La Bonne Bouffe’s Cooking, If Not Its Prices, Good as Ever

North County exhibits decided tastes at times, among them a notable fondness for Italian cooking and a general indifference to French.

There certainly are a couple of major French influences in the area, but naming Mille Fleurs and the Rancho Bernardo Inn’s El Bizcocho takes care of both of them in one breath. About the only long-standing eatery in the less-formal category is La Bonne Bouffe, the friendly and somewhat homespun practitioner of French country cooking that has managed for some years to draw a steady clientele to its Encinitas shopping center location.

This restaurant’s main attractions have always been its comfortably intimate, country inn-style dining room, a chalkboard menu of hearty cuisine bourgeoise dishes and relatively low prices. The decor and menu have stayed the same, but the prices have risen somewhat, and dinner for two with a bottle of wine these days can run to $70 and more.

Cooking Remains Classic

Thus, La Bonne Bouffe cannot be considered quite the bargain that it used to be, but the cooking, under the direction of chef/partner Guy Maussang, remains as classic and as good as ever.

One of the main treats here always has been the selection of crudites , a term that specifies not the raw vegetables that American hosts serve with dipping sauces, but a selection of carefully prepared, highly seasoned vegetable hors d’oeuvres. These can be ordered individually or, much more wisely, as a sampler plate, and the only complaint is that the servings could be more generously apportioned.

The plate includes beets in mustard vinaigrette, cucumbers in parsleyed sour cream, tomatoes dusted with tarragon, shredded red cabbage seasoned with raspberry vinegar and, most brilliant, marinated leeks flavored with fennel. Each pairing has its own shadings of flavor, and they run from the extremely nuanced to the explosive.

The hors d’oeuvres list similarly offers rustic meat appetizers that can be ordered individually or in combination; as with the vegetables, they are excellent but dished up by a miserly hand. The plate includes a rough, flavorful pate; a mound of creamy rillettes , an ultra-rich pork paste that, when made in the traditional manner, qualifies for the American Heart Assn.’s hit list; deeply hammy Ardennes ham, so beautifully flavored that it puts American commercial hams to shame, and a couple of salami-like country sausages, one notably heavy on the garlic and both quite good.

As good as these starters can be, the soups can make an even happier first course. Maussang recently did a rather startling job of searching out the deepest flavors of the leeks, carrots, onion, corn and turnips that went into an amazing cream of vegetable. A muddy yellow in color, the soup was quite unlike the delicate vegetable creams encountered at most French houses; one difference was the sweetness, which came not only from the turnips but also from sugar. To add sugar to soup seems daring at best and basely cynical at worst, but in this case it worked beautifully.

Some dishes appear regularly, but because Maussang writes his menu on blackboards, he has the opportunity to vary it at will. Among the standbys is boeuf bourguignonne , which the kitchen executes faithfully and dishes up, in true French style, with fluted mashed potatoes rather than the noodles that generally accompany it in American restaurants. It is a good, savory stew, a reliably filling dish and a good choice on a blustery night.

Vaguely Briny

Another frequently available choice is a plate of frog legs sauteed with onions, tomatoes and plenty of garlic, or, to put it in French, cuisses de grenouille provencale , a menu listing that twists the tongue as delightfully as the heady flavors caress it. The taste is vaguely briny and wild, but what little gaminess there is largely is tamed by the garlic, which points up the delicate undertones of the flesh. Popular opinion generally describes frog as tasting like chicken, but this description seems designed to deny the basic frogginess of the creature, and anyone who orders frog should undertake to enjoy it for what it is.

Lamb rack also appears frequently; Maussang gives it the typical French treatment by coating it with herbs and minced garlic before sending it on a quick visit to a very hot oven. A recently sampled rack was beautifully roasted, and the flavors of the herbs and garlic infused the roast from the crusted exterior to the very heart of the meat.

The kitchen sometimes misses the mark, and by a wide margin at that. A dish of prawns, wrapped in pastry and advertised as finished with a “very spicy lobster sauce,” was touted as one of the evening’s best choices. However, the shrimp were tough, their pastry wrappings also were tough, and the sauce, a simple homardiere (a cream sauce elaborated from lobster stock and trimmings), offered nothing of special interest and most definitely was not spicy in, say, the style of a sauce americaine .

The French sometimes like to be clever and coy when they cook, although evidence of this predilection turns up rarely enough in these parts. Maussang deserves credit for carrying on the tradition through the simple expedient of pastry cutouts that represent the main constituent of the dish; for example, a pastry lamb posed atop the roasted rack of lamb, and a gangly frog that decorated the plate of frog legs. This is a minor matter, but it shows that the kitchen takes some interest in pleasing its guests; on a more important level, plates include garnishes of simply but carefully cooked mixed vegetables.

The Elusive Cheese Plate

This is one of the few restaurants in the county that actually mention a cheese plate on its dessert list. Cheese makes a fine end to a meal, although its use in this mode is increasingly infrequent. The selection was of mixed quality, ranging from a rubbery slab of rather flavorless cheese from the Pyrenees to presentable Brie and a very young, sweet Montrachet. The restaurant suggests a glass of 1983 Port with the cheese, and, if no red wine remains on the table, it is not a bad idea.

Among the desserts, the elegant but simple creme caramel seems more or less the natural choice after a hearty, lavishly sauced dish like the boeuf bourguignonne . There are other good selections, but avoid the lemon tart, which the kitchen destroys by topping it with a disagreeable mixture of chocolate goo and whipped cream.