The first thing you notice at Pagode...

The first thing you notice at Pagode Saigon, a pretty San Gabriel Vietnamese restaurant, is the extra-large picture of Dan Quayle posted just inside the front door. Quayle, eyes as vacant as those of the fish in the dining room aquarium, holds a child and beams. The photograph is autographed. The restaurant smells nicely of grilled meat and garlic, which can make a person pretty impatient for an open table. A woman disappears into a law office that happens to have its entrance inside the rear dining room. You finally sit down.

“Let’s hear the actors and actresses of ‘The Sound of Music’ tell about the food at Pagode Saigon Gourmet,” it says on the cover of the restaurant’s souvenir menu, and inside they do. “Interesting way to eat!” says Cheryl Worsley. “I loved your food!” said “Sister” Helen Spencer. “I learned something new tonight!” says Viki Strong.

Dan Quayle apparently had less to say.

Laughing cow on its sign, French “33” beer in the fridge, Pagode Saigon is a mini-mall palace of all things beef. There is beef-noodle soup, of course, the famous pho dac biet , and also barbecued beef balls, and grilled beef, and beef ribs served with spring rolls over rice.

Mostly though, Pagode Saigon is devoted to the cult of the Vietnamese all-beef set dinner --bo 7 mon --which involves seven courses of cow brought to you one after the other until you drop. Pagode Saigon, sister to the first seven-beef restaurant in the United States, Pagolac--and a descendant of one of the better seven-beef joints in Saigon--does the seven-beef ritual as well as anybody. And it’s cheap: Two goes into seven courses for about 11 clams, because one dinner easily feeds two.

The first thing you’ve got to know about the seven-beef dinner is that it’s labor-intensive in a way that makes Korean barbecue seem like white-glove butler service. Until you get bored with the process halfway through the meal, you wrap each bite of food into a little rice-paper burrito with herbs and vegetables, then dip the bundle into a dish of sauce. And it takes a little technical work to get it right. Maybe it would be a good idea to practice on a tasty appetizer of grill-your-own shrimp before you attempt the greater challenge of the beef.

You also wrap the fish, which sort of needs to be dressed up a bit. I’m not sure whether it’s because I liked pretty much everything else at Pagode Saigon, but I was actually surprised when something called “grilled mud fish” turned out to be less than delicious.

The basket of herbs includes Vietnamese purple basil and plain old regular basil, mint and cilantro, crisp leaves of romaine, and a spiky Vietnamese herb whose flavor can remind you of the sensation experienced when you accidentally bite into a piece of aluminum foil. Skip that aluminum-foil herb, if you can. There are marinated matchsticks of carrot and daikon, paper-thin slices of cucumber, mounds of bean sprouts and acerb slices of raw eggplant. The rice paper comes in a tall, moist stack, and the trick is to peel off a single piece without tearing. The deeply weird pineapple-anchovy sauce nam mem comes in a communal crock, from which you spoon out a portion into a little private bowl and add chile or not as you please. There is no avoiding choice; this is a good place to take your existentialist buddies.

First up come slices of rose-red raw beef fanned out on a plate. You swish the beef a slice at a time through a table-top pot of boiling vinegar just until it whitens, then wrap it in rice paper with vegetables and a splosh of the nam mem . There is a big, fluffy steamed meatball--studded with clear noodles, something like a loose, sweetly spiced Vietnamese pate--that you scoop up with shrimp chips. There is a platter of stuff: delicious grilled meatballs, and tough strips of grilled beef already rolled around vegetables (which doesn’t excuse you from having to roll it up again in rice paper), also little cylinders of minced beef wrapped in Hawaiian la lot leaves--which either do or do not have a narcotic effect, depending on whom you believe. It’s sweet and terrific, my favorite course.

Item six is a sauteed-beef salad, in a powerful vinaigrette. Item seven is a powerfully flavored beef soup, clear and concentrated, pungent with ginger and garlic, with a tablespoon or so of rice at the bottom. You don’t wrap the soup.

Pagode, 710 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel, (818) 282-6327. Open Wednesday.-Monday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Lot parking. Beer and wine. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $11-$22.