BELLY UP TO THE BAR FOR A HOME-BREW

In college, before I became a refined gourmet, I once threw a party that drove my landlady to storm upstairs in her bathrobe and evict my roommates and me right while it was going on. It wasn’t so much the racket of 120 people partying overhead that she took exception to but all the beer dripping through her ceiling.

OK, so we’d spilled some. Give us some slack. We’d just discovered the creative pleasures of making home-brew. To this day the taste of home-brewed beer makes me feel rakish and devil-may-care, like a man with many adventures in front of him and many more apartments to get kicked out of.

A silo-like structure at Buster’s Brewery is painted with the words “Buster Beer--the Only Beer Brewed in Buena Park.” Literally speaking there isn’t a chance in the world that’s true (home brewmasters are everywhere), but Buster’s is the first Southern California instance of a phenomenon now quite common up north, the bar/restaurant that brews its own. Let’s say Buster Beer is the only commercially available Buena Park suds.

For the record, the Buster Beer in question is a dark reddish-amber brew, less carbonated and with more body than commercial lager beer, with a flavor more of malt than hops. Since it’s brewed on the premises in gorgeous copper brew kettles right next to the bar, it’s unpasteurized and doesn’t have the thin, faintly caramelized flavor of many commercial beers.

In other words, it’s rather like mild, well-balanced home-brew, a pleasant quaffing beer of a sort you don’t find in bottle or on tap anywhere else in these parts. As I’ve said, I have a soft spot for this kind of stuff, but if you’re only used to commercial lager, you may miss the sharp flavor caused by high carbonation (exhaustive tests conducted at my table could not raise more than three-quarters of an inch of head on a glass of Buster). Buster’s Brewery also sells commercial beers, including the product of at least one of the Northern California “boutique breweries.”

As for the rest of the Buster’s Brewery story, the place looks like a typical swinging beer bar stuffed with 19th-Century nostalgia decor, and it serves food more or less Fuddruckers-fashion. That is, you stand in line to place your order as at a fast-food restaurant, but the food is brought to you by waiters, who also take orders for beer and desserts. The menu is not limited to burgers, though. There are steaks, ribs, chicken, seafood and daily specials that often include quasi-Cajun blackened dishes.

In short, it’s more like a bar menu than a fast-food menu, and mostly, I’m afraid, the food is of no more than bar-snack quality. The hamburger, advertised in traditional fashion as the best in the world and a boon to mankind, is good but not really the stuff dreams are made of. The beer-batter shrimp have surprisingly little beer-batter flavor, considering that Buster’s is a brewery. They taste like ordinary beach town fried shrimp.

A couple of things do stand out. The best appetizer, hands down, is sauteed mushrooms in a very rich gravy (is there soy in it?). Braised sirloin tips with noodles are good and meaty and the cheapest thing on the menu apart from the hamburger, and the barbecued beef ribs are pretty good, in a sweetish mainstream barbecue sauce.

And one dish that is rather silly on the face of it actually has the makings of a guilty pleasure: “stew in a bun”--plain beef and carrot stew in the Dinty Moore mode served in a huge, five-inch-high hamburger bun hollowed out to hold it. Obviously, this isn’t a dish you want to dawdle over because the stew will eventually work its way out, but the flavor of the sesame-seed bun is curiously good with the stew.

I must warn that the soups tend to be so over-thickened you could stick a spoon straight up in one, and the semi-Cajun dishes are very strange. Buster’s seems to have invented its own Cajun-spice mixture, heavy on cumin and apparently fennel seed. The effect is curious and thought-provoking, but I’m not sure it’s a flavor people could live with very much.

There’s a good lemon cheesecake at dessert and some big soft tollhouse and peanut butter cookies that are even better, but I’m afraid apart from these items, Buster’s bakery has rather grotesque ideas. It sells a cake that is 12 inches high, and all the cakes are top-heavy with thick coagulations of hard frosting. Even one of the cheesecakes has a baroque crown of hard chocolate frosting on it. In a place with its own bakery I was surprised to find the chocolate cake had a rather stale flavor and texture.

So I say, drink a Buster Beer to give it a try and have an order of zucchini strips to go with it, maybe some sirloin tips and noodles. Don’t break out the tux, though, and don’t tell your date it’s going to be a gourmet experience. Appetizers run $1.15 to $2.45, entrees $3.25 to $9.50.

BUSTER’S BREWERY 5300 Beach Blvd., Buena Park

(213) 521-7903, (213) 941-3529

Open for lunch and dinner daily. American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa accepted.