim and Liza Goodell, who met at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, dreamed of opening their own restaurant somewhere near Newport Beach, where Tim had grown up. In 1995, they found a sweet little cottage on Balboa Peninsula that had once housed a flower shop. They painted it yellow and white, added an antique zinc bar, squeezed in two rows of tables and called it Aubergine--French for eggplant. Liza Goodell turned in her apron to run the front of the house, juggling reservations and pouring wines by the glass at the bar. The place was a runaway success from Day One, so much so that they didn’t know where to put everybody.

Orange County, it seems, was starving for a restaurant just like this. Where else could you come to eat rabbit sausage or duck estouffade with young turnips? Or savor a glass of Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise with Goodell’s beguiling desserts? Still, it was largely a local phenomenon. L.A. residents, it seemed, had just as hard a time getting down to Orange County as Orange County diners have getting up to Los Angeles to try out new restaurants.

Today, however, Aubergine is definitely part of the larger Los Angeles culinary landscape. Two years ago, the restaurant reopened after an extensive remodel. The original cottage was just too small for the kind of service and attention the Goodells wanted to give each diner. The kitchen is better organized, and the dining room has nearly doubled in size--not to squeeze in more tables, but to offer more space and comfort. And though the Goodells now have Troquet, a bistro in the South Coast Plaza shopping center, and are about to open a third spot, Red Pearl Kitchen in Huntington Beach, their focus remains firmly on Aubergine. In just six years, it has evolved into a remarkable restaurant.

Depending on the night, the amuse can be as elaborate as a three-tier affair with a spoonful of black-bass tartare and osetra caviar, a guinea hen and foie gras pate perched on a crouton, and some other little bite. It could be an adorable quail’s egg benedict cloaked in hollandaise sharp with French tarragon. Or a tantalizing seafood minestrone presented in a wide-rimmed porcelain bowl with a well at the bottom just large enough for a dainty portion of the marvelous broth and some tender baby clams.

On a balmy night, it’s a pleasure to sit in the main dining room with a sea breeze wafting in the open door. There’s also a smaller dining room, a private room with a view of the kitchen, and a small, four-table patio.

If you really want to splurge, consider the two special appetizers not included in the five-course prix fixe menu: a traditional service of caviar with the osetra, which is just now coming in from Iran. The other is a terrine of foie gras--five ounces of rosy pink Hudson Valley duck foie gras. Scooped from a French canning jar, it’s perfect lavished on buttered pain de mie.

Sometimes the choice of appetizers can be agonizing. Hand-cut fettuccine with black truffles and a poached egg on top? Cut into the egg and the yolk runs into the noodles, heightening the heady scent of Perigord truffles. That, or the slow-cooked pork belly--crackling crisp on top, almost custardy underneath, delicious with crinkly morel mushrooms, asparagus and the pan juices swirled with cream and a touch of vinegar. Or you could go for the pigs’ trotters with black truffles, a sort of divine sausage that is an inspired match with Pinot Noir. Fortunately, if you can’t decide, you can have both appetizers and skip the fish or meat course, the format is that flexible.

Goodell’s cooking is firmly based in French technique, but he rifles through cuisines from the Mediterranean and Asia to create his own idiosyncratic style. He’s as entranced with juxtapositions of flavors as a musician is with alternative tonal scales.

Sometimes his textures or tastes are delightfully oddball. Last time, I ordered the oven-roasted tomato gazpacho. It sounds innocent enough, but what arrives is a bowl with smashed avocado at the bottom and two scoops of sorbet on top, one a deep red, the other a greenish ivory. The waiter floods the bowl with a puree so red it vibrates with color. Ah. The tomato sorbet is slightly sweet, all the better to marry with the avocado and the soup’s crisp acidity. What’s amazing is the olive oil sorbet.

The agnolotti of milky white corn are like bites of cloud perfumed with sweet butter and summer truffles. And a veloute of chanterelle mushrooms is liquid velvet, garnished with a dab of coq au vin terrine and a sliver of foie gras.

Goodell is a stickler for ingredients. In such a small, independent restaurant, it’s expensive to be so uncompromising. That is especially true with seafood. A typical Aubergine menu might offer hake or walleyed pike along with day-boat scallops and lobsters. Eastern spotted skate wing, for example, is browned in butter, and served with a single ravioli stuffed with a sumptuous oxtail ragout. It’s a complicated and interesting dish, but not a fussy one.

Just as remarkable is a single, huge sweet scallop, a snowy white cushion in the middle of the plate, with shavings of salt-cured foie gras melting into the top and a quatre quartz sauce freckled with vanilla bean. The result is fascinating and works because the scallop becomes almost caramelized when seared, and the foie gras seems to have an affinity for the vanilla.

Since the beginning, Goodell has insisted on the restaurant baking its own bread. Most two- and three-star restaurants in France do the same. At Aubergine, sometimes there are crusty little rolls, a rustic tweedy bread inset with wine-dark olives, or a loaf flavored with fennel and sultanas.

The kitchen rarely makes a false step, but some dishes are better than others. A perfectly nice chicken breast stuffed with baby spinach and mushrooms is rather bland. The minimalist bluefin tuna loin in an intense soy broth also misses the mark.

The menu is loaded with dishes that soar, like the roasted veal loin and sweetbreads along with slow-braised short ribs and summer truffle cream. Or a rabbit and foie gras pastilla with the bacon-wrapped rabbit loin in thyme-scented jus.

Cheese here isn’t just cheese, but a separate course, with choices. A piquant Point Reyes blue, for example, comes with a crispy polenta cake and a Maui onion and rosemary jam, while Vella special aged jack from Sonoma is served with black mission fig flatbread, an herb salad and a splash of fig vinegar. This last is as dark and treacly as a very old balsamic vinegar, but with a more pronounced acidity.

Aubergine’s 30-some-page wine list, unfortunately, is not yet at the same level as the cuisine. Despite the roster of well-known names at elevated prices, the list is rather pedestrian and choices in the mid-price range are uninspired. It lacks the surprising or cutting-edge wines that would make it a truly exciting list, one that would better reflect Goodell’s cooking.

Pastry chef Shelly Register turns out some spectacular desserts: hot apricot tarte tatin set on an irresistible, warm buttery crust and crowned by astonishing apricot sorbet, and a mille feuille of elongated triangles of dark chocolate layered with squiggles of bittersweet chocolate cream. The dainty mignardises offered after the desserts change with each visit. And just when you think you can’t eat one more bite, the waiter is back with freshly baked madeleines dusted with sugar or a tray of deep, dark chocolate cookies. Aubergine is a restaurant to be savored. It proves it is still possible to create a great restaurant from scratch given enough passion, hard work and talent--all of which the Goodells have in spades. If that’s not a fairy tale ending, I don’t what is.

Aubergine

508 29th St.

Newport Beach

(949) 723-4150

Cuisine: French-California

Rating: ***1/2

AMBIENCE: Sophisticated cottage with zinc bar, private dining room with view onto the kitchen, and small enclosed patio.

SERVICE: Personable and professional.

BEST DISHES: Five-course prix fixe menu, $85; Nine-course tasting menu, $105 (available for entire table only); Sunday night four-course menu, $39. Corkage, $25, limit one bottle.

WINE PICKS: 1999 Knoll Gruner Veltliner Smaragd Ried, Loiben, Wachau, Austria; 1996 Pesquera Reserva, Ribera del Duero, Spain.

FACTS: Dinner Tuesday through Sunday. Street and adjoining lot parking. Rating is based on food, service and ambience, with price taken into account in relation to quality. eeee: Outstanding on every level. eee: Excellent. ee: Very good. e: Good. No star: Poor to satisfactory.