RESTAURANT REVIEW : At the Hilton Inn in Oxnard, Hotel Food Can Be Fine Dining : In this place of polarities, choose the simplest appetizer and the most complicated entree.

Hotel Food. The words are a stunning indictment, outdone only by the words Airline Food. Either way, we all know the cuisine at its worst: pre-configured entrees microwaved from a deep freeze, jumped up for presentation with brightly colored sauces. No matter how good it looks, the taste is always the same: bland, stale, alien.

Word got out in recent months that Martin’s Fine Dining, the main dining room at the Oxnard Hilton Inn, was fighting the good fight by introducing a fresh, ambitious menu with distinctive California wines to boot.

They have done so. And while there are notable successes afoot at this highway hotel, the results in recent visits have been quite mixed.

The room is lovely: tufted, half-circle turquoise booths, crisp linens, soft lighting, a center area defined by a faux arbor of huge bleached beams. Midweek the place hops at lunch but barely tops a dozen diners for dinner. This is good news, actually, for the underwhelmed service is present, capable, solicitous.

The list of appetizers immediately reveals a culinary range from the everyday crowd-pleasing shrimp cocktail to a classically haute escargot champignon. Stick with the simplest, though.

The escargot ($6.95) are tender, properly cooked, but ponderously flavorless: nary a trace of garlic in their sauce, they sit atop insipid mushroom caps and beneath a mantle of browned doughy pastry. But the shrimp cocktail? Boiled and cooled to order, these jumbo crustaceans ($6.95) are sparklingly fresh, slightly underdone for perfect texture and sweetness, and set off by a horseradish-spiked dipping sauce.

Two of five menu appetizers involve oysters--Rockefeller and on the half-shell--but on two separate visits neither was available. Once is OK; twice is a tease. It would be better to offer them as a special, when available. The fifth option, smoked salmon ($6.95), in which apple-wood smoked fish arrives garnished with red onion, capers, chopped egg and cream cheese, is generous, fresh, bracing.

If soup is available, sign on. In recent visits the tomato/basil was bright, fragrant and flavorful, if a tad salty.

Entrees also show range, from a basic chicken piccata to a fussy salmon en croute papillon. Again, the results are mixed, but here they show a reverse truth: Complicated can be better.

The salmon en croute papillon ($16.95), by far the more ambitious dish, is truly excellent: the filet tender and flavorful, adrift in a delicate onion beurre blanc sauce and complemented, rather than cluttered, by a flaky puff pastry shell that encases fresh herbs and a brushing of olive oil.

But chicken piccata? The breast meat ($12.95), after proper sauteing, is adrift in cloying butter, caper and white wine sauce. This piccata is missing its kick, or perhaps enough lemon, as well as the recognition that any piccata, whether meat or fish, is about less treatment, not more.

As if to make the Hilton kitchen less readable still, a menu centerpiece arrives as one of the most visually arresting dishes but quickly grazes perilously close to the Hotel Food genre. Chicken Marzorati ($12.95) starts as a great notion: tricolored bell peppers and cheese form the stuffing of rolled chicken breast fillets, sauteed to a deep brown and set adrift in a rosy sweet-pepper puree. Sliced open on the bias and slightly fanned out, the entree dazzles the eye. But then the bottom falls out: No scent. No flavor. Tenderness and proper cooking are revealed as a rather morbid deconstruction commences, only to end in the question: How is this possible?

The same question would plague a menu standard: Steak au poivre ($16.95). Properly cooked to order, the meat lacked flavor. So, inexplicably, did the whole peppercorn sauce.

Desserts follow in the randomness. Lemon layer cake ($3.75) is quite good, light in the cake and tart in the icings. But chocolate chip cookie cheesecake ($3.75) has the haunting metallic edge that suggests it has spent too much time absorbing refrigerated air. A plain New York cheesecake ($3.75) proves trusty: fresh, dense and flavorful, if not memorable.

An unequivocal strong suit of the restaurant is its small but well-chosen wine list, with some excellent half-bottles offered, among them Wild Horse Chardonnay ($11) and Silverado Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon ($14). Wines by the glass are above par, as well, as in a Zaca Mesa Chardonnay for $4.25.

Clearly, Martin’s Fine Dining struggles to pull its act together in an opening-year shakeout. A great shrimp cocktail. A superb salmon filet in puff pastry. But a vapid stuffed chicken breast and a flavorless steak? Such polarities trap Martin’s in that ominous gray zone: a restaurant of originality and promise and just another dumb hotel dining room.

We’ve got our fingers crossed.

Details

* WHAT: Martin’s Fine Dining at the Oxnard Hilton Inn.

* WHEN: Lunch from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dinner from 4 to 10 p.m. Open seven days.

* WHERE: 600 E. Esplanade Drive, Oxnard, 485-9666

* COST: Dinner for two, food only: $25-$50.

* FYI: Major credit cards.