French Garden aptly named

<p><i><b>Editor's note: </b>Chef Stephane Roy no longer works at the French Garden Restaurant.</i></p><p>When Dan Smith and Joan Marler bought their 30-acre farm west of Sebastopol more than 20 years ago, he ran a construction company and she taught dance and ancient mythology. They always had a garden and loved growing their own food.</p><p>At about the time they bought their farm, Smith created the Master Builder software program, which became, over the next two decades, the most popular software for small- and medium-sized contractors. It was subsequently purchased by Intuit, which gave him the resources to start farming organically.</p><p>Smith built his own barn, replete with housing for bats and barn owls and bluebirds. He refurbished a series of old tractors and built himself a precision seeder to sow vegetables. He plans to expand the year-round farming operation to 20 acres.</p><p>And then Sebastopol's Bistro Bella Vita, the gloriously upscale reincarnation of funky Marty's Top of the Hill, went belly up and Smith bought it. He renamed it The French Garden and his daughter, Sorrel Smith, an artist living in Paris, came over to do some of the excellent artwork that graces the restaurant.</p><p>The floors are covered with floral-patterned rugs, the dining room is now separated from the bar and brasserie area by glass panels and doors, and a wine rack capable of holding more than 600 bottles fills the north wall.</p><p>Chef Stephane Roy is a native of La Rochelle in the Department of Charente-Maritime on the west coast of France, a region noted for its seafood. After stints at several restaurants in his home country, Roy worked in San Francisco and Mill Valley before becoming chef at Le Theatre, Smith and Marler's previous restaurant in Berkeley. That place closed July 30 in order for them to devote themselves to The French Garden.</p><p>Customers get to partake of the fulfillment of Smith's dream of being a farmer. As much as possible, the vegetables are seasonal, local, just-harvested and organic. They are often, in fact, the stars of the plates, able to upstage the meat or fish portion of the entrees.</p><p>When the fruits are in season, they include sweet and pie cherries, red and black currants, apples, peaches, plums, prune plums and pears - plus the honey his bees make from the blossoms. It is Smith's intention to have his farm supply just about all the produce for the restaurant.</p><p>The restaurant is determinedly French. The wine list consists mainly of French wines, although there are several pages of local wines, too. Each month the list features a different winery. The current focus is on Trecini Cellars, which makes Dry Creek Valley and Russian River wines.</p><p>Among the many French bottles are the 2001 Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe Grenache Blanc for $89, a 2004 Bourgueil for $35, and a 2004 Domaine Gilles Barges Cote Rotie for $82. Strangely, the wine list has it "Domaine de Vieux Télégraphe" and "Cote de Rotie." The French Garden is no place for incorrect French, especially as the French are noted for jealously guarding their language.</p><p>Throughout the dinner, a salient quality of Chef Roy's cooking was his very light hand with salt. Many restaurants oversalt their food because they think diners prefer it, but I don't use much salt in my cooking at home and appreciate it when chefs show similar restraint. Once you get used to little or no salt in your food, the ability to taste it seems to shoot way up.</p><p>One example was the creamy Red Bell Pepper Soup ($6 **1/2) garnished with house-made crème fraiche, chives and thin slivers of raw red sweet pepper. The absence of salt made the sweet pepper flavor stand out. Similarly, the warm sliced baguette served before the meal was low-salt and was accompanied by sweet (unsalted) butter.</p><p>On the plate, the portions are very generous. Although the trend today is toward smaller servings, it's better to satisfy a large, hungry person and have a slender person leave food on the plate than to satisfy the slender person but leave the big eater hungry.</p><p>The presentations are very pretty. The prettiest was the Smoked Salmon appetizer ($10 ***). Three slices of salmon are rolled into cylinders and stand upright on a series of small, thin buckwheat blini. Each is topped with a dab of crème fraiche. Sliced d'Anjou pear accents the plate, along with a salad of greens given too much French dressing.</p><p>Service was professional and swift, even when the room was nearly full - and the room is large.</p><p>Soft, lovely greens from Smith's farm formed the underpinnings of the Beet Salad ($8 ***). Red and golden beet sticks glistened among the lightly dressed lettuces and endives, along with walnut halves, finely minced tomato, thin shavings of red onion, calendula petals, and a few deep purple violas.</p><p>A Puff Pastry with Lobster ($12 **1/2) consisted of a soggy piece of puff pastry halved and laden with lobster claw and tail meat and sautéed chanterelle mushrooms in an armoricaine sauce. Some say the sauce is named after the old name for Brittany, Armorique, and others believe it's a corruption of "American." (James Joyce punned on this dispute in "Finnegan's Wake.") It's made with butter and olive oil, leeks, onions, shallots, garlic, tomatoes and herbs and is delicious.</p><p>The Pan-Seared Scallops ($10 **) definitely had too much going on. The scallops were seared with a high flame that turned some of their edges hard and black, but the real problem was the clash between the saffron sauce and the port reduction sauce that swirled around a mound of mushy leeks and slices of grilled pear. "Liberté, Egalité, Simplicité" - isn't that the French motto?</p><p>The entrees got the food back on track. Eight slices of Duck Breast ($23 ***) were served in a fig sauce with red cabbage. Here the vegetables - little potatoes, carrots, beets, filet beans and tomato - really shone. A rich, dark gray shallot and bone marrow sauce enlivened a fine grilled New York Steak ($26 ***). Bits of marrow fat topped the meat and great french fries and garden veggies helped out. Three large chunks of snowy white, pan-roasted Alaskan Halibut ($19 ***) in a lobster sauce were a delight.</p><p>The savory persimmon-carrot flan that accompanied the fish might have been better if warm rather than cold. Battered and deep-fried zucchini slices were a treat, and there were - thankfully - more of the carrots, beets and filet beans.</p><p>Dinner finished with a magnificent Fraicheur les Citron aux Fruit Rouge ($7 ***1/2), a wedge of lemon mousse above a thin layer of jellied raspberry coulis topped with whipped cream decorated with an unopened bud of the "Cecile Brunner" rose and a mint sprig, and sitting in a pool of vanilla cream studded with jewel-like red raspberries. A wow of a dessert, and just one of 10 on the menu.</p><p>To sum up: A welcome showcase for farm-fresh, organic vegetables handled by a real French chef.</p>