RESTAURANT REVIEW : Lobster Trap Fails More Than It Succeeds : It’s a lively place, all right, but standards such as calamari rings and cioppino fall short. Thankfully, salmon and halibut prevail.

By every measure the Lobster Trap is a happening place: Gurgling water gardens on the way in. A throbbing live-music lounge adjacent to the dining room. Glassed-in dining seating that overlooks Channel Islands Harbor and what seems like miles of sailboat masts.

The people come in droves. They fill giant, tufted vinyl booths. They line up tables and have office parties. Businessmen in pairs argue animatedly. The young and in love swoon in the light of tabletop oil lamps. The old and in love, if not aswoon ogle at it all.

Everywhere, happy servers bounce along in ridiculous minishorts and incessantly ask: Everything all right?

No, actually.

Take the clam chowder ($3.50), touted on the menu as “a tradition at the Lobster Trap.” It is thicker than 50-weight motor oil; indeed, the spoon, stuck vertically into the gray-white goop, does stand up on its own. Let’s not even fish for the clam bits.

Take the house salad, touted as “garden fresh.” Carrot shavings are dry and porous, though ice-cold from refrigeration. Plain iceberg lettuce is awash in the server-recommended Chef Jose’s special Spanish dressing, a tomato-based concoction that, sadly, has commenced to ferment; its acidic, fizzy edge suggests too much storage time. Let’s not even try to assess flavor.

Take calamari rings ($5.95), a standard at any seafood restaurant and always a reliable gauge of the kitchen’s sensibility about freshness. Frying fresh squid is not exactly rocket science, but here the ringlets are lost in herbed batter that is so uniform and thick as to suggest prefabrication; wherever this squid comes from, it is without flavor, without redemption.

Let’s not continue in this vein.

What can be said about a place that operates on such a grand scale but flubs on the basics? While the Lobster Trap may be a room with a view, it is anything but a seafood restaurant that delivers on its considerable pretension.

Some dishes do work--though without particular distinction. Halibut en papillote ($17.95), in which a fresh fillet is baked in parchment with sherry, lemon juice, garlic and scallions, is fragrant, tender, sweet. But cioppino, touted as “the classic fisherman’s stew” and served up at a pricey $21.95, is a boring tomato-based fake. There is little complexity, little gusto, little flavor to a runny broth that has immersed mixed white fish chunks and shellfish.

Pacific salmon ($19.95), poached in white wine and serve with dill sauce, is cooked perfectly, though the sauce is thick and cloying. Orange roughy ($16.95), described as sauteed in lemon butter, is actually prepared a la francaise , but too heavy on the flour; the fish within is fine, but you must get through a heavy, flavor-marring robe to get to it.

Oddly, the restaurant’s namesake does not exist. That is, you can’t buy a whole lobster at the Lobster Trap. Instead you have lobster tails available for a hefty price.

Making matters thornier, the one lobster-only dinner listed on the menu is twin tails, market-priced. On one recent visit, that was $42. I asked if it was possible to get just one of the tails for a reduced price, and did, for $29.50. It was large in size but average at best in quality, sufficiently tender but void of sweet, sea-fresh flavor. At this price, however, each bite started ringing up at five rather bitter dollars.

Filet mignon ($20.95) was tender, cooked properly, but without any depth of flavor, forcing a reliance upon a rich mushroom accompaniment.

At lunch, a mahi mahi sandwich ($6.25) was dried out, marred by the weighty francaise treatment and served with an inedibly metallic, bitter teriyaki sauce.

Against this backdrop of dubiousness, the Lobster Trap maintains certain pockets of quality--the shrimp cocktail appetizer ($8.95) is fresh and first-rate, and the mushrooms-stuffed-with-crab appetizer ($6.95) quite satisfying. But it remains, on the whole, a nautically themed show of a place whose culinary ship is listing. When dinner for two with wine, tax, and tip easily brushes the $100 mark, one has to ask: Are we going to dine well or just party hard?

If at all, make it the latter.

Details

* WHAT: Lobster Trap.

* WHEN: Lunch Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Sunday brunch from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dinner seven days from 4 to 10 p.m., during summer months till 10:30 on Friday and Saturdays.

* WHERE: 3605 Peninsula Road, Channel Islands Harbor, Oxnard.

* HOW MUCH: Dinner for two, food only, from $45 to $90.

* CALL: 985-6361.

* FYI: Major credit cards accepted.