RESTAURANT REVIEW / LA LOUISIANNE EXPRESS : Ragin’ Good : Warmth radiates from this down-home place that specializes in the spicy dishes associated with New Orleans.

Cajun food swept across the country in the mid-1980s, with memorable ambassadors such as the prodigiously talented and proportioned chef Paul Prudhomme appearing everywhere--on network TV as well as at humble department store demonstrations.

Cajun food, it was clear, was ready for its mainstream niche: American cuisine, largely Californian, had created a climate of readiness for regional specialties. And who better than those ragin’ Cajuns to jam the American dinner table with truly distinctive, indigenous foodstuffs?

Well, the party faded. The result of the rage was blackened everything everywhere, with the industrial solvent Dixie beer treated as a ’70 Chateau Latour. Even Prudhomme’s New York City outpost, fashioned after his world-famous K-Paul’s Kitchen in New Orleans, folded once the fad, like the frequently mishandled iron-pan spicing, flamed out.

Now comes another ragin’ Cajun, Steve Stieffel. Only this time, he’s not selling a fad or, as fad victim, attempting to overcoat everything in black and cheerfully insist, as diners self-immolate, “Y’all are now in the French Quarter and having a good time!”

The guy is a former Simi Valley car salesman, for starters, although some years ago he did serve as bartender at Brennan’s and Antoine’s, two of New Orleans’ more famous restaurants; he drifted into restaurateuring only after his weekend dinner guests in California, glowing and satiated, suggested his new career. Now, Stieffel, with his Shanghai-born wife, Sharri, acts as caretaker in the faithful cooking of his family’s guarded Gulf Coast recipes. The results, happily, can be stunning.

Stieffel and his wife do this in a modest, 24-seat storefront called La Louisianne Express. It is situated in a Simi Valley strip mall, next to a dry cleaner and 7-Eleven and facing the backside of a gas station. The interior is more commodious, if still no prom-night memory: metal frame chairs at diner-style tables on a tile floor, with overhead lighting and wall-mounted plastic billboard menu serving the ample take-out crowd.

But go and dine in. The few atmospheric touches--obligatory Mardi Gras posters, a framed instruction sheet on how to properly behead and eat boiled crawfish, and less-than-professional vacation snapshots of rainy New Orleans placed beneath tabletop glass--only announce the place’s lack of calculation and lend it warmth.

Warmth, indeed, is a major point here. Cajun spicing is, along with Indian food, as complex as personality. But its goal is simple: If something is to be billed as “spicy” or “hot”--a gumbo; an etouffee; yes, even, a pan-blackened fish--the heat must come from the deep and arrive on the palate slowly, building by accrual. What’s the food worth if you can’t taste it because of an instantly blow-torched mouth?

One bite of the pan-blackened red snapper ($9.95), ordered to “medium” spicing, made the case for La Louisianne. The fish, while not the super-pricey Gulf redfish for which blackening was originally conceived and then so often abused, is Gulf snapper nonetheless, sweeter and more tender than its Pacific cousin.

Two large filets arrived cloaked in dry black. One pierce of the fork and clear briny juice flooded out. The meat was delicate and fragrant, and set off all the more by the slowly detonating heat of perfectly balanced spices.

The accompaniment of “house rice” was the classic New Orleans’ “dirty rice”: dry white grains stained with pan-seared pepper, lower voltage than those on the fish and oddly refreshing in counterpoint.

Not everything is as successful. But two other dishes do compete for a rightful crown at La Louisianne.

Frogs legs were, at $6.95, an unspeakable bargain, as all entrees here include house soup (a thin, pleasant enough tomato broth with cabbage) and garlic bread (alas, no punch). A large portion--did I count six full legs?--arrived pan-sauteed in a dense, buttery seafood-stock and vegetable reduction.

The result was clearly defined flavor: in the succulent meat, in the vivid sauce. No breading. No frying. A reductive treatment, yet ordered to “medium spice,” with the kind of slow-to-build heat that puts lights under everything.

Then, the oysters. Available as an appetizer ($3.50; you get four) or dinner ($9.95; seven or eight, depending upon size). Not since the Acme Oyster Bar, in New Orleans, have I seen such large and sparkling mollusks, here wrapped in a light batter and quickly deep-fried, so that the delicate folds of the oyster emerge bursting with sweet brine. Dipped in a horseradish-spiked cocktail sauce, these humbly billed “Fried Oysters” are an authentic, indigenous treat, as troublesome to the eye as a leaden row of bloated egg rolls yet explosive in flavor and light texture. They’re a happy deception.

Oddly, the more obvious Cajun dishes at La Louisianne are those that just miss the mark. A slow-cooked chicken-sausage gumbo ($5.95) had everything in the flavor department, with deep heat rising from its dark roux and bright vegetable saucing; its few lonely bits of meat, however, needed bolstering.

Crawfish etouffee ($6.95), in a compelling tomato-based vegetable sauce, suffered similarly: too few of the fresh-water morsels, and those that did emerge were overwhelmed by dense sauce.

Closer to the mark was the bedrock dish of the entire cuisine: red beans and rice ($5.95). A rather severe rendering--firm beans, thin liquid, plenty of white rice--the flavor was deep and rich and wide from smoked ham hocks and sausage. While the menu promised more meat than arrived, one can’t complain about something as rustic and satisfying as this.

Pass on the seafood salad appetizer ($2.95); a few filets of sweet shrimp and bits of flavorless crab are lost in a field of iceberg lettuce beneath a mantle of viscous ranch dressing. Pass over the flavorless, limp broccoli as a side dish, electing instead the down-home hush puppies. And crab cakes ($3.95), another classic of the genre, suffer from pasty filling and a tough breading encasement that dominates.

But the shrimp cocktail appetizer ($4) is among the best I have encountered. Though only medium-sized, the shrimp are so tasty from the Cajun brew that cocktail sauce is elective, if not an intrusion.

Chosen well, the food at La Louisianne Express is the real thing and even better. And you will leave La Louisianne full and deeply satisfied with just an entree.

But you will also be making a terrible mistake in missing the bread pudding with whiskey sauce ($1.50). It is of the “set-up” variety--firm, dense, decadently rich and nearly overwhelming in its moat of sweet yet edgy whiskey-spiked liquid.

A cup of chickory-laced coffee ($.70), the same charry fog-cutter dispensed like medicine at Cafe du Monde on New Orleans’ Jackson Square, is the perfect foil.

Steve and Sharri Stieffel bring honor to the Cajun tradition at more than competitive prices. It’s as if they never noticed that the Cajun rage very nearly succeeded in burning things up altogether.

* WHERE AND WHEN

La Louisianne Express, 1854 Cochran St., Simi Valley; 582-2026. No bar. Open for lunch and dinner from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, and till 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Closed Monday. Reservations not accepted. Visa and Mastercard accepted. Dinner for two averages $22.