RESTAURANT REVIEW : Odyssey Offers a Magnificent View and a Buffet of Epic Size

Anyone heading north on the San Diego Freeway around Granada Hills is bound to notice the sign for Odyssey Restaurant--conspicuous white letters displayed on the side of a hill that suggest the same lost glamour you’d search for in, say, Hollywood. The sign does not begin to suggest the fact that the Odyssey is a vast special-occasion restaurant, trading in weddings, lodge banquets and Gargantuan buffet brunches.

No one can dispute the fact that this hill is capable of offering a magnificent view of Southern California’s unique topography. Odyssey Drive is steep and rustic; when you reach the top you find yourself in a parking lot so big it could invite a nine-hole golf course over for the weekend. “Top of the world, Ma!” you think as you look down over the entire north San Fernando Valley. On a clear day, you can see Encino.

The most popular time to take in all this splendor is Sunday, around noon. That’s when the restaurant and its banquet rooms, which have classical Greek names like Athena and Apollo, bustle with brides still wearing their trains, elderly gentlemen in VFW hats and throngs of hungry brunch-goers, who line up at the restaurant’s all-you-can-eat buffet to sample foods as diverse as boiled shrimp, Korean-style ribs, salmon Benedict and rice pudding.

If you’re a fan of buffet, it is safe to say that Odyssey’s Sunday champagne brunch is the ne plus ultra up around here. Even in Las Vegas, where the buffet is legendary, you’d be hard-pressed to match this one in depth or variety. Who would dare complain that the champagne is Andre, or that many of the hot dishes end up baked onto their respective steam tables?

Head for the giant omelet and waffle bar, where chefs stand at the ready to prepare your own creation, and you won’t have to worry about that problem. You could also make a beeline for the fully stocked 20-foot salad bar to pile your plate skyward with vegetables and pasta salads.

The cold table is loaded with poached salmon, a bathtub-sized vat of crab legs and various seafood and pasta creations. The hot station features breakfast standards--bacon, country sausage patties and surprisingly soft scrambled eggs--as well as entree dishes like stuffed pork loin, fish tempura and Italian frittata. Stop by the carving station for oven-roasted beef and turkey, or the enormous dessert bar crowned by a do-it-yourself hot fudge sundae station. That’s cappuccino, all right, pouring from a spigot, and the tub right next to it contains real whipped cream.

Maybe Sunday brunch isn’t your thing. No problem. The Odyssey is also a full-service dinner house, open to the public every evening. At night, when the candles flicker in a pattern similar to the headlights on the freeways below, the big, boxy main dining room exhibits a different, almost Midwestern style.

Chef Steve Geving does his best with a mountainous menu that aims to please everyone, plus six to eight specials nightly. It’s still basically prime rib, Australian lobster tail and top-sirloin country atop this hill, but a few dishes--blackened halibut and lamb loin in merlot sauce for example--show that the restaurant is trying to be au courant.

Most of the entrees are complete dinners that include hearty starters. An abbreviated version of the Sunday salad bar is one option for a first course. Rich, velvety shrimp bisque or a creamy, middle-of-the-road Caesar are others. Really big appetites might cotton to the special appetizers, at extra charge. These run to things like good grainy crab cakes with a mild remoulade sauce (not the Louisiana sort of remoulade--it’s more like tartar sauce with herbs) or hand chopped salmon tartar, heavy on the capers.

One of the people at my table couldn’t resist a dish called birds of paradise--until it arrived, that is. It does sound interesting: jumbo shrimp wrapped in a tangy crab mousse, cooked spinach and hollandaise drenched puff pastry. But it turns out to be far too heavy, and the pastry is apt to have been burned to a crisp on the bottom.

We tried the blackened halibut and the lamb loin, both specials. The halibut sounds delicious, served with roasted pecans, lemon and butter, but it’s done in by a thick surfeit of spices. The lamb loin isn’t bad, though, the gamy slices of meat resting in an unctuous sauce tasting of merlot wine, mushrooms and peppercorns. And predictably, it’s a lot more than a normal person can finish.

These foods don’t leave a person much room for dessert, but you can get chocolate-dipped strawberries, a sticky-sweet apple walnut cheesecake or something they call mile-high chocolate cake, a rather insipid multilayer cake with a frothy, uninteresting mousse filling.

But you didn’t come up here for dessert. You came for that grand view, and all that lost glamour.

Suggested dishes: Sunday champagne brunch, $16.95; salad bar, $9.95; crab cakes with sauce remoulade, $7.95; lamb loin, $23.95.

Odyssey Restaurant, 15600 Odyssey Drive, Granada Hills, (818) 366-6444. Lunch 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 5-10:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 5-11:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. Sunday; brunch 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Sunday. Full bar. Parking lot and valet parking. All major cards. Dinner for two, $40-$65.