RESTAURANT REVIEW : Barbecue Pays Off for Patrons and Owners : The Wood Ranch BBQ & Grill offers affordable meals that feature high quality and huge portions.

Wood Ranch BBQ & Grill opened near the junction of the Simi Valley and the Moorpark freeways roughly two years ago. There was little need for yet another barbecue emporium in rib-heavy Ventura County. Worse, the restaurant climate for newcomers back then was even bleaker than it is now: savagely competitive, ruthlessly Darwinian in allowing only the fittest--and fattest--to survive.

But Wood Ranch BBQ has more than survived. It has flourished.

It is full most every night and so jammed on weekends as to dispense vibrating beeper devices to which patrons can respond, perhaps after a half-hour wait, for their tables. Wood Ranch plans to multiply, with a second Ventura County restaurant now in lease-negotiation stages.

One of the owners of Wood Ranch BBQ is Eric Anders. He brings to restaurateuring a keen sense of the marketplace, perhaps honed during his MBA days at UCLA. As a result, he espouses--and delivers on--a simple premise so “revolutionary” as to be lost on many a beleaguered restaurateur: The customer must not only be happy but feel he or she gains more from the dinner investment than he or she pays out.

Translation: high quality and huge portions in a changing, upbeat environment you can afford to take the family to.

It’s worked. The food is at worst only good and often excellent--though reference-quality barbecue is found elsewhere. The prices are extremely competitive and, in some conspicuous instances at the menu’s higher end, loss-leader low. And the tasteful Western-themed environment is unfailingly clean and cheery, the staff trained and helpful, the menu and cocktail specials changed enough to keep things interesting.

For someone who abhors the formula restaurant as unoriginal and a chronic bore, I gladly nod my cap--nay, my Texas wide-brim--to Wood Ranch BBQ.

Indeed, the single best reason to go is for the most popular entree: Tri Tip Roast ($10.95), or tri tip as few have ever seen it. It’s a fatless, 1.5-inch-thick mignon, a veritable bunker of meat wood-roasted outside and rosy within. It is tender, richly and smokily flavored, so plentiful that those capable of finishing it might wish to volunteer for a cardiac endurance study. Only its sauce--a too-sweet, gutless, middle-of-the-road barbecue confection--lacks punch, but then it seems sauce everywhere does nowadays.

Second-best on the menu does rank first, however, as best value. Baby back pork ribs--a full, sprawling rack of Curly’s of Iowa ribs, which means exceptionally sweet and tender and meaty--costs just $12.95, a good 30% below fair-market price. Better still, they are in perfect shape: lightly, slowly roasted to preserve juice and flavor. But there’s that sauce again.

Half barbecued chicken ($7.95), that of a very large chicken, was overcooked and dry on one visit and in very good, though still precooked, shape the next. Prime rib beef ribs ($8.50) also proved troublesome: as an all-you-can-eat special one night, the first batch was dry, slim in the pickings, tough from over-charring; but the follow-up batch, fewer in number, was generous and richly flavorsome in meat. Darn that sauce.

T-Bone porterhouse steak ($14.95), a 16-ouncer, was grilled perfectly as ordered, deeply flavored, and quite satisfying.

An appetizer not to be missed is Buffalo wings ($4.50). One of the country’s foremost purveyors of this vinegar-edged, incendiary dishes is situated in St. Louis, and so judgment fell to a picky St. Louis dining compatriot who proclaimed our wings “perfect.” I, rapturously lost in the embarrassingly tall pile of meaty wings before us, simply nodded.

Much ado is made here about shredded onions ($3.50), in which microfine onion shavings are breaded and fried, yielding a mound that looks like a huge curly brown wig. Sorry, I’ll pass--never before has the surface-to-vegetable frying ratio been higher. Worse, onion flavor was absent. A better appetizer is the Utah-sized chicken quesadilla ($5.95), nicely balanced in its white cheeses and green chilies.

Entrees are accompanied by a choice of sides, best among them a crisp Oriental-edged peanut coleslaw and heavy homemade-style mashed potatoes that bear the distinct flavor markings of creamed cheese. The fresh vegetable choice tended to be corn on the cob, often overcooked. Baked beans, if your hunger truly gapes, are nicely spiced and firm. Every table is laden with fresh garlic rolls salted, happily, without apology.

Beer always works well with pungent barbecue, but the scale and milder manners of Wood Ranch’s meals may call out for wine. The list is small and reasonably priced, with all choices available by the glass. The Fetzer Valley Oaks Cabernet Sauvignon ($13.95 for the bottle, $4.25 for a glass) stood up well to most menu selections. (Note: This counsel might change if Wood Ranch BBQ were to do the right thing and offer diners the choice of a deeply spiced barbecue sauce.)

In any event, go to Wood Ranch BBQ hungry. Bring the kids. Ask about specials-of-the-night. And leave feeling, without guilt, as though you’ve gotten slightly more than you paid for. That’s the plan. They’ve made it that way on purpose.

If you just can’t escape embarrassment, order in. They deliver.

Details

* WHAT: Wood Ranch BBQ & Grill

* WHERE: 540 New Los Angeles Ave., Moorpark, 523-7253.

* WHEN: Open seven days for lunch and dinner from 11 a.m. till 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and till 10 Friday and Saturday.

* FYI: Major credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, food only: $15-30.