RESTAURANT REVIEW : Red Leather Booths and Tasty Red Meat Under a Pink Light

There are restaurants with crests, vast dark dining rooms decked out with stained glass, red leather booths and a 20-year collection of mirrored plaques that advertise obscure brands of liquor, masculine dining rooms that might be in the Rotary neighborhoods of Downey or Dallas or Des Moines.

These restaurants, proud heraldists of the American surf ‘n’ turf aristocracy, have late-model Cadillacs in their parking lots and intimate nooks in their smoky, dimly lit bars. A prosperous businessman or a district sales manager from anywhere in the country instinctively grasps the basic McDonald’s floor plan.

You know what you will find, Muzak and Manhattans, and, at Tracton’s House of Prime Rib in Encino, you’ll find it all: a genial host in the sort of loud sport jacket Arnold Palmer would wear; flirtatious waitresses with enormous, teased hair; garlic toast on request. What little light there is is tinged with pink to erase wrinkles and enhance the appearance of the meat.

Men with their bottle-blonde wives wear blue blazers and Sansabelt slacks, have gray chest hair peeking out from unbuttoned golf shirts and have a martini or two before dinner. Large groups of clean-cut men in dark suits drink Lite beer and talk just a little louder than they have to. Squeaky, Marilyn-esque laughter echoes across the room as one waitress carries out a becandled slice of bundt cake to the strains of “Happy Birthday” and another scoops beef into a reinforced bag labeled “Bones for Bowser.”

The host leads you down a hall, past banquet rooms, a citation to Mr. Tracton for heroism signed by J. Edgar Hoover and a lottery display, toward a comfortable banquette that is upholstered in what feels like real leather. Your drinks--extra-dry martinis, olives on the side--appear instantly, a full 10 minutes before the welcome mat-size menus show up.

Mammoth baked potatoes and equally mammoth steak fries are a la carte as is, of course, a dinner salad, a head or two of chopped iceberg lettuce with hot fried croutons, doused with the garlicky goop called Green Goddess dressing (bet you haven’t thought of that stuff for a while) that is tossed table-side in a gleaming, stainless steel bowl. It tastes, as it should, like salad.

That old steak-house standard, tomato and onion salad, looks terrific--thick slabs of tomato practically luminescent with ripeness and topped with meaty, glistening anchovies--but turns out to be made with the pink rocks you would expect tomatoes in March to be, coaxed to illusory efflorescence by the rosy glow overhead, and drowning in a too-sweet vinaigrette.

Say howdy to the $15.95 shrimp cocktail, four croissant-size things, the Loch Ness monsters of the shrimp world, arranged carefully around a platter of ice and flanked with lemon wedges and two little dishes of sauce. Unfortunately, the creatures seem fabricated from wet cotton batting and hardly pick up flavor when repeatedly dunked into mayonnaise or the wan horseradish-spiked catsup served alongside. Deep-fried “Cajun” wings, more than a 10-spot cheaper, are a little better, though their inspiration owes more to Kelbo’s than K-Paul’s.

But everybody knows that a crested-restaurant appetizer is no more than a sophisticated way to kill time before the beef shows up. Tracton’s doesn’t disappoint--the place serves about the best red meat in the San Fernando Valley, well-marbled enough to send the American Heart Assn. running for cover.

The filet mignon is butter-soft, impeccably rare (if that’s the way you ordered it) beneath a crisp coat of char from its charcoal grilling; a New York cut is firm yet yielding to the tooth, and with that beefy mineral tang you might have forgotten about.

A megalithic slab of prime rib, a portion Fred Flintstone would have loved, is the second most wonderful prime rib in town, a rich piece of protein that is to the stuff on a Las Vegas buffet what Jackson Pollack is to Spin-Art.

Tracton’s House of Prime Rib, 16705 Ventura Blvd., Encino (818) 783-1320. Lunch Monday-Saturday, dinner seven nights. Full bar. Valet parking. All major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two (food only) $40-$50.