PEPPERS’ PERSONALITY IS SPLIT AND SO IS MENU

Talk about a place with a split personality. One half of Peppers is a whimsically decorated family restaurant in Garden Grove (old movie photos, a cartoon mural of flamingos doing vacation stuff) where kids can eat free. It advertises itself as a place for showers and anniversary parties.

The bar, meanwhile, advertises itself as a hot place to (nudge-nudge) meet people. Heavy happy hour action with $1.50 kamikazes. Miss Tecate contest, male exotic dance reviews on Wednesdays. Live rock, videos, a flint-eyed bouncer carding all comers, and a smoky ambience for the light show (it’s eerie to see a restaurant where the smoke is coming out of the bar).

I, however, have an unsplit personality that centers on food, and whatever goes on in that bar of Peppers is a mystery to me. I’ll meet you over on the flamingo side.

Peppers the Restaurant is, on the face of it, the usual slick Yankee-Mexican place where the plastic-waterproofed menu lists combo plates, fajitas, potato skins, burgers and quaintly named non-alcoholic cocktails. As a matter of fact, some of the best things are quite un-Mexican. In addition to regular nachos they have “Chinese nachos,” which use fried wonton skins instead of tortillas--and they’re not bad, the wonton skins interestingly crisp and puffy.

The best of the appetizers also strikes me as rather American: breaded shrimp with a blue cheese dipping sauce (nice dash of garlic in that). There’s some red pepper in the breading, but don’t believe the menu when it suggests that this is not a dish for the faint-hearted. You’d need a physical allergy to red pepper to be in trouble with this dish.

In fact, the name Peppers is a little misleading. Apart from a lively table salsa and a mean ground pepper sauce accompanying the fajitas, there’s generally a pretty low pepper quotient here. My waitress explained, “Well, a lot of people don’t like hot food.” So wouldn’t they be going to a place that calls itself “The Guacamole Hut” or “Melted Cheese, Sour Cream and Bathtub Margaritas”?

But Peppers does not stick totally to familiar and Americanized items. It makes the savory pies called empanadas, including a delicious empanada de mariscos with a rich, creamy seafood filling, rather on the French side of the Mexican spectrum (they certainly do make such things in Mexico). Arroz con pollo may not be something you get enthusiastic about--just cooked chicken chunks on rice cooked in chicken broth--but it is a real Mexican dish usually missing from our restaurant menus.

Another unfamiliar name is enchilada azteca. In my book, this is a dish more properly known as budin azteca, though comparing it to an enchilada rather than budin (a sort of sausage) is apt enough. It’s layers of tortillas and chicken, and I think it would be a lot more exciting if it came in a proper green chile sauce rather than the usual nondescript brown enchilada sauce.

There are also several stewy dishes of chicken or seafood in dizzy flavor combinations involving things like tequila and fruit juice. Camarones changuro, shrimp with artichoke hearts topped with melted cheese, seems the sanest but don’t expect anything elegant and sophisticated. Peppers’ chili, on the other hand, is a thoughtful model worth noting: layers of separately cooked ground beef, beans and beefy chili. The beans have kept their shape, and the texture of the dish is not affected by leaking bean liquid. It’s like a very rich and slightly hot beef sauce on beans.

The usual Mexican antojitos are pretty good here. They use shredded fried beef for their taco fillings, and the tamales are really remarkable--possibly the best tamales in Orange County--full of terrific beef chili in a wonderful red sauce. The fajitas comes in a sauce that shows some of the same clever hand as the tamale.

Mexican restaurants do not have a course suitable for the American sweet tooth, and the desserts make not the slightest attempt to seem Mexican (in the nine months the place has been in operation, the one Mexican dessert, flan, has been dropped because so few people ordered it). There are some real guilty pleasures on the list such as chocolate amaretto mousse or the Oreo cookie cake. The mud pie is a huge mass of chocolate ice cream in a stalwart graham cracker crust that calls for a hammer and chisel to cut.

The brownie cake, though, tends to alternate good brownie with rather dry cake, and the fried ice cream is a mess. The layer of crushed cookies that the ball of ice cream is rolled in before frying has a decent flavor (rather like a cake doughnut), but it’s pretty oily, and Peppers hedges its bets rather heavily by floating the fried ice cream in a coupe of canned peaches.

Prices can be simply stated. Appetizers run $2.95 to $4.95 and entrees $4.95 to $9.95. One child per paying adult can eat free.

PEPPERS Plaza Alicante, 12361 Chapman Ave., Garden Grove.

Telephone: (714) 740-1333.

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