By Dan Berger
IJ correspondent

. . .back to basics practicality of latest occupant at 622 Broadway in the town of Sonoma in a restaurant called Meritage (rhymes with heritage). It is still a play on California cuisine, but it is really California authentic, in that it does with great ingredients just what ought to be, done.

Chef Carlo Cavallo, formerly of Piazza d'Angelo in Mill Valley, adheres to the notion that great ingredients do not need excessive assistance from the kitchen, with meddling from some exotic land. Make it simple and the dish will sing.

Small points impress me.
Start with the bread basket, with its wonderful cheese sticks, soft home-baked bread, and garlic dip served while you peruse the menu.

Or try, for instance, the asparagus. If they are very good (and here they are), they ought not be excessively played with. Here, they are grilled just enough to make them al dente, then wrapped in pancetta and drizzled with white truffle oil and a light balsamic glaze, and served with real Parmigiano shavings ($8).

The excellent Caesar ($6) is made from hand torn romaine. Purists will tell you that cutting the leaves could impart a faint metallic taste.

And the best salad of all is the wilted spinach salad with pancetta and wild mushrooms that were sautéed with onions and toasted walnuts ($7).

Now, remember the first time you dined in a fancy restaurant and they gave you a chilled fork to eat the salad? How affected is that? The fork gets warm as soon as you hold it for a minute, or take a bite of the salad.

Meritage goes it one better instead of the chilled fork, the Caesar comes on a chilled plate, and the baby spinach, which is a warm salad, comes on a warm plate.

More excellence: the pastas ($9 to $13) are all done perfectly with assertive, but balanced flavors. So there is a delicacy to the thin spaghetti sautéed with chicken, roasted tomatoes, black olives and baby spinach, and served with a lightly garlicky chardonnay sauce ($11).

The tiger prawns in curry and Pernod and served on homemade wide fettuccine ($13) is an excellent concept that works.

Far more delicate than you would imagine is the escargots in a Champagne and wild thyme sauce ($7). The dish is called a Napoleon, but the puff pastry isn't a necessary ingredient. What I liked was the fact that the escargots were not steeped in garlic. Indeed, there was no garlic in the dish, an inventive creation.

Entrees are rather substantial in size, and one evening, after a mess o' appetizers, four of us ordered just three main dishes, and found we had had plenty.

One dish I enjoyed was the seafood stew ($16) with prawns, manila clams, fresh, tender calamari in a tomato broth. Inside were two wedges of garlic-laced polenta. A hearty and nicely seasoned dish with the flavor of cioppino.

The Sonoma ostrich tenderloin ($18) was seared and served rare, and has a distinctive gamy character, but was fairly delicate and needed the peppercorn reduction sauce underneath. The dish comes with sublime mashed potatoes.

With all of the pastries prepared here, desserts are likewise superb, and worth trying. They change regularly, as does the menu, for that matter, so you simply have to be a bit adventuresome.

The wine program here is a joy (as well it should be since the place is just south of the lovely Sonoma town square). You can consume a bottle of De Loach Fume Blanc for $20, or a B.R.Cohn Silver Label Cabernet for $27. On a reserve wine list, you'll find 1985 Gaja Barbaresco ($400), 1996 Sassicaia $45), and 1996 Chateau S Sean Cinq Cepages ($80). Corkage fee is only $ 7 a bottle.

Chef Carlo is sensitive to the needs of those on a diet, and will prepare any dish with lower oil than usual, and the staff here is knowledgeable about the food even to questions of what ingredients were used in the preparations.

Call the style of food anything you choose, and pronounce the name any way you want, Meritage is one of the late great discoveries north of SE Francisco.