When I ate at Molly’s during June “Restaurant Week,” the place should have been at least as packed as Ruth’s Chris was the previous night. The food was vastly better, the wine list more interesting and sophisticated, with smarter choices for less money. Yet barely half the tables were occupied, all (judging from overheard conversations) by hard-core foodies and winies (not “winos,” nor a “nation of whiners” plunging into mental recession; from what I heard, everyone sounded pretty bright). So, just like the last time I reviewed Molly’s, it’s time to sound the trumpets in another wake-up call: Molly’s may be a restaurant in a hotel, but it’s a chef’s restaurant first. Don’t let the conventioneers keep it for themselves. Yes, it’s a bit pricey, but no more so than is the norm in the Gaslamp, and you get a much better payoff in food quality, craftsmanship, and professional service — not to mention free parking.

Unlike most chains, the Marriott’s local restaurants (another is Arterra in Del Mar, and another Roy’s is about to open here on Harbor Drive) put the chefs and not the suits in charge of the food. (You can thank a food-forward manager named Steve Pagano, who ran the Del Mar location and was promoted to a higher slot in this one.) In fact, the Marriott is hip enough that instead of advancing some corporate drone, they appointed Molly’s distinguished sommelier, Lisa Redwine, as the restaurant’s general manager. (Only Amy Winehouse could beat that for an apt sommelier name, but Lisa was a more appropriate person for the job.) Lisa left a few weeks ago for the Shores — you can still read her legacy in the smart wine list — and now chef Timothy Au is in charge. This mode of operation is incredibly rare at American hotel chains. You may find it at a boutique chain like the Kimpton’s or at a Euro-style luxury chain like the Ritz Carlton, but — wow — at a middle-class Marriott, where even I have occasionally stayed? Obviously, somebody at the top understands the distinction between the important pleasures versus the class-based snobberies.

Chef Brian Sinnott put Molly’s on the map. After he moved on to 1500 Ocean nine months ago, the equally experienced chef Timothy Au took the helm. But the restaurant seemed to lose some of its local cachet, as if foodies didn’t quite trust another chef to please them as much. If there were any initial problems with the transition, however, they’re no longer evident. Everything we ate was totally “au-some.”

Molly’s menu is seasonal and local, changing constantly. (The menu posted on the website is more an overall sample than a precise depiction of what’s coming from the kitchen in a particular week.) The generous Restaurant Week menu covered many of the dishes on that week’s seasonal à la carte menu (although not the most expensive choices). But tempted beyond endurance, my posse and I strayed to the regular menu, to start with a round of oysters on the half shell. That told us plenty about the new chef. The species were kumamoto and hama hama, which are as good as oysters get. They arrived with an array of garnishes: lemon wedges, semi-hot Hungarian paprika, and an unconventional mignonette consisting of chopped shallots and herbs with only the barest touch of vinegar. As someone who learned to love oysters in New Orleans (land of do-it-yourself oyster sauces), I was overjoyed to avoid the vinegar OD of standard mignonettes. Sam and Mary Jo drank the grit-free juices from the shells as eagerly as I did.

There were three choices for every course, and coincidentally we were a threesome. (Sometimes life gives you a little break.) A terrine of house-cured, cold-smoked salmon and house-made Boursin cheese featured the rich, profound flavors of thin slices of cold-smoked lox layered with creamy cheese. Perfectly complementing the terrine was a salad of spring greens dotted with cubes of smoky bacon and capers with a preserved-lemon vinaigrette that tasted faintly like anchovy (not from the fish, it turned out, but from the spicing of the lemon).

Citrus and herb-cured ahi offered another intense raw fish, an essence of ahi, accompanied by lolla rosso (a hearty Italian red lettuce) with pancetta and sweet red onion slices in a cardamom-spiked lime-juice dressing. The flavors produced the whole-body satisfaction of a hot bath on a cool night or a Caribbean swim on a hot day.

Caramelized local peach made the most of the season: Instead of boring old melon with prosciutto, here was fresh, local stone-fruit with pancetta, pine nuts, aged balsamic, and a single, pristine glazed leaf of Genovese basil for deep-dark greenness flashed with sweetness. This, too, combined physical impact with an intellectual one: What a smart new combination of tastes!

We’d gone happily for the “wine pairings” offered with the menu, and for the first courses Ms. Redwine chose an interesting dry Riesling from Kim Crawford (Marlborough, NZ). I’m not normally a great Riesling fan, but this one was just right.

Our main courses covered sea, air, and land. Diver scallops, ultra tender in a warm coriander vinaigrette, benefited from accompaniments of shaved artichoke, braised fennel, with its subtle licorice flavor, and potato purée discreetly touched with orange and more fennel.

Roasted prime-grade tri-tip beef offered thin, rare slices bathed in a subtle sauce (egg-yolk Gribiche vinaigrette mellowed with a red wine–veal demiglace) with huge, grilled slices of heirloom tomatoes and pancetta-wrapped romaine, also grilled (but not quite enough — Piatti in La Jolla grills the lettuce longer and hotter, and it comes out better). After the prime filets at Ruth’s Chris and Cowboy Star, how did this beef stack up? It was tougher — tri-tip is not a melt-in-your-mouth “gourmet” cut, it’s the stuff (eaten with pinquito beans) of the famed Santa Maria annual community barbecue. But after its careful treatment, it gave an illusion of tenderness. The flavor was truly beefy, and the sauce civilized it and made it more interesting than mere meat.

Marinated, grilled natural chicken breast with oregano and olive jus came with a mound of roasted corn, red peppers, and Israeli couscous. It was really good for chicken breast — not dry — but it was still breast. Perhaps someday scientists will find a way to turn this meat into organic transplant material for the glamour gals of Del Mar. Most weeks, duck is on the menu instead. Given the choice, go with the quacker. “Who’s better than a Chinaman at roasting duck?” says chef Tim Au.

The tasting wines for the scallops and chicken came as a pair: a Kim Crawford Chardonnay and a Pinot Noir from the same maker and region. They were fine, but both were blown away by the red that accompanied the beef, a Matt Block blend (Stellenbosch, South Africa) combining Merlot, Shiraz, Cabernet, and Petit Verdot. The overall flavor was that of a carefree, food-friendly Rhone with an undertone of darker Bordeaux flavors. The older I get, the less I cotton to the egotistical posturings of California Cabs (give me Bordeaux or give me plonk!) and the more I enjoy the friendly charm of grapes from the Rhône, wherever they’re grown — especially this area of South Africa, where they seem to have settled in comfortably.

The hits just kept on coming, although by dessert I found it harder to concentrate on yet more food, more wine. (Those penetrating appetizer flavors with their somatic impacts had taken a toll on my palate. How much pleasure can a body and mind absorb at one meal?) The hotel pastry chef, Rudy Wieder, devises desserts, following the general guidelines of Tim Au — who likes light desserts as much as I do.

Carlsbad strawberry shortcake with minted chantilly cream was airy, accompanied by an Inniskillin Cabernet Franc ice wine from Canada. Bananas Foster, prepared and flamed tableside by our waiter the old-timey way, was luscious with vanilla ice cream to lighten it up, and on the side, Inniskillin Vidal Icewine (like its kinfolk, from the Niagara area). The decaf espresso was perfect.

The underlying question about Molly’s is: Now that chef Brian Sinott has moved on, is it still worth eating there, in the territory of tourists and conventioneers? Well — unlike the fleshpots of the nearby Gaslamp, you get hassle-free, money-free parking. And a very pretty, quiet, civilized place to eat in. And truly fine food and a wine list that won’t bankrupt you for plonk but gives you interesting choices for whatever you can pay. All this, and what we ate was from a Restaurant Week menu — not the prime stuff, but the least-costly dishes for the kitchen to produce. And we were still thrilled. Tim Au is not a carbon copy of Sinnott, but he’s fully as good on his own, and miles ahead of the empty glitz that lies just to the north. Whoever this Molly is, she deserves a big kiss.

ABOUT THE CHEF

Timothy Au (preferably pronounced “Ow,” although he says “Aw” is okay) has been a chef for 25 years. His interest in food started early: At age six, he tried to teach the babysitter how to make steamed rice. He attended cooking school in Milwaukee and simultaneously suffered a rigorous French-style apprenticeship at a leading restaurant there. Then he worked in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Hawaii under some of the country’s most celebrated chefs, including Susan Feniger, Mary Sue Milliken, Jeremiah Tower, and Bradley Ogden, including four years as chef de cuisine under Jeff Jackson at the esteemed A.R. Valentien at the Lodge at Torrey Pines, before moving on to Connecticut as executive chef at a luxury resort. Superstar chef Bradley Ogden brought him back here, recruiting him for the job at Molly’s. If you’d like to read his full résumé in detail, you’ll find it on Molly’s website.

“My mom cooked a lot of canned and frozen and convenience food. With both parents working and having four boys, both my parents cooked. My father cooked in the Chinese style, and my mother cooked in the convenient Midwestern ’50s style. I preferred — don’t tell my mom — my father’s cooking. His father was a Chinese missionary who traveled all around China with his wife, my grandmother, so the food they cooked wasn’t regional, it was basically the whole of China. It was like an American style of Chinese, homogenized, but they started with the Mandarin region — light, not spicy.

“Back when I started cooking in the ’80s, being a chef wasn’t a glamorous profession. I grew up kind of a bad kid. I wasn’t thought to be the brightest child on the block. And growing up in Wisconsin back then, it was very…Caucasian. The south side of Milwaukee was very Germanic and Polish, and I was kind of beaten down by teachers and classmates alike.… So the reason I started cooking was that I’d always have a job, I’d never go hungry, and I thought I was not intelligent enough to do anything else.

“In high school I went to two different schools, the School of the Arts and the Broadcast Journalism School, because I wanted to be a disc jockey. But I’m not a person who can live a solitary lifestyle as a disc jockey, so I decided to do something I enjoyed, which was cooking.

“I didn’t realize at first what upscale European food was about — I thought it was really cool, really interesting. As I was growing up, we’d go to some Polish- and German- and Serbian-style restaurants. There wasn’t anything much more in Milwaukee, and we didn’t have a lot of money to eat out. But later on in life I realized that the food I was eating [during my apprenticeship] was part of each country’s history and the way of life there. You could tell the weather by the way they cook. All the different foods have a reason why they’re the way they are. No, I haven’t traveled. I’ve pretty much filled my life with work…. I waited a long time before I became a sous-chef because I wanted to be the best in the kitchen.”

I asked if he was tempted to do “fusion” style. “When I was in Hawaii I did do some fusion food,” he says. “My philosophy of food is basically Asian, as far as the roundness of my food — sweet and sour, hot and bitter, all those components together. I still use a lot of Asian ingredients, mixed with the Mediterranean ingredients.”

I asked why he’d accepted a job at a Marriott after such a hotshot career. “Several factors,” he said. “One of them is the ability and the autonomy to do whatever I want with the food. The other is, being in such a large facility, the food-cost parameter is not that big of an issue. I purchase separately from the rest of the hotel, so I get the best ingredients that I can. I can serve a certified Japanese Wagyu beef carpaccio appetizer with a truffled cheese for $15 — where else can you do that? I can do that because of the umbrella I have above me. The other factor is that this company is hungry for culinarians, especially here in San Diego. And hotels are starting to be recognized for the quality of their food, like they were 20, 30 years ago.”

Most of the produce he uses comes from local farms and farmers’ markets, and as a resident of Leucadia, Tim finds it easy to shop at Chino Farms regularly. During a long stint in Hawaii he learned how to surf, and that’s another important factor in his choice of location — it’s what he does to unwind in his rare downtime.

Molly’s Restaurant and Wine Bar
**** (Excellent)
Marriott Hotel Marina, 333 West Harbor Drive (at Front Street), north tower level 1 (sub-lobby), downtown, 619-230-8909; mollysfinedining.com.
HOURS: Sunday–Thursday 5:30–9:00 p.m., Friday–Saturday until 10:00 p.m.
PRICES: Starters, $9–$15; entrées, $32–$40; sides, $3–$6; desserts, $9–$12 (per person).
CUISINE AND BEVERAGES: Seasonal California cuisine, made-from-scratch ingredients (including cheeses and cured meats and fishes) with clever, creative twists incorporating local produce. Vast choice of mainly California wines includes half-bottles and plenty by the glass in generous pours, emphasizing uncommon bottlings. Local and international beers and ales. Full bar with creative cocktails.
PICK HITS: Go to town — whatever you like.
NEED TO KNOW: Free validated valet/self-parking for three hours at hotel door (Front Street entrance). Business-casual to dressy. No vegetarian or vegan entrées on website sample menu, but kitchen excels at vegetables, and elaborate side dishes are adaptable as entrées.