For a taste of Baja, head to Valle Mexican Restaurant in Oceanside.

The dishes emerging from 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 can braid slices of trout into thin crowns over tuna aguachile. Grated chayote becomes a sculpture of blooming flowers, set atop a pool of bright yellow tiger’s milk. A spiny lobster taco arrives open-faced, placed in the center of a ceramic platter with scalloped edges to exaggerate the tortilla’s roundness.

Valle's presentation style is defined by its visual spectacularity. Alcocer's flavours, dish by dish, cannot be crammed into a single dish so easily. Neither do my feelings about it.

My favorite side of his culinary personality — the part that leans toward the rustic and straightforward — comes out during the heart of the meal. A charcoal-black bowl holds a tetela, its triangular tips reaching to the edges of a pool of green salsa below. The blue and yellow masas mingle like churning weather patterns around a volcano. The masa contains pressed chicharrones, with smooth textures and a very pronounced porcine essence. Avocado melts silkily into the salsa, and epazote leaves lend their herbal sharpness without overwhelming the more subtle ingredients.

It is an earthy cuisine, with its feet on the ground and which connects us with the earth.

An hour earlier, the meal had begun with a series of appetizers that included “oysters,” a gelatin extracted from seaweed that mimicked bivalves and was served in oyster-shaped ceramic dishes. Two plates of roulade, one of them featuring boneless 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 such sanctuaries of haute cuisine as La Broche in Madrid and Le Patio on the southwest coast of France, and to Enrique Olvera’s flagship restaurant, Pujol, in Mexico City. Valle’s menu is a culmination of his influences and experiences.

I like Alcocer’s rootsy creations best in part because I knew his food in Baja, where he grew up. He also runs Malva, opened in 2014, in Ensenada’s Guadalupe Valley. Woven palm leaves create a thatched roof covering the restaurant’s partially open-air dining room, with views of the valley and mountains beyond that are almost comically picturesque.

Among the dishes at an incredible lunch seven years ago: grilled (real) oysters drizzled with soy vinaigrette as a nod to the region’s longtime Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities; yellowtail crudo tinged with a version of gochujang that Alcocer made using a fermented paste of dried Mexican chiles; chileatole of octopus, white corn, and a swirl of bone marrow in poblano chile; and a main course of sautéed rabbit surrounded by carrots, lettuce, and creamed millet, a darkly humorous take on things the animal would like to eat.

Valle, where Alcocer and his family moved to the San Diego area, more surgically distills his ambition and canny imagination into prestigious restaurants. He has earned recognition: both of his restaurants have received a one-star rating from the Michelin guide. In these two places we have a cultural bridge across the border.

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

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

There are few such examples in the high-end sector, particularly since Carlos Salgado closed his landmark Taco Maria restaurant in Costa Mesa last year (albeit further north). Baja’s star chef, Javier Plascencia, had been associated last decade with Bracero Cocina de Raiz, a short-lived restaurant in San Diego’s Little Italy neighborhood. Its aguachiles, grilled meats and superb Caesar salad were meant to illustrate the identity of Plascencia, who grew up between two countries; his family owned restaurants in Mexico and the United States within 30 miles of each other.

Valle most strongly conveys the Baja vibe. Alcocer convinced the hotel to hire Venice-based Studio Collective Design to evoke the earth tones of the Guadalupe Valley in stone tiles, grays and browns, mottled patterns and mixed woods. It’s the kind of dining room I want to wander through slowly to run my hands over every surface. The view from the patio is stunning: palm trees, the Pacific, watching the summer crowds fill Oceanside’s tall pier as the sun disappears below the horizon. Still, for sensory pleasures, I’d suggest retreating indoors.

Recently, James Spencer, a veteran of Mélisse, Hotel Bel-Air and many other formal establishments, joined the team as general manager. He leads a friendly staff that conveys, with a maximum of enthusiasm and a minimum of pretension, the finer points of the food as well as the pairing of Mexican wines, most of them from Baja California and at least a couple of projects in which Alcocer is involved. It's a rewarding survey-lesson on the region's viniculture.

As with most restaurants of this calibre, the tasting menu revolves around the seasons and whims. I didn't like how it started or ended for an early July dinner.

To open: a fun charred onion mini tart in a squid ink-tinged crust, the top covered in caviar. This starter has been in and out of rotation and I've heard raves from others; the one I had moved to the main course was burnt, obliterating all the flavours, including the roe, which was a sad waste.

To finish: a chocolate shell airbrushed to look like something between a cocoa pod and a mango, filled with mango mousse and koji-fermented coconut milk to achieve a farmhouse cheese consistency. I can appreciate the ingenuity and rigor, and the desire to fuse various signifiers of a sense of place into a single form, but I would have preferred to end with something that tasted of summer freshness.

In between? There was the tetela and the delicate rabbit roll with huitlacoche. A perfectly seared piece of halibut in beurre blanc with asparagus and a gorgeous variation on a layered tamale reconfigured as a bread roll filled with refritos, scented with hoja santa and placed on a rich, smooth red pipián. This was the style of cooking I remembered.

So I'm clinging to the center of food and to a chef whose talent I trust and who brings to Southern California a unique sense of place, of two places. I'll be back to see how the culinary landscape continues to change.