RESTAURANT REVIEW : Smoldering Oak Over Montrose; Syrupy-Sweet Sauce in Van Nuys

The weather turned hot last week and I got hungry for authentic barbecue, big hunks of meat slow-smoked over smoldering embers of aromatic wood. Here are two places I visited.

Generally speaking, I adore oak in an armoire, tolerate it in a Chardonnay and downright dislike it in a barbecue pit. In the case of Oak-N-Smoke, however, I’ll make an exception.

Oak-N-Smoke Pit Barbecue is a squeaky-clean restaurant on the second story of a recently opened Montrose mini-mall. There are a few tables inside, and some plastic garden furniture on an adjacent balcony for al fresco eating, but no real atmosphere to speak of. Don’t expect much more than bare-bones service, either--you order the meats yourself in a cafeteria-style line.

So who cares? When it comes to the ‘cue itself, these bones should be meaty enough to please anyone.

Pitmaster Gary Baca prepares the meats in a smoker he keeps out back, using oak logs and something called Jack Daniel’s Oak Barrel Chips, which are wood chips from the actual barrels in which the renowned sour mash ferments. (Bags of them are for sale just inside the door.) The meats are all a dark brown in color and explode with the taste of oak. Proponents of hickory or mesquite, and I count myself in that group, might have some trouble adjusting to the difference.

The best meat here is probably the pork back ribs--soft, lean and sticky baby backs with a thin crust. The ruddy, soy-sauce-brown chicken is unusual in that it absorbs the taste of the wood more completely than any of the other meats here. You can buy it whole or by the half.

As to the rest of the choices--a beef tri-tip and a store-bought smoked sausage--well, I’m not that impressed. Oak doesn’t blend well with sausage, especially a spicy one, and the tri-tip comes out on the leathery side. They’d be better off selling a softer, fattier cut such as brisket.

I’m not completely sold on the accompaniments, either. The barbecue sauce (Oak-N-Smoke has the good sense to let you put it on yourself) is tangy but rather one-dimensional, something that could also be said about the heavily vinegared cole slaw. But I have no (ahem) beef with the creamy, chunky potato salad, or the red beans trucked in from Santa Maria and enriched with bits of leftover meat, a dish called bar-b-que pinquinto beans.

Suggested dishes: bar-b-que pork back ribs, $6.99/$11.99; smoked chicken breast sandwich, $4.49; pinquinto beans, 79 cents; potato salad, 79 cents.

Oak-N-Smoke Pit Barbecue, Park View Plaza, 3600 Ocean View Blvd., Montrose (818) 249-6111. Lunch and dinner 11 a.m.-9 p.m. daily. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. Cash and checks. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$20.

Valley Ranch Barbecue is an enormous Western-style barn with an A-frame ceiling, and you can smell the wood burning in the brick pits the minute you come through the door. It’s also something of a fixture, having been in existence nearly 25 years. You’d think they would have ironed out all the wrinkles by now, but they haven’t.

It’s a sit-down place with table service, but not necessarily well-informed waiters. When I asked mine what kind of wood they were using, her answer was redwood. (With apologies to Woody Guthrie, Neil Young and the parks department.) In fact, Valley Ranch uses a combination of hickory and mesquite, resulting in rather mild-tasting meats with a slightly sweet aftertaste.

All that would be well and good if Valley Ranch served a really gutsy, spicy barbecue sauce to give these meats some life, as barbecuers do in, say, Kansas City. But it doesn’t. What you get here instead is a syrupy-sweet version of ketchup that I found nearly impossible to eat. If your tastes are like mine, bring your own barbecue sauce and you’ll enjoy the food here a lot more.

You can taste most of the meats here on something they call the Sampler, a generous plate of ham, pork, beef, chicken and approximately four pork ribs. The ham and beef are unremarkable, served in lean slabs, and the pork is somewhat overcooked. Chicken, nicely browned and crisped, just misses because it has been continually basted with something violently sugary. Only the tender, tasty ribs live up to expectations, and a good crumbly ranch house sausage is served on a separate plate. Once I scraped the sauce off the sausages, I liked them just fine.

The barbecue plates here, incidentally, come with a good tray of pickled vegetables and side dishes such as sugary baked beans, thick-cut French fries and a good cole slaw that tastes of celery seed.

Suggested dishes: baby back pork rib dinner, $9.95; ranch house sausage dinner, $7.95; cole slaw, $1.50.

Valley Ranch Barbecue, 16623 Sherman Way, Van Nuys (818) 989-1300. Lunch 11 a.m.-4 p.m. daily; dinner 4-10 p.m. daily. Full bar. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $18-$25.