Menu Changes on the Table

Phil Bucky, who opened the County Line restaurant in Tarzana only last August, is already expanding. His new space, to open in early April, will double his capacity to 200 and give the restaurant more stage room for live entertainment. Bucky plans to also change the name of his place to Phil Bucky’s County Line Restaurant and Bar.

His menu will continue to sport the barbecued ribs, chicken and beef that keep the restaurant jammed with people. It will also continue to reflect Bucky’s sense of humor. His chili isn’t just chili but “kick-a-chili,” for example, and he calls his potato chips buffalo chips.

A buffalo chip, as any cowboy can tell you, is the calling card of the south end of a northbound buffalo, left behind to make the prairie grass grow tall.

Bucky also offers up such exotica as buffalo burgers and ostrich burgers, and certain concoctions of turkey and buffalo meat that go by names unfit to print in a family newspaper.

Sandwiches cost $6.95; dinners, $8.95 to $16.95. The fresh-fish daily specials from the grill reflect market prices.

County Line is at 18588 Ventura Blvd., (818) 342-5171.

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San Remo Italian Restaurant, a fixture in the Van Nuys restaurant scene for more than 15 years, has revamped its lunch menu.

Among the new items are angel hair pasta with a basil tomato sauce, broiled chicken, broiled salmon, and a special antipasto made with mozzarella cheese, prosciutto, melon, mushrooms, eggplant, red pepper and endive. Lunch comes with soup or pasta, and prices range below $10, as a rule.

Mario DiPaola, who runs San Remo with his brother Tony, changes the luncheon menu fairly often, but not the dinner menu.

“We haven’t changed the dinner menu in seven years,” Mario DiPaola says. “If we did, people would start to worry that we were changing our prices, too, and we haven’t done that in seven years, either.”

The brothers hail from the south of Italy. Their restaurant, which opened in 1981, seats 80. It is open for lunch five days a week and dinner seven days.

San Remo Italian Restaurant is at 13729 Victory Blvd., (818) 904-0499.

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Vladimir Khehfets has opened a new private dining room seating 25 people at his Rasputin Unique Cafe.

Khehfets also boasts a new dinner dish--grilled sturgeon in a pomegranate sauce--and a new appetizer of smoked sturgeon on a potato pancake.

Also on the menu, you can find such traditional Russian dishes as beef stroganoff and chicken Kiev with a California twist--which means, respectively, prepared with low-fat sour cream and no butter.

Prices run from $12 to $14.

Rasputin Unique Cafe is at 13615 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, (818) 907-6334.

* Juan Hovey writes about the restaurant scene in the San Fernando Valley and outlying points. He may be reached at (805) 492-7909, fax at (805) 492-5139 or via e-mail at 103254,3561@compuserve.com