Review: How far for a true taste of Baja? To the center of this modern Mexican tasting menu

The plates that roll out of the kitchen at Valle, a nearly three-year-old modern Mexican restaurant inside the Mission Pacific Beach Resort in Oceanside, are relentlessly beautiful.

For his eight-course tasting menus, chef Roberto Alcocer might braid slivers of trout into thin wreathes over prickly pear aguachile. Shaved chayote becomes a sculpture of blooming flowers, set atop a bright yellow pool of leche de tigre. A spiny lobster taco arrives open-faced, placed at the center of a wavy-edged ceramic platter to exaggerate the tortilla’s roundness.

Dramatic visuals define Valle’s presentation style. Alcocer’s flavors, dish by dish, don’t squeeze under one umbrella so easily. Neither do my feelings about them.

Tetela of blue and yellow masas in a pool of salsa verde contains pressed chicharrones, garnished with avocado and epazote leaves.

My favorite side to his culinary personality — the part that leans rustic and direct — comes during the bull’s-eye center of the meal. A pitch-black bowl holds a tetela, its triangular points reaching the fringes of a pool of salsa verde underneath. Blue and yellow masas bleed together like churning weather patterns around a volcano. The pocket of dough contains pressed chicharrones, their textures soft and the porky essence nicely pronounced. Avocado melts silkily into the salsa, and epazote leaves bring their herbal sharpness without bulldozing over subtler ingredients.

This is earthy cooking, grounded and grounding.

An hour before, the meal had started with a series of snacks that included “oysters” — jellied seaweed extraction meant to mimic the bivalves and served in oyster-shaped ceramics. Two courses of roulade, one involving deboned rabbit wrapped in prosciutto, were examples of the dinner’s many nods to French technique.

Alcocer has been working in professional kitchens for more than 25 years; his career has taken him to haute shrines like La Broche in Madrid and Le Patio on France’s southwest shores, and to Enrique Olvera’s flagship Pujol in Mexico City. Valle’s menu is a culmination of his influences and experiences.

I’m keenest on Alcocer’s rooted creations in part because I first came to know his food in Baja, where he grew up. He also runs Malva, opened in 2014, in Ensenada’s Valle de Guadalupe. Woven palm leaves create a thatched roof that covers the restaurant’s partially open-air dining room, with views of the valley and the mountains beyond that are almost comically picturesque.

Among the dishes from an incredible lunch seven years ago: grilled oysters (real ones) doused with soy vinaigrette as a nod to the region’s long-standing Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities; yellowtail crudo stained with a version of gochujang that Alcocer fashioned using a fermented paste of Mexican dried chiles; chileatole of octopus, white corn and a swirl of bone marrow in poblano pepper; and an entree of sauteed rabbit surrounded by carrots, lettuces and creamed millet, a dark-humored riff on things the animal would like to eat.

Valle, for which Alcocer and his family moved to the San Diego area, more surgically distills his ambition and sly imagination into prestige dining. He’s earned recognition: Both of his restaurants have received one-star ratings from the Michelin guide. In these two places we have a cultural bridge that spans the border.

Chef Roberto Alcocer with his own Baja-made wine at Valle. Alcocer grew up in Baja and also runs Malva in Ensenada’s Valle de Guadalupe.

Woven palm leaves create a thatched roof that covers the partially open-air dining room, with views of the valley and mountains.

Few such examples exist in the high-end space, particularly since (albeit further north) Carlos Salgado closed his standard-setting Taco María in Costa Mesa last year. Star Baja chef Javier Plascencia had partnered last decade on the too-short-lived Bracero Cocina de Raiz in San Diego’s Little Italy neighborhood. Its aguachiles and grilled meats and magnificent Caesar salad were meant to illustrate Plascencia’s identity growing up between two countries; his family ran restaurants in Mexico and the United States located within 30 miles of one another.

Valle most strongly conveys Baja in its ambience. Alcocer persuaded the hotel to hire Venice-based Studio Collective Design to evoke the Valle de Guadalupe’s earth tones in stone tiles, grays and browns, mottled patterns and mixed woods. It’s the kind of dining room I want to roam through slowly to run my hands over every surface. The perch from the patio is stunning: palm trees, the Pacific, watching the summertime throngs fill Oceanside’s tall pier as the sun disappears over the horizon. Still, for the sensory pleasures, I’d suggest cocooning inside.

Recently James Spencer — a veteran of Mélisse, Hotel Bel-Air and many other formal settings — joined the team as general manager. He leads a gracious staff that conveys, with a maximum of enthusiasm and a minimum of pretense, the finer points on the food as well as the pairing of Mexican wines, most of them from Baja and at least a couple from projects in which Alcocer has a hand. It makes for a gratifying survey-cum-lesson on the region’s viniculture.

As with most restaurants of this caliber, the tasting menu revolves around seasons and whims. I didn’t love how an early July dinner began or ended.

To open: a playful charred onion mini tart in a squid ink-dyed crust, the top covered in caviar. This starter has come in and out of rotation and I’ve heard raves from others; the one I had crossed over to burnt, obliterating every flavor, including the roe, which was a sad waste.

Mango chocolate dessert.

To finish: a chocolate shell airbrushed to resemble something between a cacao pod and a mango, filled with mango mousse and a coconut milk fermented with koji to achieve a farmers-cheese consistency. I can appreciate the ingenuity and the rigor, and the desire to merge several sense-of-place signifiers into a single form, but I would have rather concluded with something that tasted of summery freshness.

In between? There was the tetela and the delicate rabbit roulade with huitlacoche. An exactingly seared hunk of halibut in beurre blanc with asparagus, and a gorgeous variation on a layered tamale reconfigured as a roll filled with refritos, perfumed with hoja santa and set over rich, smooth rojo pipian. This was the tenor of cooking I remembered.

I’m holding fast, then, to the meal’s center, and to a chef whose talent I trust and who brings to Southern California a singular sense of place — of two places. I’ll be back to see how his culinary landscape keeps shifting.