'Tis the season to host relatives and friends escaping from frigid far-off lands to America's Finest City. And once they check in, what do they want first? San Diego's finest food.

Consider Laurel Restaurant and Bar, which is under new management, freshly remodeled -- with valet parking at last! -- and within strolling distance of Balboa Park's "December Nights."

From street level, you can see down into the dining room through the restaurant's tall windows, an envy-inducing fishbowl effect that makes you want to join the folks savoring their dinners below. The new decor is sleek and handsome in off-white with black trims, including the gleaming white tile flooring (with black no-slip strips) of the staircase leading down to the restaurant. If you need to wait for your group to gather, there are comfortable couches to the right and a cute little bar to the left. Huge glass cylinders filled with floating roses punctuate the space, and a double-sided banquette sets off the back third of the room -- suggesting a semi-private space for large parties while moderating the sound level on both sides. A full-size mirror hangs on the back wall, decorated with scrolled wooden cut-outs, a 3-D effect. The world-music loop on the sound system slips from North African to Cuban to jazz.

The food is equally stylish. The eclectic, ever-changing seasonal menu includes flavors from France, Italy, Japan, Southeast Asia, and California, unified by a sensibility that speaks with an unmistakable Gallic accent.

We met up with the Lynnester and her friend Samurai Jim, a roving engineer whose work takes him all over the globe (poor guy). Once seated, we were immediately greeted with poached edamame (fresh soybeans) -- the signature of the Urban Kitchen restaurant group that now owns Laurel. (Urban's head honcho Tracy Borkum prefers them to bread and butter because they don't fill you up before the meal. If you must have bread, you can buy a "grilled rustic" version as a $4 side dish.)

Jim, just returned from Greece, approved of the snack plate of mixed olives, although its $8 tab seemed a tad steep. For serious appetizers, we began with a spectacular house-smoked, cured elk carpaccio. Now I'm no stranger to elk, but Laurel's has to be the best rendition yet for showcasing this meat's distinctive flavor and texture. The thin tenderloin slices were splayed on a long rectangular plate, topped with slivered almonds and young arugula. The meat was lean, deep red, and slightly sweet from a light smoking over applewood, with citrus notes from lemon oil and lavender coulis. Coarse-ground black pepper kicked it up. What does elk taste like? Not like chicken -- nor beef nor lamb, nor even much like deer venison. You just have to taste it for yourself.

Kurobata pork belly was another winner. Kurobata is the Japanese name for gently raised heirloom-breed Berkshire hogs (originally from England), the porcine equivalent of Kobe beef. Berkshires have been reintroduced to American farms, but the Japanese name has stuck. A good-sized chunk of the uncured bacon arrived in a slanted-edge white bowl, mingling with small potato pancakes and shreds of dark greens. The braised meat was lightly crisped with a sweet-tart pomegranate and pasilla chili glaze. Its streaky, succulent interior tasted like honest, old-fashioned fatty pork -- not that thankless "other white meat."

"Do you like escargots?" I'd asked Lynne as we worked out our order. "I love them!" she answered. "I loved them so much when I was a kid that, for my 12th birthday, my mom gave me a set of escargot shells -- you know the kind, in a plastic cylinder on top of a can of snails." She also loved Laurel's out-of-the-shell treatment: Tender bits of mollusk meat, cut grape-size, mingled in a porcelain cocotte with English peas, pea purée, carrots, olive oil, and shell-shaped pasta (conchiglie), a neat culinary pun. The critters themselves weren't the least bit rubbery; I can't say as much for the pasta, but by now, potato gnocchi will have taken its place. With Laurel's ever-changing menu, any glitches are temporary.

"Crispy sweetbreads" had the look and mouth-feel of chicken nuggets, deep-fried in batter and wafted with candied "pancetta dust." I loved the roasted cippolini onions and thick crème fraîche sauce on the side, although the combo struck me as an odd coupling of Maxim's de Paris with Mickey D's. Jim and Lynne, however, happily polished off the dish.

The wine selection ranges from carefree, oyster-friendly Muscadet ($28) on up to great French bottlings like Château Latour '90 ($999). We were delighted to realize that we'd serendipitously arrived on "Sinful Sunday," when a selected list of wines are half-price. These are tag-ends from the encyclopedic wine list, with only a bottle or two left of each. For us, that meant enjoying a first-course bottle of Sancerre (Loire) marked down from $60 to $30, a white so easygoing and food-friendly that both the wine-shunning guys at our table enjoyed some sips before returning to their own quaffs. For entrées, Lynne and I ordered reds by the glass; my Feraud-Brunel Côte du Rhone was all I'd hoped, her Château Robin meritage (Bordeaux-style blend) -- not quite.

"Last time I ate veal cheeks, they were too rich," said Jim, tasting our first entrée's fall-apart-tender meat, the product of long and clever braising. "These are much better." My partner said, "That's because the ones you had were probably done with cream or a heavy wine sauce." Jim agreed. Here, served with a hint of a gentle jus-based sauce, the meat was bedded among roast parsnip wedges, creamy parsnip purée, and deep-fried parsnip flakes -- a study in three modes of one root's piquant flavor. "Wow," I said, "next time I shop in Hillcrest, I gotta get me some parsnips, and celery root and rutabagas, too -- enough with plain old mashed potatoes!" If there's any justification for the existence of winter, this dish is it.

A Wagyu (a.k.a. Kobe) beef fillet entrée offered thin, plate-covering slices of superb beef, rare as ordered and salted just right. They were augmented with more snail meats. Alongside was a hunk of roasted parsnip and a heap of lean mashed potatoes, colored bright green from parsley puréed in extra-virgin olive oil. "This is the best Kobe I've tasted," said my partner. Jim was entranced, too. I was not that mad for the mash nor intrigued by the meat, which I found more tender than flavorful -- but it was still an excellent twist on steak.

About the duck confit -- do I dare voice a doubt without offending the entire French nation? Confit consists of salted and herb-rubbed cut-up poultry (usually duck or goose) cooked and stored in its own melted fat, then re-cooked in the fat to crisp the exterior. Laurel's is quite the classic version -- a large leg-thigh piece with the typical hard-crusted exterior and dryish, shreddy meat, bedded atop small green French de Puy lentils, which are spiked with chewy, smoky bacon bites, and wisps of wilted spinach. I've tasted moister confit (just once, from a French chef at Ernie's in San Francisco), but this dish is another that's slated to change next week: The confit will play a supporting role in a cassoulet (French white bean stew), which to my palate is the best possible use for it. (All the seafood dishes are changing to winter species, too, so I won't bother talking about our selections, now off-menu.)

We gobbled through most of the desserts, enjoying them all. The smash hit was part of a "Citrus X 4" taster assortment. A buttermilk panna cotta topped with a subtle orange gelée, resembling haute-cuisine Jell-O, tasted like a Creamsicle, according to the Lynnester. We revisited it until the last scrap was gone. The other citrus offerings included a fluffy warm lemon pudding (so light it was barely there), a grapefruit sorbet, and a compote of mixed citrus, heavy on the grapefruit.

Samurai Jim picked a "chocolate tasting" that included a demitasse of old-fashioned hot chocolate topped by a mini marshmallow (his top pick), a square of molten chocolate cake, and a scoop of white chocolate ice cream (which melted away neglected). A butterscotch pot de crème consisted of white chocolate pudding flavored all through with butterscotch, rich and distinctive. You really have to be a butterscotch fan, but it grew on us. (Literally -- I'm sure it added an inch to my hips.) Goat-cheese cheesecake with tart pomegranate seeds and lemon thyme was ethereal and not the least goaty, a square of fluff with tangy garnishes. Another plus for the dessert course is the choice of five different French-press coffees, each grown in a different area, including a good decaf mocha java. But if you still have some wine left, you can pretend you're in Burgundy and consider the cheese sampler before or instead of the sweets.

Good food, good wine, good people -- this a good place to show off San Diego to those outlander in-laws. And after they're gone, I'll be back at Laurel.

ABOUT THE CHEF

Wine Sellar & Brasserie owner Gary Parker inherited Laurel when chef Douglas Organ, his business partner in both restaurants, pulled up stakes and left for Boston. Too busy with the Brasserie and fed up by the near-endless high-rise construction mess on Fifth Avenue, Parker put Laurel up for sale last spring. Restaurateur Tracy Borkum, owner of Chive, Kensington Grill, and Urban Kitchen Catering, reputedly paid a million for it, and plenty more to renovate it. Now the construction is gone, renovations are done, and Laurel looks like -- a million bucks.

Under the overall aegis of Urban Kitchen's Provence-born executive chef Fabrice Poigin (previously at Bertrand at Mr. A's), chef Amy DiBiase heads Laurel's kitchen.

"I've always worked in restaurants," she says. "I grew up in an Italian family, so food was always around. My grandfather owned a little clam shack in Maine, and on my mom's side, my mom and my aunts were all general managers at restaurants. So I was a little restaurant rat, growing up. I was in the back of the kitchen hanging out with my mom, I'd get stuck doing little jobs, like, I'd be over with the guys portioning meats or bagging things for them, or doing silverware, or helping my mom with her paperwork. I remember counting [cash register] drawers with my mom when I was 15 years old. It was a really good background in the reality of restaurant work.... A lot of people come out of culinary school, never working in a restaurant, and they're just -- sometimes they've spent all that money on school, and when they start working, they just can't handle it.

"Right out of high school I went to Johnson and Wales Culinary School in Rhode Island. Jason Schaefer [Laurel's former executive chef] came from there, too. Right after I graduated I was researching San Diego. (My parents have been living in North County for about 12 years now.) I was going to go to the Hyatt in La Jolla, but I read about this restaurant and about Douglas Organ's reputation, and I came out here to try and get a job at Laurel. And I got here a month after Doug left. It's funny, I moved here from Providence when he moved to Boston. Jason had just gotten promoted, and he hired me.

"I've been at Laurel for four years. I worked my way up, starting as a line cook. I worked under Jason and then under Mary Jo Testa. When she left, I was given the opportunity to be chef de cuisine. I was running the kitchen for a little over a year by myself.

"The way Fabrice and I work together is, he'll have his ideas and I'll have my ideas, and then we'll have meetings together and try to integrate both our ideas, coming up with the dishes together. Most of the dishes, it's both of us."

I asked who made the desserts. "We don't have a pastry chef. I've got two girls here, 19 and 20, right out of school. One of them, it's her first job out of culinary school, the other was a pastry chef in Vegas. They work with Fabrice -- he hands them the ideas, and they try to work through it."

"We're working to get the menu as solid as possible.... We're going to bring back the tapas sampler; we're working on that now. For the winter fish, we're going to have Arctic char and Atlantic cod from Bar Harbor, Maine. We're putting in a cassoulet, a venison chop instead of the lamb, and a new presentation for the beef fillet. I just hope that the local people understand and like what we're trying to do."