CAREFULLY DIFFERENT AMERICAN FARE

Marvelous how one little piece of information can change your perspective. When you know that Remington’s is owned by a guy who also owns a lot of Wendy’s franchises, it suddenly looks like a flagrant design for a new chain. With its distinctive and easily duplicated visual personality (blowups of Western scenes from paintings by Frederick Remington), it has the sturdy design and smooth edges of a template for reproduction, and the menu has the proper familiarity--omelets, upscale burgers, Mexican food, stuffed potatoes, ribs, chicken--combined with an acceptable degree of originality.

The game here is a kind of flirtation with the general public’s inborn caution, and I must say Remington’s does it very well. Alongside the reassuringly familiar menu comes a bar list of 125 drinks with the angle that some of them are, if not quite Old West, warmly antique.

You can order a Gibson, a gimlet, an Old-Fashioned, a rob roy. (A rob roy! The last time I heard anybody call for a rob roy, I wasn’t old enough to drink.) The rest of the drinks are mostly of the silly, modern sort, full of bananas and liqueurs--drinks masquerading as desserts (there are even a couple with no alcohol in them--desserts masquerading as drinks masquerading as desserts).

The food is distinctly in the American vein. Portions are large. There is that recent mania, the deep-dish stuffed potato (most of the fillings contain Cheddar, jack and mozzarella).

One item you get in a baked potato and also as a soup (though a “soup” you could sculpt a sand castle out of) is what they call Brunswick stew. It’s not terribly close to the original, which was a soupy stew of meat (originally game) with beans, corn and tomatoes. This one is pork, chicken and beef stewed down to a thick protein concentrate and covered with melted cheese. It tastes like rich American chili meat, unspiced and made a bit sweet by a layer of corn.

Foreign dishes regularly get somewhat Americanized. Chicken Dijon has rather more mustard in it than a French chef would be likely to use, and I dare say the result is more what an American would expect chicken Dijon to be.

The Mexican dishes can be rather forcefully redesigned. The seafood enchilada’s stuffing is a credible Mexican mixture of cooked fish, onions, tomatoes and cilantro, but this is an enchilada that has become a sort of burrito. Instead of being baked in sauce, it is made from a big flour tortilla coated with a slightly sweet, medium-hot pepper paste, and the package is baked in a ramekin. It’s a little dry but rather pleasurable.

The side dishes that come with the Mexican items are worth noting. The refried beans have a powerful bean flavor, and the rice is neither plain nor “Spanish” (cooked in tomato juice). It has peppers and celery in it and, I think, gains from everything not being cluttered up with tomato.

Apart from the elaborate potato stuffings, the Mexican dishes and the handful of sauteed chicken dishes, just about everything at Remington’s is plainly broiled or deep-fried.

The pork and beef ribs are meaty and a little smoky, in the style of a lot of backyard barbecue chefs, and the barbecue sauce is surprisingly tough-minded, a peppery-vinegary sauce rather than the sweet tomato paste I was dreading. (It’s also a rather thick sauce, and for some reason, it’s served in syrup dispensers; you could get muscle strain holding one over your plate and waiting for the sauce to drip out).

A novel touch is veal ribs alongside beef and pork. They taste like a sort of mild beef rib on a pork-sized bone.

There are two steaks and a steak sandwich, all Black Angus beef, tender and flavorful. There are hamburgers, of course, but not the sort Wendy’s regulars would recognize. These are the $5 size, thick and classically beefy. You can get cute toppings, of course--guacamole and mozzarella topped with green salsa--and cholesterophobes can ask for chicken instead of beef.

The fish menu is rather limited: deep-fried shrimp, catfish or frog legs (the last rather bland, though at least, in the appetizer size, you can ask for them hot), scampi and a broiled fish of the day.

A couple of the appetizers, all of which come with special sauces, are very good. The sweet, crunchy red onion rings, for instance (“beerings,” fried in beer batter, get it?), though they don’t gain a thing from the barbecue sauce you’re supposed to pour on them.

The “beerinis” (beer-batter zucchini; it gets worse) come with a blue cheese dressing and the “beershrooms” (yes, mushrooms) with a very good horseradish sauce. Among the soups of the day there are extremes, on one side an insipid corn chowder and on the other a wildly clam-flavored clam chowder.

I like Remington’s. The food is full of vivid, distinctive flavors in a surprisingly wide spectrum of styles--the gazpacho tastes like gazpacho, the marinara sauce with the deep-fried mozzarella tastes Italian--and there’s something cheerful and ingratiating about it.

Sometimes it’s a little wobbly (one night, great vegetables tossed in butter with tarragon, the next, overcooked vegetables with an eerie pink tinge and trace of bitterness) but things usually work pretty well. Entrees run $4.99 to $14.99; most are under $6.

REMINGTON’S 28682 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo

459-0962

Open for lunch and dinner daily; Sunday brunch. All major credit cards accepted.