RESTAURANT REVIEW : New Rosie’s Is Cheery but Best Choice Is Salad Bar

“I could be anywhere in the United States right now,” said one of my more upwardly mobile Encino friends as she surveyed the scene in a West Valley shopping mall. “This is suburbia.”

I couldn’t argue. Here at the corner of Fallbrook Avenue and Vanowen Street, there are chain restaurants such as Chili’s and lines of moviegoers snaking around buildings for the new Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster. This could as easily be a mall in Lubbock, Tex., or Kansas City or Raleigh, N.C.

Inside one of the mall’s new restaurants, however, you would never imagine you were in one of those cities. All of them have fine and distinct regional styles of barbecue, the cooking genre that Rosie’s Ranch House purports to serve--of course, Rosie’s is also a chain. What you get instead here is more in line with the homogenized view directly outside, and barely as soulful an experience.

It’s not for lack of cheer. Rosie’s is bright, with walls of pale wood that look as if they have been transported, plank by plank, from a frontier exhibit at a theme park. The walls are hung with countrified signs reading “danger, mine shaft,” “Griswold’s seeds” and the like, and the floors have a liberal sprinkling of sawdust. A verdant trompe l’oeil mural of a wide-open mountain pasture, painted by local artist Brian Schreiner, dominates a side wall.

But for me, the cheery atmosphere is the best part of this restaurant. On a recent Friday evening the place is remarkably disorganized, in part because of the mad scramble of customers en route to an early screening of “Terminator II.” Despite a dining room that appears almost half empty, the harried hostess informs us that there will be a 25-minute wait for a table. We scope the scene and count 13 empty tables.

Even when we’re seated, things do not get much better. The nice waitress answers an unreasonable number of our questions with smiles and patience, but her assistants cannot seem to get our order straight, three times bringing us the wrong dishes.

When we do get the right ones, we wish we had stuck with the mistakes. An enormous platter of onion rings looks inviting enough, but tastes leaden and tired. Rosie’s chicken, from the Lite Dinners menu, calls to mind sugary cardboard. Corn on the cob comes out soggy. It’s the first time I can ever recall eating an ear of corn without getting a single kernel stuck in my teeth.

There are, thankfully, a few other things to cut the teeth on here. First off, there’s that famous salad bar, the trademark of all Rosie’s restaurants. It’s an enormous collection of homemade pastas, Chinese chicken salad, Moroccan-style carrots spiked with cumin, crisp herbed lavash bread, sweet-and-sour meatballs, abundant fresh fruits and an outsized assortment of greens, dressings and garnishes. A good number of people pile up the platters as if they hadn’t had a bite in weeks.

Then there are several types of ribs, generally the most reliable meats to order here. The ribs are advertised as being “slowly roasted overnight over fruitwoods,” and I’ll admit they can be quite smoky and tender. My choice, the baby backs, are especially so, with the firmer and fattier beef ribs coming in a close second on my wish list. I’d say to avoid the spare ribs--I find them tough and greasy--if it weren’t for the fact that you can have them with a spicy Cajun-style sauce. It’s a whole lot better than the sticky, gooey red sauce they glop on all the rest of their meats.

As this is a large menu, you will find one or two surprises. The one-pound extra-thick pork chop, grilled nearly black on mesquite embers, can be fatty but is really quite delicious when you cut away to the meaty parts. And anyone who eschews the salad bar in favor of a menu salad, such as the good warm turkey salad or surprisingly snappy Cobb, should be subtly rewarded.

Rosie’s is definitely a great place to bring kids, partly because the noise level makes it as much of a madhouse as a child’s playroom, and also because of the wonderfully underpriced child’s menu. Child’s dinners include fries, ice cream and soft drinks, and many of them are under $4. Well, hey, kids love the suburbs.

Suggested dishes: warm turkey salad, $6.95; baby back pork ribs, $11.95 (half slab), $15.95 (full slab); Rosie’s double pork chop, $10.95.