RESTAURANT REVIEW : Pigs in a Banquet : * Old Hickory BBQ, despite the name, doesn’t cook with hickory. But it still serves up a tasty barbecue.

Old Hickory BBQ inadvertently proves how important a good hardwood like hickory is in the barbecue equation. That’s be cause meats here are grilled over charcoal, rather than barbecued over smoking embers--a critical difference.

I just returned from a trip through the Carolinas, where barbecue is synonymous with pork shoulder cooked up to 10 hours over smoking hickory logs. The chef at Old Hickory got a little defensive when I asked him whether he used real hickory. “Don’t judge us until you taste our food,” he said.

Fair enough, I thought, ordering up some baby backs, barbecued chicken and hot links. The meats came up perfectly charred and very well sauced. Although there is no substitute, to my mind, for the use of wood, which imparts complex, almost magical flavors to certain meats, Old Hickory BBQ is a solid neighborhood restaurant, with lots of tasty entrees and side dishes.

It’s a tiny, crowded place with a counter and a handful of high tables and oversize stools, so it is no wonder that most of the business is takeout. Perhaps you shouldn’t visit when you are in a hurry: There is often a logjam at the small counter, since much of the menu is prepared to order. One Saturday evening, one of the few other seated parties remarked to us, rather wryly, that we would have time to go home, shower and shave before the food arrived.

Start off with the restaurant’s Louisiana gumbo, a murky broth simmered for an entire day. This is one of the San Fernando Valley’s best gumbos, chock full of shrimp, corn, okra, spicy rice and sliced sausage, plus a heavy pinch of bay leaf. Half a pint, the smallest portion sold here, goes further than you might think, making a hearty appetizer for two.

Most entrees come with a choice of good side dishes. The fine, slightly lumpy mashed potatoes are doused with a russet-colored gravy. Soft, sweet collard greens are cooked with bits of smoked ham--moist, fresh-tasting and relatively free of bitterness. Corn on the cob comes up piping hot and perfectly cooked. There are also starchy black-eyed peas, staring up at you from little paper cups. Even the hush puppies will please you--these fried cornmeal golf balls, studded with bits of onion, explode with a burst of steam when you bite into them.

The best barbecue dish here is the one featuring baby back ribs, even if the ribs Old Hickory BBQ uses look larger than you might expect from a “baby” pig. These are fall-off-the-bone tender ribs, with a bit of dark red sauce cooked into the meat. And you just may want to smother them with the sweet-tart, oddly spiced barbecue sauce that owner Leon Meade has concocted. It’s one of the most unusual and distinctive sauces I’ve tasted.

*

Chicken, the meat that misses hardwood barbecuing the least, is another good bet. Being more delicate than pork, chicken can absorb too much wood flavor when barbecued over hickory. In Meade’s hands, charcoal-grilled chicken is masterful: moist, juicy and artfully blackened.

The big disappointment here has to be the hot links. They remind me of ordinary hot dogs that have been cooked in spicy sauce before being blackened on a grill. They’re a far cry from the crumbly, spicy sausages you get at the better L.A. barbecues, such as Bennie’s, and not even up to the hot links you can buy at any supermarket.

Anyway, the fried chicken and catfish are excellent. The former is simply a great example of Southern fried chicken: moist, soft meat beneath a crunchy, peppery batter, just as you’d get in a genteel tearoom somewhere in the Deep South. The catfish has a different crunchy batter, this one made from cornmeal. It’s a generous portion, too, about three large fillets to an order.

If you can eat dessert after eating barbecue, Old Hickory BBQ has two available. Both are homey, Southern and as sweet as the law allows. The runny peach cobbler, served in a paper cup, looks like a fruit soup with bits of baking powder-rich biscuit and sliced peach bobbing up and down in it. The sweet potato pie is a simple, smoothly pureed filling on a flaky crust. To me, it’s the best dessert after eating pig, barbecued or grilled.

WHERE AND WHEN

Location: Old Hickory BBQ, 11715 Moorpark St., Studio City.

Suggested Dishes: Baby back ribs, $8.50; two pieces fried chicken, $4.75; hush puppies, $2; catfish fillet, $7; sweet potato pie, $2.

Hours: Lunch and dinner 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 3-9:30 p.m. Sunday.

Price: Dinner for two, $12-$20. Parking lot. No alcohol. Cash only.

Call: (818) 763-8414.