RESTAURANTS : OC LIVE! : British Pub: Jolly Good Food and Ambience : Olde Ship Finds Safe Harbor in Fullerton

“What happened?” a friend exclaimed. “English food isn’t supposed to taste this good.”

Maybe the phrase “good English food” isn’t a complete oxymoron after all. We were chowing down on fine platters of beef pie and fresh mashed potatoes topped with thick brown gravy at the Olde Ship, a right British pub with all the trimmings, located smack-dab in the center of downtown Fullerton on a tree-lined stretch of Harbor Boulevard.

Here you can choose from a wide variety of draft ales, porters and stouts and even order a hard cider, if you please. And the menu reads like a short list of the most popular English dishes: bangers and mash, steak and kidney pie, Cornish pasty, fish and chips, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding.

The atmosphere is pretty much what you’d expect of an olde ship. The front dining room, which also houses the U-shaped bar, is crowded with cozy black booths and captain’s-style benches seating a hearty bunch of roll-up-the-sleeves, no-nonsense eaters. The walls are full of nautical plaques and plates embossed with the visage of Adm. Nelson, rounded out with quaint wooden and brass items you might purchase from a ship’s chandler.

In the rear is an even cozier, landlubber’s sort of dining room in the English country house mode. Here the booths have Burgundy-colored cloth cushions and the window curtains look almost frilly.

This room would be the perfect place for midafternoon tea, and owner Doug Collier may offer a traditional English tea here one day.

You already can get excellent tea--the beverage, not the ritual meal--at the Olde Ship, either freshly made ice tea (rather a Colonial idea, that) or the traditional scalding-hot British cuppa.

Service is resolutely British as well. Most of the barmaids have thick British accents and banter jollily with the customers. The only O.C. influence seems to be their tendency to discourage you from ordering too much food--something that’s easy to do here. The portions are big enough to satisfy a miner on his day off.

The “appetizers” among traditional pub food are more likely to finish an appetite right off. Scotch egg, for one. It’s a globe of batter-fried sausage meat with a hard-boiled egg in the middle, served with pickles, tomatoes and other garnishes, and it looks about the size of a soccer ball.

I attempted to order a pork pie, but a waitress talked me out of it. It’s basically a dense, fatty pork filling in a rich pastry crust. “You’ve got to acquire a taste for pork pie,” she confided.

Pub crawlers tend to be late breakfasters, which probably is why the Olde Ship serves English-style breakfast at all hours.

This breakfast is about as far from orange juice and bran cereal with nonfat milk as it is possible to get. It consists of two thick rashers of Canadian bacon, a fat British banger sausage and two fried eggs accompanied by baked beans, sauteed mushrooms, a grilled tomato and a slice of fried bread (not toasted--fried).

It’s a beloved traditional meal, especially the parts a Yankee finds hardest to understand, such as that tomato and that fried bread, so don’t try to mess with it. When the waitress asked me how I like my eggs, I took her seriously and ordered them over-easy. They came out over hard anyway.

Nothing has impressed me more here than the restaurant’s terrific take on fish and chips.

In England, the fish often is a flaky white fish called plaice. Collier uses Icelandic cod, dipping the filets in a beer batter that comes out of the deep fryer moist and crunchy.

The fries are thick and not at all mealy. There’s a bottle of the traditional fierce British malt vinegar on each table for squirting over everything.

I like the corned beef and cabbage too--a stack of thin-sliced, ultra-lean corned beef simmered in Guinness stout and served with a hunk of steamed cabbage and a pile of overcooked corn, peas and carrots. Have it with a dab of Colman’s first-rate hot English mustard.

Among the various pies, Scottish bridie might be the best. The menu tells us that it is made from the best quality beefsteak with onions and special Scottish spices, all in a rich Scotch whisky sauce.

It is shaped more like a turnover than what we call a pie in this country, and the crust is very rich--there seems to be more shortening than flour in it.

Another “pie” of this sort is the crescent-shaped Cornish pasty (rhymes with, but is not, nasty ) from the southwest of England. It has a hearty filling of beef, carrots, onions and potatoes.

Pass on the bangers and mash, though. These plump, juicy sausages are far too bland for our tastes, and the good mashed potatoes with gravy that comes on the side just doesn’t salvage them.

England is famous for its national sweet tooth, and the Olde Ship makes its own amazingly rich desserts, so heavy they could ballast a frigate.

Fruits of the Forest Pie is all crust and berries; rhubarb crumble is mostly just crust. They also serve a real sherry trifle, a dense apple pie and an egg-rich bread-and-butter pudding.

All desserts come blanketed in a yellowish custard called Bird’s, which is as much of an institution over there as Big Ben. “Please leave the pudding off my rhubarb crumble,” I asked the waitress.

“That’s custard,” she shot back. In the end I got the Bird’s anyway.

The Olde Ship is inexpensive to moderate. Appetizers are $1.95 to $5.95. Main dishes are $5.95 to $8.95. Desserts are $3.

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* THE OLDE SHIP

* 709 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton.

* (714) 871-7447,

* 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays. Closed Sundays.

* Visa, MasterCard and American Express.