RESTAURANT REVIEW : Terrace Caffe Aims to Satisfy, Not Excite : Fine-tuning will help the new eatery capitalize on its well prepared, moderately priced bistro menu.

Mammoth Lakes restaurateur Les Sarantinos had it with the cold and the snow sometime last year. So he came south and opened Terrace Caffe in Thousand Oaks. He’s happier with the climes now.

We can all be happier that he’s here.

The Terrace is an oddity in these parts: a smartly turned out bistro featuring eclectic American cuisine at low to moderate prices. True to the bistro tradition, the place is open seven days for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and features a small, focused menu for each.

It is clear, as a result, that Sarantinos intends that his new baby become an old standby rather than a flash-in-the-pan, a dependable yet stylish nexus for the shopping and moviegoing crowd rather than special occasion hoopla house. That is good in the sense that the Terrace purposefully limits itself to a straightforward, homey cuisine.

But it also means the Terrace does not reach for dramatic culinary heights. Indeed, the food in several recent visits hewed more to the simply satisfying than memorably exciting--and one dinner along the way was a plain flop. Overall, however, the batting average is high, and so the Terrace earns a solid place among those leading Ventura County restaurants that clearly establish a considered approach and deliver on it most of the time.

Start with onion soup ($3.50), a dense broth sweetened by the loads of fresh onion and topped (lightly, for once) with cheese. Pass on the clam chowder, Manhattan-style, which is a pleasant enough stew of fresh vegetables but light on clam flavor and bore one--1, to digitize it--clam bit.

The most dependable appetizer is the quesadilla ($4.95), conventional in its combination of jack and Cheddar cheeses, green chilies and sour cream but done so freshly and well that the commonplace becomes distinctive. You won’t do badly, either, to start with a Caesar salad ($5.95 as a virtual meal or an alternate to an included dinner salad), even if its pleasantly pungent dressing is prepared ahead of time.

The single best entree in recent visits was the chicken brochette ($8.95). This dish vexes the most able of chefs because its skewered ingredients--marinated white-meat chicken, onion, bell peppers, zucchini--all cook at different rates. But here everything comes out right: tender, flavorful, just-cooked chicken and vegetables that manage to remain al dente. Placed alongside perfect rice and herbaceous, sauteed zucchini and fresh tomato pieces, the dish best captures the Terrace’s pared down but sophisticated bistro style. It is also a dinner bargain at this price.

Grilled salmon, a special ($11.95) one night, was a generous belly cut, perfectly cooked, and set adrift in a light dill sauce. Marring the presentation and jarring the flavor, however, was the kitchen’s incongruous ladling of brown gravy over the accompanying mashed potatoes. (The server would have done well to ask first before doing the generic home-style treatment to every dish.) Grilled halibut steak with herbed butter ($11.95) was perfectly turned out and presented.

Ironically, the great flop, an apparent anomaly, was the dish that probably begot the original bistro: grilled half chicken ($9.75). The Terrace’s menu identifies this entree as garlic chicken that is “prepared in limited quantity . . . to ensure freshness.” What arrived on the plate, however, was the opposite: old precooked chicken that had done so much heated-up, hang-around time that the meat was dry, stringy, overcooked, flavorless. Had garlic ever been present, it was cooked away completely.

A delightful choice from among a half-dozen or so pastas available is the classic, simple cappellini with tomatoes and fresh garlic ($8.25). This is an epic portion of firm angel hair pasta fragrant with fresh basil. The dish is restorative, light, true to its essential flavors.

Desserts show well. Both pecan pie and apple pie are fresh, intensely focused in flavor, and, in a show of intelligent restraint, veer to the sparer side of sweetening. Indeed, the apple pie, tart and crunchy in the pile of thin-sliced fruit, masquerades as health food with a mile-high granola crunch topping.

The Terrace has a small list of California wines chosen as much for their bistro-right price points as their worthiness. To wit, the always pleasing Kendall Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay tops out the list at $18. Happily, all wines are available by the glass, from $3.25 for a Spanish sparkler to $4.95 for the KJ Chardonnay.

With some fine tuning, Terrace Caffe will easily capitalize on the position it has begun to secure in a market that needs a dependable, cheerful, moderately priced bistro.

Details

* WHAT: Terrace Caffe.

* WHERE: 105 Brazil St., Thousand Oaks, 379-3811.

* WHEN: Open seven days for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.; 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

* FYI: Major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only: $25 to $40.