On With the Show : Our man goes out on the dinner-theater circuit and comes back with a half-baked story.

The steak had traveled a distance.

When chicken arrived in its place, the server was dispatched upon a search.

But where?

Seats at the Ventura Concert Theatre filled for the Gregg Allman show and, down front, where folding tables form a makeshift dining area below the stage, noise and smoke and laughter formed a great blur.

“Here!” a flailing diner called out from two rows away.

“Here!”

Sure enough, he had the steak. It was surrendered--passed overhead like a hot dog at the ballpark--and arrived daggered with a Popsicle stick reading “medium well.”

But medium rare was ordered. Oh, well. It’s late. Sending it back to the kitchen would put things well into the darkness of a boisterous rock ‘n’ roll show--and who knows how well that would go? What are the odds of finding one’s server once an ear-crushing band takes the stage?

So goes the haute cuisine experience at the Ventura Concert Theatre.

You needn’t eat here, of course. The place is a concert venue, not a restaurant.

But the best seats in the house--that is, the front third of the auditorium--are reserved for those willing to fork out $20 or more for an entree, a beer and a tip. That’s in addition to the concert ticket charge.

The hard truth? You need to eat here if you care about seeing the performance up close and intimate. For a couple taking the time to drive north from Thousand Oaks or Simi to hear Emmylou Harris, for example, another $40 ensures that all the trouble and planning are worth it.

It’s an odd calculus, one that pairs concert-goers with food that is mediocre at best and at times downright disastrous. But the symbiosis is clear: Diners have the “opportunity” to buy a better seat, and the theater, by selling food, gets to exact a premium on those seats.

Enjoy that steak.

Two other venues in Ventura County--Ottavio’s Dinner Theater in Camarillo and Wheeler Hot Springs in Ojai--serve food before performances. The level of the cooking in these two places well surpasses that of the Ventura Concert Theatre. But they still operate on largely the same premise: Eat and be entertained.

In the case of Ottavio’s, which sells classic dinner theater, you have no choice: You dine or don’t get to watch, say, Neil Simon’s “Prisoner of Second Avenue.”

Dining is somewhat easier here, as the dinner theater is related to the popular Ottavio’s Italian restaurant on Ventura Freeway in Camarillo. But the buffet is not without its hazards and dislocations (see reviews that follow).

At Wheeler Hot Springs, special dinner/musical performance series are launched twice a week. While patrons are occasionally admitted to the performances at the very last minute, these events are designed as single dining/entertainment packages and require advance reservations. Dining here is easily best of all, for the Wheeler kitchen is in business on other nights as a fine restaurant. But it comes at a heftier price.

The choice by these three institutions to offer the combo deal is not an aesthetic one, though in some cases you may feel richly rewarded culinarily and culturally.

The choice, instead, is about money.

Tom Marshall, Wheeler’s general manager, is plain on the point.

“We used to make it optional, where you could come in for the show only,” he said. “But often, we didn’t sell enough dinners that way, and we couldn’t make it. The shows just didn’t pay for themselves.”

Indeed, the shows don’t come cheap. At Wheeler they are often top-shelf, the kind you would expect in the prime concert venues of Los Angeles or New York. Tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson is a case in point.

He appeared with a quartet recently, and the show, with a three-course dinner, was $50, wine and tip not included. The result: A couple, after buying a $30 bottle of wine (optional), could expect to leave $160 on the table. At that level, you’d better be pretty happy with Wheeler’s food as well as Henderson’s sonic excursions.

The great American chef James Beard is credited with the line, “Food is theater.” He was not, of course, invoking the purchase of hotel food as a way to see Tony Randall perform on the dinner theater circuit.

He was instead referring to the manner in which food and its preparation enchant: both the cook and the cooked-for. And the way it inspires good conversation. Food, and the behavior of those involved with it, was to Beard inherently dramatic.

Is it even possible, then, for food at the stage theater or food at the rock concert to rise to Beard’s axiom?

While that would certainly be the best of all worlds, the truth is prickly: Tragedy and comedy--as well as inspiration--stalk meals in Ventura’s combo houses.

For better and worse, they are among the prime cultural destinations in Ventura County.

OTTAVIO’S DINNER THEATER

The doors open for dinner at 6:30 p.m., but don’t expect to see food, in the form of a wan iceberg lettuce salad, until 7. This first half an hour, evidently, is get-acquainted time for you and your table mates--and time enough to order a drink that is not included in the $25 package fee.

You will be assigned a table upon arriving and led to it. Be mindful of where the stage area is so that you don’t seat yourself facing away from it.

It becomes immediately clear that the performance, at 8, is a long way off.

At 7, shortly after the salad arrives, there are two events: the arrival of hot, puffy dinner rolls and the introduction of two child singers who, as you negotiate huge croutons and excavate viscous ranch dressing from lettuce, croon Whitney Houston hits to prerecorded background music at ear-piercing levels.

All conversation is stopped; eight people around the table, drowned out by the sound, appear as if in a silent movie, chewing salad and carefully removing butter pats from gold-foil wrappings. It is only 7:15. Bon appetit.

Other tables are being called to the buffet, but yours is among the last in sequence. Finally, at 7:30, you face a bank of trays near the door where you first entered.

In fact, the woman who took your money at the door now faces you with a large steel serving spoon, suspended over the pasta tray, waiting for your cue as to which dish you’ll try: chicken, engulfed in a heavy white cream sauce that goes blip-blip-blip in the pan; salmon filet beneath paper-thin lemon slices; pasta shells in tomato sauce with green peppers, and plain sauteed zucchini with oregano and other mixed Italian herbs. You’ll try everything, thank you, carbo-loading for comfort, for survival.

The simplest is best: zucchini. It is firm, miraculously undercooked for the buffet, and extremely flavorful. The salmon hurts: It’s dry, overcooked, and tastes as stale and metallic as it looks fresh and rosy, set off so wonderfully by all that fresh lemon. The shells in tomato sauce are acceptable, decent, safe--nothing more, nothing less. Only the chicken breasts, cut into quarters, are cooked properly, but, alas, they are lost in cream sauce.

The singing has stopped. It is 7:50 p.m. Coffee and dessert arrive, and with it a palpable relief that one might finally recede from this banquet of strangers into semi-darkness and enjoy the magic of live theater. But curtain time doesn’t seem, ever, to arrive.

And so for the next half an hour, you have plenty of light by which to excavate the kitschiest of Italian desserts, neatly balled and placed in a ‘50s Jell-O cup: pistachio and chocolate ice cream flecked with bits of fire-engine-red maraschino cherries, topped by a jagged spurt of canned whipped cream.

At 8:20, one hour and 40 minutes after arriving, the lights go down. And they do so much faster and more smoothly than dinner did.

VENTURA CONCERT THEATRE

Timing is a problem at the Ventura theater. Pilgrims showing up for the big shows, billed for 8 p.m. kickoff, start lining up outside at 6 p.m. And the house will advise that you show up at that time if dinner is in your plans.

But the doors opened at 6:30, and we couldn’t find a waitress till 7:10 p.m. When we did, we ordered a plate of nachos ($5.95), as listed on the menu, but were told, “You can’t get those till after 8:30.”

OK. Time to punt.

So we start with mozzarella cheese sticks ($5.95), slim, prefab tubules of flavorless cheese cloaked in unseasoned heavy batter jackets. The only thing they inspire are thoughts of a deep-freeze hotel supplier in Akron, Ohio. Sauteed mushrooms ($4.95), an unappealing, shiny brown pile of them, arrive entirely, and inexplicably, without flavor. Pass the salt; hello, blood pressure.

The steak ($13.95), after finding its rightful keeper, is overcooked, flavorless, leathery. The fish special is thresher shark ($11.95). While flavorsome, it is marred by a deep gash, dead center, the obvious mangling of an impatient chef who still got it wrong: The fish is raw in the center.

Curiously, both entrees are accompanied by impeccably fresh, perfectly cooked carrots--at this point a joy and a mystery. The baked potatoes too, are firm and properly cooked, if small, and generously laden with sour cream and chives. Only the paper-dry dinner rolls match the entrees in haplessness: They haven’t been sufficiently warmed back to life from whatever deep-cold storage space they were held in.

Minutes to show time, we seek solace in dessert, having left the dinners largely uneaten. Cheesecake ($3) is bland and, worse, frozen within. Apple pie, with decorative lattice crust on top, is a gluey, gooey supermarket version crowned with canned whipped cream.

Understand that realistic standards are being applied here.

A steak should have some flavor, fish should be cooked, cheese sticks should behave as if they were a dairy product, frozen pie should be thawed--and nachos, unless specified otherwise on the menu, should be available when listed on the menu.

Patrons of our acquaintance insist there are ways to dine here and be happy. Teriyaki chicken ($10.95) gets high marks from most who order it, though our sample was under-flavored and awfully skimpy.

We’re also told a reliable way to dine here is to keep things simple and just order the cheeseburger or chicken breast sandwich. Well, we’d love to.

But there’s a horrible Catch-22: These selections, the menu makes clear, are served only after 8:30 p.m. Good luck getting dinner seating that late--or, conversely, enjoy a burger at a concert nobody wants to attend.

By 9:30, when Gregg Allman finally takes the stage, you have rung up a tab of $45 per person, once the admission price is figured in. Blues music now takes on a new gustatory dimension.

WHEELER HOT SPRINGS

Is there anyone among us who does not like to come here?

Perched above Ojai at the beginning of the Los Padres National Forest, the setting is rugged, original, remote, restorative, beautiful. The dining room is a quiet, elegant, yet somehow rough-hewn country space that soothes. And the food, under the sure hand of chef Gael Lecolley, has reached heights that deeply satisfy.

Still, pairing this with entertainment in no way guarantees success.

The timing could be all wrong. The food could be “special edition,” or a scaled-down version lacking the polish and care of that offered from the restaurant’s main menu. Table service might be less attuned to the diner’s wish and instead fixated on maintaining a pre-performance schedule--all in the knowledge that it’s going to be a lousy tip night.

Happily, none of this comes to pass at Wheeler, which pulls off the dinner-entertainment combination with grace, aplomb and value.

The Celestial Trio, a fine harp/cello/flute confabulation from Los Angeles, anchored a recent Wednesday night classical series. Dinner seating commenced at 6, though diners trickled in till 7--none of it mattering, since you run on your own clock.

While the food itself is not scaled down, menu choices are. The package price of $45 includes a menu of two choices in each of three courses, typically soup or salad, fish or meat entree, and one of two desserts.

Salad arrives in perfect shape: a mix of four different leaves, impeccably washed and dried and lightly dressed in a herbaceous vinaigrette.

A generously cut New York strip steak, pan-seared bistro-style, arrives perfectly cooked (medium rare) and set adrift in an amber moat of piquant mustard-cream sauce.

Surrounding the steak is an artful medley of fresh vegetables, all fanned out along the rim: asparagus tips, French miniature green beans, a hollowed tomato half-filled with pearl onions and potato balls of like size. More starch, you ask? Freshly baked rosemary rolls are accompanied by a fragrant, earthy, black slush of crushed Kalamata olives, olive oil and garlic.

Call it before-theater, before-concert, before-anything eating--it is impressive. Only the dessert, a black currant mousse cake set off by tart fruit purees, fails to deliver in flavor what it did in dazzling visual presentation.

Wheeler, in being a prideful restaurant, has a terrifically drawn wine list. But the fairest values are in the full bottles, if you have enough in your party to drink one, as prices by the glass--from $6 for an everyday Old Creek Merlot to $12 for a good-but-not-epic-vintage Heitz Cabernet sauvignon--are gratuitously high.

If that’s the only setback, we’re still happy. The Wheeler package works so well.