RESTAURANT REVIEW : Stick to the Cactus : The fat spears coated with a spicy batter and plunged into a deep fryer, are the single best reason to seek out Wild Bill’s Bar-B-Que.

Maybe it’s because we’re stuck with a growing number of sticky AQMD regulations, or maybe it just takes so much time and effort. Whatever the reason, the art of the hardwood pit barbecue seems to be fading during the ‘90s.

Most of our reasonably priced barbecue restaurants seem to have forgotten the old-fashioned method of stoking embers in a pit until the sun goes down. Some of the more ambitious ones flavor their meats with wood chips bought from commercial suppliers. Still others merely bake or broil in the oven, and so what if the flame is provided by the local gas company?

This brings us to Wild Bill’s Bar-B-Que, situated in a funky section of North Hollywood. Drive up Cahuenga to get here and you pass small, quirky restaurants with names like Le Fun Cafe and Lee’s Yum Yum Chinese-Muy Bueno.

Wild Bill’s does its part to add to upper Vineland’s quirkiness. It’s an odd-shaped white stucco shack, painted up on the outside with tall saguaro cacti the exact shade of Kermit the Frog. Inside, it looks more or less like any tourist-trappy Southwestern cafe. The floors are strewn with peanut shells, the walls adorned with posters of Wild Bill Cody, Willie Nelson, John Wayne, 10-gallon hats and general Western hokum.

I might also mention that it feels like Trigger’s stall in here. The dining space is all of three seats at the counter and several tables jammed together just past the front door. A great deal of the business is takeout, but as the restaurant is open 24 hours a day (another vanishing species), expect a wide mix of characters sitting at these tables.

When you see a good number of them eating cactus, though, don’t attribute that to eccentricity. Callie Mae’s cactus twigs are a tangle of fat spears of sweetly medicinal nopalito cactus, coated with a crusty, spicy cornmeal batter and plunged into a deep fryer for the perfect amount of time. This is great cooking in what is at best an average restaurant. The cactus twigs don’t need anything, but lots of customers slop them up with the restaurant’s “flamin’ Injun hot sauce,” which my seismologist/hot sauce freak friend rates at about a 7.0 on the Richter scale. The twigs are the single best reason to come here, unless it is 4 a.m. and you’ve got a craving for ‘cue.

If you do get that craving, take note. Meats are slow-cooked here, all right--but not, as you may have guessed, in a wood pit. Off in one corner of the open kitchen area, you can see the white, two-foot-square Nesco roaster oven, a contraption that looks like it has more miles on it than Willie Nelson. The meats cook in here for up to nine hours, and I will concede they are fall-off-the-bone tender.

The barbecue sampler plate gives you one big beef rib, a couple of pork ribs and half a chicken, and the meats, are, well, different. The soft beef rib comes off best, perhaps due to the grainy texture of the meat, but the pork ribs lose something in translation, the meat curling up and shrinking away from the bone. The chicken tastes stewed, the meat slightly dried out the way boiled chicken can get. I actually like it, but it is definitely not for purists.

It’s a better idea to order shredded or chopped meat here, drenched in sauce inside a chewy bun. Billy the Kid’s chopped pork sandwich has all the good flavor of slow-cooked meat, but it doesn’t remind you of its humble origins in the roaster oven. Wild Bill’s shredded beef sandwich is sort of a Western-style sloppy Joe with a sweet barbecue sauce that needs to grow up a little.

Pass on the tired (and pricey) buffalo burger, real USDA buffalo meat according to the menu. Big deal. If buffalo were as good as beef, we’d be eating it all the time. I can go either way with regard to the BBQ hot links. They taste OK, but I can’t get over the fact that they are deep-fried. Sausage, in any form, is fatty enough.

To the side dishes. Outlaw ranch fries are fat slabs of potatoes lightly dusted with spices. Black Bart’s BBQ beans are your basic baked beans, overcooked, cloying and earthy. And then there is the dry, chunky, faintly sweet wild Indian cole slaw--tasty, though actually rather tame.

Me, I’m having another helping of cactus twigs. Even if it is 4 in the morning.

WHERE AND WHEN

* Location: Wild Bill’s Bar-B-Que, 5342 Vineland Ave., North Hollywood.

* Suggested Dishes: Wild Indian cole slaw, $1.50; Callie Mae’s cactus twigs, $4; Billy the Kid’s chopped pork sandwich, $4.50; BBQ sampler, $7.50.

* Hours: Open 24 hours daily.

* Price: Dinner for two, $12 to $18. Limited parking in side lot. No alcohol. MasterCard and Visa.

* Call: (818) 752-4557.