RESTAURANT REVIEW : The Royal Treatment: Bold, Simple Lunch : Bakery in Ventura, which has experienced strong popularity in the months since it opened, offers a meal at an attractive price.

Finding the simple and good at lunch is often an arduous and bad experience.

So many lunch menus are nothing more than dumbed-down dinner menus--a cop-out when you consider that lunch is its own culinary genre, designed around the great sandwich and the great bowl of soup.

Although some restaurants still post true lunch menus, they mar their offerings with bogus, insipid ingredients--my favorite among the deceptions being sliced processed loaf turkey instead of the carved real thing.

Plainly, the good lunch spot is hard to find.

Now comes Royal Bakery, modestly situated at the corner of a mall on Telephone Road in Ventura. The Royal is doing it right: It treats lunch with simplicity, boldness and authenticity in the ingredients. The result, taken in spare white surroundings on cafe tables indoors and out, is altogether restorative. And the Royal, despite a recent downsizing of some portions owing to feverish popularity in the first honeymoon months of its being open, does lunch for an attractive price.

Start with one of the soups ($2.95), which change daily. Always they are dense, milled to a coarse texture, fragrant with fresh herbs.

Cream of tomato, so debased in its form as perhaps the most popular canned soup in American supermarkets, recovers its essence: Pink, lustrous cream-and-fresh-tomato broth is buoyed by black pepper and the sweet pungency of basil. Corn chowder is thick, heavy on the freshly peeled mashed potatoes and whole kernel corn--a rendering so rustic as to be straight from Iowa. Only cream of mushroom lacks oomph, but then the mushrooms are fresh and firm, the broth silken and faintly woodsy.

Sandwiches are accompanied by a salad of mixed, supermarket-style greens, but the leaves are sparkling fresh and spiked with crumbled feta cheese and toasted pine nuts. Caesar salad is available for $3.95, and it is quite presentable: fresh in the romaine with real bite in the dressing.

The turkey club sandwich ($5), simply named and fabulously constructed, is the real article: freshly carved breast meat of roasted bird topped by crisp bacon, lettuce or mayonnaise on bakery French bread or whole wheat. (This is the outsize sandwich, I believe, that drew in the initial throngs and now has been cut back in scale and weight. Still, it remains a fine sandwich and a fair deal.)

A frequent sandwich special is curried chicken ($4.75), a humdrum name that fails to communicate a terrific freshness and complexity achieved by the incorporation into the mix of crisp green apples and raisins. Yes, the chicken is the real thing: carved from birds, not sliced from processed rolls. Tuna salad ($4.50) is a bit more run-of-the-mill but perfectly adequate, as over-the-counter tuna goes, if you can abide the incorporation of chopped sweet pickle.

A worthy soup-and-salad deal is the $4 combination, featuring a bowl of soup and a half sandwich of your choice.

The Royal expands its lunch menu by offering fresh individual pizzas and a variety of quiches. Both can be excellent, and both can be lackluster--so you’re more on your own here. A recent sun-dried tomato pizza with three cheeses, goat among them, was quite good: firm, yeasty crust, pungent cheeses, generous slices of sun-dried fruit. But a barbecued chicken pizza--dried out, lacking flavor--wasn’t nearly as successful.

A mushroom and fresh-herb quiche was stunning in its joining of rich egg filling with light, fragrant mushrooms in a frothy mix. A sausage quiche, while adequate, was sodden and without such magic.

Once in awhile, the Royal’s kitchen stretches even further, crossing the line into dinner-style entrees. On a recent visit, one such dish, listed as a blackboard special, was linguine with cream, sherry, Dijon mustard, capers, sweet red peppers and seared chicken.

The good news: For $5.95, you can get a mammoth portion of properly cooked pasta with a rich, flavorsome sauce. The bad news: It’s actually too flavorful (too concentrated in the sharp combination of mustard and capers), too rich, too heavy, too, too, too. For the person who wants a large lunch, though, it may be worth a go. In any event, it’s clear that real talent lurks about this humble bakery kitchen.

Desserts here form a universe far larger than the usual: The Royal was and is first a bakery, and so pastries, cookies and cakes of every stripe abound. The results are of uniformly high quality. Of course, if a simple lunch is your mission, you might instead prefer an espresso or cappuccino, each brewed competently.

The Royal continues to adjust to its newfound popularity, and it will be critical in the coming months that the place find stability in portions and prices. So much works well now--the delightful staff bears mention here--that it would be a shame to falter under the crush of people grateful for the simple, good lunch.

Details

* WHAT: Royal Bakery and Cafe.

* WHERE: 4726 Telephone Road, Ventura, 654-9104, 658-6030.

* WHEN: Lunch from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Phone orders welcome.

* FYI: Lunch for two, food only, $10 to $18.