Galileo 101, like all heavenly bodies, is ever in transit -- and has been since it first entered our solar system. When new, it offered "avant-garde Italian" food that has gradually evolved into adventurous Euro-Cal cuisine, its dishes influenced by modern French cooking with a few Pacific Rim touches. A "wine tower" in the bar (complete with "wine angels" in harnesses) subsequently became a rum tower and is now turning into a tequila tower (sans angel).

And (as Galileo said), it still moves. A few weeks before we arrived, the restaurant's long-time top toque departed and was replaced with Joe Craig, who was chef de cuisine for the previous nine months. (Earlier, he was chef de cuisine under Scott Halverson at Chive, which received four stars in this paper during that period.) The change was a surprise to us, but hey, Joe -- way to go! At two dinners (sampling some 16 dishes), I encountered no flops, no serious flaws, not even minor inconsistencies. Everything we ate was highly enjoyable, and several dishes were no less than splendid.

At the base of the soaring Harbor Club, the restaurant is handsome, offering good things to look at from every angle. You enter via a wraparound patio dining area (named "Pluto," since it's "out there") with firepit tables, some facing the convention center across the street and others next to a grassy mini-park. You pass through the "Earth Bar," which was populated on a weekend evening by young corporate types (men in Polos and Dockers, women ranging from the preppy Ts and sneaks of moon-goddess Artemis to the high-glam date duds of would-be Venuses). In the "Jupiter Dining Room," the decor is deliciously astronomical, with overhead lights shaped like half-moons, well-padded matte silver steel-backed chairs with a 1950s-style oval hole in the back (very NY-MOMA Design Collection), and an open kitchen along one side of the room. On the walls are portraits of Galileo, the inventor of the telescope. Hung on a silvery mesh curtain behind the banquettes is a framed gallery of the scientist's engravings, enlarged and richly colored-in, showing what he saw on our moon and the other planets with his 20x telescope. (The brief captions reveal why Galileo's observations so upset the papal worldview of his time.)

Dinner begins with slices of crusty rustic bread and coral-colored butter, whipped with roasted sweet chilies and sugar. The fall menu is well adapted to the season, with autumnal flavors of game, premium meats, wild mushrooms, and clean, honest sauces based on reduced meat stocks.

The soup du jour at our first visit was an earthy, comforting butternut squash puree with greens floating subsurface to offset the squash's sweetness, and, center stage, a "chorizo fritter" made of the mild Spanish (not spicy Mexican) version of the sausage. In the wild mushroom duck confit tart, a filling of moist duck shreds, dressed with a veal reduction, mingled with fresh wild mushrooms (shiitake, cremini, enoki) to spill from a buttery puff pastry shell. The combination proved a happy one, intensifying the "ducky" flavor of the fowl.

The savory veal reduction sauce makes a clever reappearance where you'd least expect it, as a glaze under large, plump, sweet scallops, cooked tender, uncommonly paired with osso buco (veal shank) shreds mixed with baby arugula and chive oil. It's a wonderfully eccentric version of surf and turf.

A wild boar tamale is loaded with finely chopped braised meat, but the meat doesn't taste very wild. "It's like regular pork," said my friend Cheryl. In fact, I doubt that it's true boar: Some years ago, while writing a meat and game cookbook, I discovered that most "boar" available commercially in the U.S. is feral pig, descended from escaped ridgeback hogs that the pioneers brought to the New World. Furthermore, most of the current supply is farm raised, so the ridgebacks have come full circle -- they're back in the pen again, presumably with some extra running-around room. (The advantage of farm-raised "boar" is that truly wild pigs and boars are prone to trichinosis and so must be cooked to death for safe eating.) Whatever the meat's actual ancestry, the dish redeems itself with a lively chile guajillo sauce and a charming little salad of fresh nopalito strips, good tomato, and onion. Thin streaks of lime-flavored cream sauce decorate the plate and are worth dipping into.

Another November evening, when the temperature had returned to steaming Indian summer, my partner and I were drawn to lighter beginnings. Scottish salmon, house-cured to tender gravlax in vanilla vodka, was the bashful star of a salad, hiding under a heap of baby arugula dotted with tiny beets in a light, balanced dressing of orange and yuzu. Rare seared ahi has become a ubiquitous starter, and Galileo, too, offers it. Here the cubes are garnished (per the menu) with "tropic fruit, avocado mousse, papaya coconut sauce." All were present and accounted for, but in miniature. We found puffs of the mousse, squiggles of the delicious sauce, plus a tiny, welcome pile of unadvertised green tobiko (flying fish roe). The fruits consisted of apple slices, baby kiwis, and -- ta-dah! -- a single fresh rambutan (a luscious, funny-looking fruit from Southeast Asia with a flavor something like a lychee) capped with its own Phyllis Diller wig of wild, red-headed peel. I'm not sure the dish is worth $15, even with a rambutan, but the flavors were fine -- we just wanted more of the garnishes.

We had to wrestle with our eco-consciousness when we saw Chilean sea bass on the menu -- our gang of four that evening (Sam, Cheryl, my partner, and I) have been trying to boycott it until stocks are fully recovered. This fish, which lives to age 40 and takes ten years to mature enough to reproduce, is still endangered, although the rampant poaching for the American market has abated somewhat. What made us ignore our consciences was its escort, a bed of "Okinawan purple potatoes." These were, as I'd hoped, Hawaiian ubi -- big, knobbly Hawaiian yams with sweet and slightly glutinous deep-purple flesh. Vacationing at a rent-a-house in Kailua, my housemates and I constantly threw them on the barbie. ("Haoles don't like those," the supermarket checker told me, but these haoles sure did.) This is the first time I've seen this much-missed veggie at a mainland restaurant, and it's still delicious -- here pureed with butter to serve as a dais for the fish. The bass was tender, moist, flaky, surrounded by a blood-orange coulis that lent a subtle note of sweetness. This is one Patagonian toothfish that did not die in vain.

The most expensive dish on the menu features a good portion of the best parts of a Maine lobster, out of the shell, with thick-skinned ravioli filled with pumpkin puree, along with thin slices of lightly cooked fennel root, and a foamy sauce based on a lobster stock reduction barely touched with powdered star anise. It's very good, but not as good as the bass. Few things are.

A venison strip loin was cooked rare to our order -- but alas, since most restaurant venison nowadays is farm-raised red deer from Australia or New Zealand, it's nothing like gamy wild venison. Chef Joe himself was disappointed with its mildness: "Compared to the deer my father used to hunt in Minnesota, it just tastes like a cow," he told me later. Nonetheless, if venison is on the menu, you'll get very tender meat, cooked to order (and please give this fatless meat its due by ordering it rare). It came with purple and green broccoli and cauliflower, all just right. The garnishes were supposed to include pomegranate-juice gnocchi, but the kitchen was all out that night. A black truffle demi-glaze sauce was AWOL, too. In any event, chef Joe is going back to the rack of elk that appeared on earlier menus. Having eaten elk (a delicious meat), and after observing the careful treatment of venison here, I think I can recommend the rack sight unseen.

Due to a printer's error, the menus before us no longer trumpeted the pedigrees of the meats, as previous menus had, but when we tasted the flat iron steak, it was clear that it was Kobe beef. It, too, came rare as ordered, surprisingly tender for this cut, accompanied by caramelized onions, roasted red potatoes, asparagus, and above all else, a zesty chipotle béarnaise sauce that tasted freshly made and (aside from the addition of chilies) true to the classic recipe.

On a return visit, the evening's special was another "difficult" cut of Kobe beef, the short rib. Served boneless in a thick square, it was topped with two rounds of fried onion, crowned by a haystack of buttery slim haricots (French green beans), all plated atop a shallow pond of chipotle barbecue sauce. The meat was tender and rich, its sauce a serious barbecue sauce and not some sweet, ketchupy thing. It was complex and spicy, clearly the product of much thought and experimentation (and a lot of ingredients). The onion rings were coated with panko and seasonings, and my only wish is that the chef would use a sweet variety like Maui, instead of plain yellow onions, to live up to the rest of the ingredients. If you're into wine, go for a big, bold red with this -- the somewhat tannic but fruity Nebbiolo on the wine list might be perfect.

If we're to believe chef/writer Anthony Bourdain, diners should approach "specials" with caution, as they may feature the remnants of some aging ingredient that the chef wants to get out of the kitchen before it spoils. (I think I'd be scared to eat at Bourdain's restaurant.) But at Galileo, the specials are worth serious consideration, because they're where a talented chef gets to exercise more creativity than on the printed menu items. At our first meal, Cheryl's heart was set on a special I wouldn't have ordered, seared ahi with soba and Thai green curry. Surprising the heck out of me, the spicy sauce tasted convincingly like genuine Thai curry, not the usual dumb farang fusion-fakery. I even liked the soba, since it was the carrier of that sauce.

My visits to Galileo 101 were slightly premature, as a dessert chef from San Francisco was hired to start work the following week, with a license to do "edgy," non-mainstream sweets. When I ate there, unfortunately, although desserts were all house-made, the choices were the easy-to-cook standards of restaurants without specialized pastry chefs: various crème brulées, gelati, chocolate lava cake, house-made s'mores. There's also a cheese plate listed among the appetizers, which might have served for dessert if we hadn't already finished our wine. Mainly, though, after both dinners we wanted to leave with the meal's great good tastes still in our mouths.

Googling Galileo 101 turned up almost no previous press coverage. I'd attribute this to the restaurant's tendency (in the language of Galileo-era astronomy) to be a "mutable star," with a shifting identity, plus its location in an obscure corner of the galaxy -- a cul-de-sac where J Street ends at a park. With no foot traffic, the restaurant is invisible except to those who already know about it. But if it's been an undiscovered star, it's now become a culinary star, one that awaits your discovery.

ABOUT THE CHEF

Galileo 101's owner is Jay Amini, in his first venture into the restaurant business. He was originally partnered with a more experienced restaurateur, whose share he eventually bought out. Asked about the restaurant's shifting identity, he says, "We are always improving." One likely improvement is in the skill of the chef.

Chef Joe Craig, aged 28, hails from Minnesota. "I've been traveling around the United States, cooking in high-end restaurants, and I landed in San Diego because of the weather," he says. "I worked under Scott Halverson at Chive for two years, and from there I came here and worked under Danny Salcedo for about eight months, until he left." Craig's interest in cooking stems from childhood. "My father was an awesome cook, and he hunted. He'd cook deer, and boar, and all sorts of wild game. As a kid, I loved to be in the kitchen. So when the time came, ten years ago, I studied cooking at the Art Institute of Minneapolis."

Joe was the one who put the game meats on the menu. "I had some awesome venison, but it didn't have much game flavor...I just took that off the menu and put back a rack of elk. But the owner didn't want us going too crazy on this menu with things like the elk, the venison, the Colorado lamb braised for 12 hours, and the Chilean sea bass with Okinawan purple sweet potato. People were reading the menu and asking, 'What is this?' So I also put some stuff on that people will recognize -- simple things for the San Diego people and conventioneers. I had to put a pasta on the menu, a really good one with shrimps, but it's still pasta. The problem is, you put a pasta on the menu and a tenderloin steak on the menu in San Diego, that's all that people order. That's not fun for a chef. But I can still buy high-end product, like Wagyu tenderloin I get from Snake River Farms for, like, $400 apiece [for about six pounds], and Kurobuta pork, and Jidori chickens. One of the good things downtown, a lot of the guys around here are buying high-end stuff now. People aren't trying to buy and sell garbage around here any-

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"Next week we're getting a new chef to do desserts. She went to school in San Francisco, and she's been cooking [professionally] for three or four years. Her main interest now is in getting into the sweets. She showed me some pretty weird stuff she makes that I think will go really well with our menu -- not mainstream stuff, it's going to be a little edgy. If we do a chocolate cake, it'll be a bizarre chocolate cake. I'm working on trying to get our pizza oven out of here, since we don't use it, and replace it with a convection oven so we can do soufflés and old-school desserts. You can't get a soufflé to blow up fast enough without a convection oven.

"People think a chef's job is glamorous somehow. But it's a crazy business, 'cause your schedule is opposite to the rest of the world. Your restaurant is your life, you have to be married to it. It's like a construction job -- it's really heavy work and stress." Nonetheless, Joe plans to stick with it. "I'm just a really good cook, and that's all that I want to do." His hope for the future? To open a neighborhood bistro of his own someday.