A Wine Country find

Every town should have a perfect little restaurant like Santa Rosa’s Café Saint Rose. It’s the kind of place that, if you were traveling here from afar and you just happened to stumble across it, you’d take a picture and later, back home, showing friends scenes from your visit to the Wine Country, you’d say, “This was our favorite place of all.”

A photo of the outside of the restaurant would show a robin’s egg blue couch with orange pillows under an awning hung with multicolored lights, inviting customers to relax streetside.

Inside, 10 small tables are closely packed. As you sit down and look around, details start to reveal themselves. The curvaceous chandelier is a relic of another age. The light switch cover is a piece of tin cut and stamped into the shape of a hand. A dozen white roses sit in a vase in front of black drapery. In case you’re in a mood to read, there are books like “501 Must-See Movies” and a raft of cookbooks.

The photo of a small girl chasing pigeons in St. Mark’s Plaza in Venice rings a bell as you realize that the owner and chef’s name is Mark (Malicki) and the restaurant is Saint Rose. The tables are nicely set with linens, but nothing’s on them except tea lights. Malicki doesn’t present you with salt and pepper with which to unbalance his carefully prepared treasure plates.

This is not a typical restaurant with a long list of dishes to choose from. Malicki puts together a couple of appetizers and a couple of entrees and you get to choose one of each. There may be oysters beforehand, and a single dessert. For the oysters, appetizer, entrée and dessert, you pay $42 — or whatever the going rate is that night, depending on what’s on the menu. This style of cooking requires that the patron trust the chef’s abilities. And Malicki’s abilities are considerable.

Malicki has been around Sonoma County for about 20 years, so a lot of people may remember him as the chef at the erstwhile Truffles in Sebastopol. If anyone had the good fortune of dining with the Sterling family at Iron Horse Vineyards, Malicki was the family’s and winery’s chef for a number of years. But Café Saint Rose really gives him a chance to shine for all of us.

The wine list is a thing of beauty: very eclectic, very knowledgeable and extensive for such a small restaurant. Fifty-five wines, 12 by the glass, are featured. A $20 corkage fee twists your arm to buy from the wine list, but that’s no hardship. A rich, red 2003 Aglianico from Campania, Italy, is $46. A 2005 Alsatian white is $30. Sauvignon blancs and chenin blancs from the Loire Valley and Chablis are from the cooler climates of France, while a 2004 Chateauneuf-du-Pape, 2004 Gigondas and 2002 Cote Rotie hail from the warm Rhone Valley. Many other interesting wines fill out this list. The wine glasses, by the way, are stemless. There’s something satisfyingly nonchalant about that here in Wine Country, where wine etiquette is sometimes strictly enforced.

Service is carried out efficiently and carefully by two pleasant young women. A bonus is movie nights on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when the menu is a prix fixe $30 and films are as eclectic as the wines. During February, the movies were romances.

Malicki’s cooking is not elaborate, but it is fancy, in the sense that he chooses the best ingredients he can find — “fancy” being a food purveyor’s term for the highest quality. His menu on a recent night included the following offerings:

Oysters on the Half Shell. Five Steamboat oysters were snapping fresh, served cold on ice on a beautiful lotus blossom-shaped plate along with lemon wedges and mignonette dipping sauce. Although the waitress said they were from British Columbia, Steamboats are actually from Steamboat Island, located at the mouth of Totten Inlet in Puget Sound, Wash. These were the Japanese species, Crassostrea gigas, brought here when the native Olympia oysters were fished out or destroyed by papermill waste in the first half of the 20th century. These oysters are at their peak of quality now — plump and full of sweet glycogen.

One of the two appetizers offered (you choose one) was Wild Gulf Shrimp Baked in Parchment. Big, pink, wild-caught shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico set the standard for shrimp quality, especially when they are never frozen. These four shrimp were split open length-wise, dusted with smoky paprika and baked in parchment. They’re like miniature lobster tails, and you can easily pull the meat from the shells with your fork.

The other choice in appetizers was Grilled Chorizo with Braised Kale, although, given the Portuguese propensity for braised kale, the sausage might better be called “chourico,” the Portuguese word, rather than the Spanish “chorizo.” Three deliciously grilled pieces of split sausage and a mound of steaming kale were joined by a poached “farm egg.” A slice of toasted French bread touched with butter and garlic added to the plate.

The entrees included Fried Little Birds With Lavender Honey and Sea Salt. Having heard stories about the French penchant for eating actual little wild birds — like sparrows — I was glad to find that the birds were two quail cut into pieces, pan fried, and set on a mess of watercress sprigs given a tangy vinaigrette and sprinkled with a handful of pine nuts with a slight resinous flavor, indicating their freshness.

The other entrée on the menu was a seared piece of Tofino Inlet Salmon. Tofino Inlet is on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, in a resort area known for its pristine waters. The salmon was perfectly done — flaky, sweet — and came with sautéed broccoli rabe and potatoes that were parboiled, cut into chunks then browned in lots of butter. This is cooking with a modern sensibility: no heavy sauces, no baroque elaborations, just good food well cooked.

The dessert was Strawberry-Blood Orange Heart-Tarts. Two heart-shaped puffs of airy pastry shells were cut in half and filled with sliced strawberries, blood orange segments and whipped cream. Romantic and dreamy.

To sum up: A quirky and unlikely place to find some of the best cooking in town — but there it is.

Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for A&E. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.