RESTAURANTS : OLD-TIME PLEASURES AT THE OLD PLACE

Tune the radio to country, we’re leaving the city behind. Head up the Ventura Freeway, off at the Kanan exit, left into them thar hills. Left on Troutdale, left again on Mulholland, then pull over, park, disembark. Up above, stars. All around, trees. And across the street, in a lone ramshackle building under a faded sign, the Old Place.

“We’ve got beer and wine only,” the waitress barks. “Clams are $11 an order, steaks $10. Baked potato, bread and butter comes with.” She looks us over, then adds, “Forget vegetables. Vegetables here are nothing.”

She pads away--she’s also the bartender--and comes back with the beer.

We’re a half-hour from Los Angeles, three miles from Agoura, but it might as well be the Yukon--funky and rugged, booths as crude as stable stalls, a heavy old wood bar and a beer-drinking crowd of men that are men and women that are women--everybody in jeans and Western boots, the men wearing their cowboy hats indoors. (Rest rooms are outside and around toward the back.)

In one corner there’s an upright piano, silent tonight, but they say there’s often music--whoever drops by. They say Dolly Parton did one time. Maybe she will tonight.

Besides the local cowpeople, another Old Place regular is here, an old codger in an old green suit who sells hand-painted ties out of a small, beat-up suitcase. Soon he joins us, compliments the women at our table, then launches into a history of the place--how it started as a Post Office in the ‘30s, became a market in the ‘50s, then a restaurant 15 years ago. Before he has a chance to haul out the ties, the clams come and he leaves us to our meal.

Or maybe he can’t bear to watch us eat these things. It’s not the restaurant’s fault. All steamed clams on the West Coast are like this--steamed littlenecks and cherrystones, not the tender Ipswich clams you get back East, true steamers. These little Western numbers, when steamed, become tough as rubber bands. At $11 an order, we eat them anyway, feeling taken.

After another round of beer, the woman shuffles over with our steaks, stacked plates running up her arm. She was right about the vegetables--five garbanzo beans perched on a small chunk of iceberg lettuce--dwarfed by the steak, a hunk of top sirloin as big as a shoe, but somewhat less tough.

We’re all silent for a time, sawing the meat, sinking our teeth into it, chewing, swallowing. This isn’t dining, this is masticating. And there’s something very satisfying in it. Besides the sheer physical pleasure of chewing, the steak carries a strong taste of the oak over which it was fired.

“In Sweden,” says one woman in our group, who has been in the U.S. only a few months, “we would eat this much steak for a week.”

Dolly Parton doesn’t show up. No musicians do. Despite this, the locals are warming up to each other, a few couples slow-dancing without music. The man with the ties doesn’t return--he’s busy with a fresh load of city slickers at the bar. But we’re visited by another regular feature of the Old Place, a roll of aluminum foil with which to package our leftover steak.

The Old Place is open Thursdays through Sundays. Reservations are needed for the booths, which seat up to eight; couples can sit at the bar. On Sunday night they serve steak stew, $3.50, “but you better get here at 7 sharp,” the waitress says, “if you want stew.”

The Old Place, 29983 Mulholland, Cornell , ( 818 ) 706-9001. Dinner for two, $20-$31, food only.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: The Betsy (1001 N. Vermont Ave., (213) 662-2116) has gone through a lot of changes since it first opened a couple of years ago. When the original chef, Laurent Quenioux, defected to the Seventh Street Bistro, he was swiftly followed by his assistants. Then in January the restaurant closed altogether for a few weeks. Well, this very attractive restaurant is now open again, with a new young French chef, a new young French staff and a new young French menu.

This fancy restaurant has a location as odd as its name, which may account for the reasonable prices--two can eat abundantly for $50 (food only). The food is not entirely polished, but it is based on interesting ideas. A first course of sweetbreads arrived in an orange-and-green peppercorn sauce; although everything was well cooked, the flavors never quite married. Duck with raspberries was both lovely and delicious. Veal arrived sitting in swirls of red-and-green pepper purees; had the veal been cooked just a little bit less, the dish would have been wonderful. On this one visit we were almost the only patrons in the place; surely this nice little restaurant deserves a few more customers.