Cavaillon is likely to become your favorite neighborhood French restaurant, no matter how far you live from its neighborhood. It's located in a new upscale suburb in the former wilds southwest of Rancho Bernardo and northeast of Del Mar, with the usual component of chain stores and chain restaurants in homogenized strip malls. But when you step through Cavaillon's door, you're transported to the mythic small-town heart of France, where housewives flirt with their butchers to get the best piece of meat and sniff and thump on every melon at the farmstand. The comfortable, medium-small restaurant could even be a bistro in the Provençale market-village of Cavaillon -- hometown of chef-owner Philippe Verpiand, who was the sous-chef at La Jolla's renowned Tapenade for seven years before striking out on his own.

The decor is pure Gallic nostalgia for preindustrial days: Polished tables of dark wood are set with heavy white linen napkins and brass chargers but no tablecloths. The wooden chairs are comfortable during a long meal. Art Nouveau light sconces, shaped like ecru calla lilies with gracefully curved stems, alternate on the walls with sepia photographs and vintage black-and-white postcards portraying the town of Cavaillon at the turn of the last century.

The menu offers several options for how you want to play dinner. You can enjoy a delicious, modestly priced meal at the Monday night prix fixe dinner ($32 for three courses). You can have a slightly more expensive meal from the regular menu, especially if you shut your ears to the siren songs of the evening's specials. (On the other hand, you're not going to live forever.) Or you can rush to the restaurant before March 15 to take advantage of an outpouring of black truffles fresh from Provence -- a menu available à la carte or as a full tasting dinner for $79.

Moi? I did it all, you-all. That's (heh heh) my job.

The Lynnester's charming mom, Mary Ann, had just arrived to escape the frigid winter in northern Michigan. Like daughter, like mother -- Mary Ann had already done her research and singled out Cavaillon as a destination, even if it meant driving north with Samurai Jim a few hours after her plane landed.

We thought we were coming for the Monday night prix fixe. But then we discovered the "Black Truffle Celebration" in a one-page menu inset. We mixed and matched two prix fixe dinners with à la carte choices from the regular menu and the truffle dishes. I returned a few nights later, determined to try more of the regular menu's dishes -- but succumbed again (partly) to the temptations of truffles and specials.

Whatever you choose, your life will be a happier one if you start with a mini-appetizer of panisse ($5), a specialty of Provence. It's misleadingly described as "chickpea cakes," but don't think falafel -- think deep-fried satin. What you get are four puffy, golden-brown rectangles (like steak fries), crisp outside, light and soft inside -- essentially custard with fine-milled garbanzo flour as a binder. This proves to be a superb, sugarless substitute for the toasted marshmallows of childhood campfires, rivaling deep-fried tofu in texture. The flavor is subtle and clean, and the thick aoili dip does not stint on garlic. (The myth is that Provençale girls never get mosquito bites because their flesh is so imbued with garlic. Did the story originally feature Dracula instead of aedes?)

Cavaillon is not the sort of restaurant where they stick you with the "cheap" dishes on the Monday prix fixe menu. Here, the choices are every bit as tasty as the more expensive entrées, with most drawn from the regular menu. The soup du jour was a creamy potato-leek purée sprinkled with finely minced chives. It was rich, subtle, comforting, a caress to the soul. Tartiflette, arriving in a small baking dish, was a gooey gratin of potatoes with leeks, bacon, and mild melted Roucoulons cheese. Jim loved it, as did the rest of us, but all three women found it rich for a starter. "I'd prefer this as a side dish with an entrée," said svelte Mary Ann.

Coq au vin consisted of two plump thighs robed in a thick, soul-soothing reduced-wine sauce sweetened by cooked-down carrots and onions. You'd never guess that peasants invented this dish to wring the last bit of nutrition from retired laying hens and bruised roosters beaten on the alpha-male battlefield. The hens at our table gossiped about Julia Child. "Her recipe for coq au vin isn't nearly this good," Mary Ann said. "Coming to think of it," I added, "the coq au vin I ate in Burgundy wasn't this good either." "Are you actually saying this is the best coq au vin you've ever eaten?" asked Jim. Yes, it was.

Slow-braised salmon proved a prodigy, too, the flavorful fish, clearly wild catch, so gently cooked that it was as velvety through the narrow strip as it was in the thicker part. It came with a lighthearted mixture of diced apples, leeks, and rutabaga.

From the truffle menu I zeroed in on duck foie gras "au torchon." The torchon treatment (wrapping, slow-poaching, and then chilling) creates a deluxe cousin to pâté, with a texture like semifirm butter. The generous cylinder included plenty of delicious black truffle shavings running through the center. It came with a madeleine-shaped oval of black Mission fig mousse and toasted brioche slices to spread the manna on. The ethereal mousse is only slightly sweet, an elegant alternative to the usual syrupy fruit explosions.

Maine diver scallops are an entrée on the truffle menu, but the staff graciously accommodated my plea to have a half-portion served as an appetizer. The interiors of the tremblingly supple scallops were the nacreous tint of a pink pearl. They were scattered with a king's ransom of coins of black truffle, all embedded in an asparagus risotto so rich with Italian Parmesan that it might be difficult to do it justice were it a main course.

At the return dinner, I spotted somebody at another table with a truffled artichoke risotto, and it sidetracked my resolve to start with escargots or onion soup. The dish arrives in a small covered glass jar, and the waiter instructs you to bend close and shroud your face with your napkin when you open it, deeply inhaling the initial aroma. This brings a blast of concentrated truffle scent (the earthy essence the Japanese call umami). The rest of the risotto is fascinating, too. On top is a black layer of thin truffle coins, mingling with the red of tomatoes. Below comes a white heap of rice, diced artichoke hearts, and grated Parmesan. At bottom is a creamy coral liquid -- the juices of all the other ingredients mingling with mascarpone cheese.

The grand poo-bah of the truffle menu is beef tenderloin Rossini. This is one of the great old haute cuisine dishes that you rarely see anymore. Who could resist? (Not I.) Arriving rare as ordered, the top-class beef was as tender as a baby's butt, capped with chunks of foie gras and disks of truffle, snuggling up joyfully to more truffles in the port wine sauce. Alongside came soft puréed spinach and a crisp domino of porcini polenta.

At the return visit, the evening's soup was a lobster bisque with a distinctive personality. Made in the style of Breton lobstermen (or their wives), its cream component is modest, and its flavor and aroma are pure sea life. (If you should luck into this bisque, you might want to try a really dry white to drink with it -- perhaps a French Chablis or a New Zealand sauvignon blanc -- to match its relative leanness.)

The duck confit from the regular, everyday menu is no quotidian quacker. In fact, it's spectacular -- which is how it's supposed to be but seldom is. For confit, duck legs are slowly braised in the duck's own fat, then rapidly fried in the same fat to crisp the skin. If you've ever tasted a dried-out duck confit and wondered why those frogs swear by the stuff, you'll finally learn the answer. For one thing, Cavaillon buys Moulardes -- the foie gras duck, a busty, plump, and well-fatted species created by crossing the hefty Pekin and the flavorful Muscovy breeds. (At my visit, the menu misspelled it as Mallard, which is a smaller, much leaner wild duck; the typo should be corrected by now.) The confit arrives with skin as light and crackly as the best Peking duck, over rich, fall-apart meat set atop a port wine demiglaze, and comes with savoy cabbage mixed with diced carrots and a dollop of creamy butternut squash purée.

The first evening's entrée special was Australian barramundi (in the sea bass family). I'd recently chawed on the same species, overcooked, at Bondi in the Gaslamp (more about that next week). Here, it was done swiftly and properly, grilled on the skin (making it crisp and easy to slip off) and accompanied by a très provençale sauce of tomatoes, fennel, and French black olives. Butternut squash again added sweetness to the plate.

The second dinner's irresistible special offered two cuts of free-range Brandt Farms veal with morel mushrooms. Rosy noisettes of veal tenderloin (the prettier sister) were quickly grilled and paired with a small hunk of slow-braised flat iron (shoulder) -- two very different routes to tender meat. Unlike its pallid formula-fed cousins, the veal tasted as if the calf had enjoyed its short life -- here a sip of milk from mom, there a nice bite of grass (hence the reddish color). The morels, wild mushrooms with a delightful crenellated texture, embodied a flavor so deep and rich it rivals that of truffles. Spinach and butternut squash purée reappeared on the side. (This is, after all, a bistro, not some exorbitant shrine of cuisine.)

Desserts range from simple to perhaps overelaborate, a.k.a. frou-frou. Profiteroles were fascinating, baked crisp and firm rather than the more typical soft and fluffy rendition. They were stuffed with pistachio ice cream and whole pistachios and drizzled all over with bittersweet chocolate syrup. It's a chocoholic's dream dessert. Samurai Jim is a chocoholic, ergo.... Cheesecake parfait arrived in a large milk glass. Topped with diced pineapple and passion fruit, it held more cream flavor than cheese flavor, so Lynne and I (cheesecake-aholics) were disappointed.

Tangerine confit presents a whole clementine poached and steeped in syrup until even the peel is edible. It's intense. Next to it is a madeleine that begs to be dipped in the syrup. Further down the long rectangular plate is a pouf of thick, sweet chocolate ganache and then a tangerine sorbet. The chocolate added a sweetness that many will welcome, but the austere sorbet (which I loved) was the smart skinny kid bullied by its platemates. A warm chocolate tart is something like a small soufflé but with a dense, fudgy interior instead of an airy one. It comes with a scoop of bashful coconut ice cream (not as blatantly coconutty as I prefer) over a mound of diced tropical fruit with a passion fruit coulis. If you still have wine and appetite, you can choose a cheese plate of three fine French fromages, which includes nothing truly stinky or scary.

At long last the starving

masses of Scripps Ranch, Sabre Springs, and Rancho Peñasquitos have a serious nearby alternative to chains, pubs, and mom'n'pops. But even downtowners have a new destination to savor. As the Michelin Guide says of its two-star (out of three possible) recommended restaurants, Cavaillon is "worth a detour."

ABOUT THE CHEF

"My father used to own a butcher shop in France, and I was going to do that, but he told me, 'No, do something else, because it's gonna be really rough in 20 years.' And he was right. So I decided to be a cook, because since I was young, I was always cooking and baking," says Philippe Verpiand.

"I began cooking when I was 16, and I went to a culinary school in France for two years. When I was 18 and graduated, I began to work all around the country. I tried to do one year each in different restaurants, in all the regions of France. I worked in a lot of restaurants and resorts rated two stars in the Michelin Guide -- each year for ten years I worked in a different one. Some of them were Café de Paris in Biarritz, and La Poularde near Lyons, next door to Troisgros [three-star destination], Le Bateau D'Ivre in the Alps. In the French Riviera, I worked in a two-star hotel where Alain Ducasse began his career.

"But I was tired of paying a lot of income tax in France. One of my friends, Patrick Ponsaty [currently of Bernard O's in Rancho Bernardo], used to work for Jean-Michel Diot in New York, and he connected me with Jean-Michel, who was opening a restaurant in San Diego, Tapenade. It worked out, and I stayed seven and a half years at Tapenade before I decided to open my own place. I am 36 years old right now, and it was time.

"I don't know exactly why I picked Santaluz; when I came and looked at this space, there was nothing here -- but it's a growing area, and in three, four months they're going to open a highway, and we're going to be connected to Crosby Ranch, and Rancho Bernardo will be about ten minutes away. In this area there is no good restaurant around, and people want one. So I hope I will succeed. The first few months were very slow, but now more people are coming and we are just beginning to do well."