RESTAURANT REVIEW : The Real Accent’s on Good Food : Tartine’s name is a bit pretentious, but the French restaurant takes its cooking seriously.

Maybe the accent aigu over the final e in Tartine (say “tart-teen-nay”) is intended to give the restaurant a Continental image. Actually, it makes the place sound a whole lot stuffier than it really is.

It’s actually fun, so I didn’t really want to confront the waitresses with the fact that in France, a tartine (minus the accent) is a time-honored snack of toast topped with either cheese or jam, pure kid food and usually irresistible. Add the accent and . . . well, hey, you’ve got something Inspector Clouseau might order. Lose that accent, kids.

But by any name, Tartine looks like a Mediterranean oasis, sticking up from the concrete wasteland of Ventura Boulevard near the corner of Canoga Avenue. It’s a pink-walled, marble-floored villa that you’d swear belonged in the Cote d’Azur, and it happens to be one of the nicest places in the West Valley for a light meal.

They take their cooking seriously at Tartine. Right by the door there is a table with the latest issues of Bon Appetit and Eating Well for your perusal, and both the breakfast and all-day menus are dominated by swatches of colorful comestibles like basil, feta, chopped tomato and eggplant.

I actually arrived here several months too late. The restaurant was serving fried green tomatoes while the movie of the same name was sweeping the area, and I promised myself I would get over there and try a plateful. No such luck. The dish is off the menu at present.

A few of us did arrive in time for breakfast one morning, though, and I can’t say enough about that. We ordered what the menu called frittatas and feasted on them, even if these were not very Italian. Frittata is supposed to be a thick fried cake of eggs and vegetables, but these are pretty thin, more like what you’d get in Spain if you asked for a tortilla, though they do taste great.

The best one at Tartine is made with sun-dried tomato, goat cheese, eggplant and marinated artichoke, and the components taste fresh, as if they had been added at the last minute. A heartier version is made with grilled potato, onion, tomato, bacon and cheese--fine, but perhaps a bit redundant. State-of-the-art, razor-thin grilled potato and onions, dripping with butter, comes as a side dish with either.

If you come too late for the good, buttery scones, fresh-squeezed juices or iced or hot espresso drinks, however, there is a huge lunch and dinner menu to console yourself with. Pizzas are especially good here, with moderately thin crust that bubbles up nicely around the edges. Pizza Tartine is made with fresh tomato, mozzarella, spiced, sauteed beef, red pepper and sweet basil. Pizza ratatouille sounds a bit crazy, topped as it is with a piquant Provencal vegetable stew of eggplant, peppers and olive oil, but works nicely. My choice would be pizza Mediterranean, which has the same ingredients as the first frittata mentioned.

At lunch, most people seem to stick to the salads and sandwiches, and I’d have to agree with them. Several salads, notably a shrimp salad and a spinach salad made with fresh turkey, have a refreshing, creamy herb dressing that is positively loaded with fresh dill. Dill dissenters can try an interesting rice salad made with chicken and a vinaigrette dressing, a credible, feta-rich Greek salad with a lemon dressing or an assortment of pasta salads.

Pastas and entrees are more commonly ordered during the evening here, despite being available throughout the day. Some entrees, such as Tex-Mex steak--a filet mignon with green pepper, tomato, onion and jalapeno--are too heavy for my kind of lunch. That goes double for the dreary desserts: creamy tortes trucked in from heaven knows where, unappetizingly displayed in a refrigerator case. See whether you can talk the kitchen into whipping up a tartine instead.

WHERE and WHEN

Location: Tartine, 21826 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills.

Suggested Dishes: Frittata with sun-dried tomato, $6.95; pizza Mediterranean, $8.50; shrimp salad, $5.50; turkey burger, $6.60.

Hours: Breakfast 7:30-11 a.m. Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-noon Saturday, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Sunday; lunch and dinner 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10:30 p.m. Friday, noon-10:30 p.m. Saturday and 2-9 p.m. Sunday.

Price: Lunch for two, $17-$25. Beer and wine. Parking lot. All major credit cards.

Call: (818) 887-6353.