RESTAURANT REVIEW : Tyler, Tex. Shares Its Barbecue With Folks in Van Nuys

Barbecued chicken has become somewhat of a staple pizza topping, and ribs have already begun to infiltrate the menus of a few of the newest and most chic Westside restaurants. Southern food is hot this year, and the sort of people who decide such things hint that ‘cue might just become the meat loaf of ‘88, a food raised up from base proletarian origins and plunked square onto the Villeroy and Boch table settings of the rich. Hot links are suddenly haute .

Yet, attempts at gentrification are likely to fail. Barbecue is more than a menu category: It’s a world view. Like honest sweat, it can perfume you for days. This is why that popular Beverly Hills rib place is noted more for its salad bar than for its treacly meat, and why you go to the kind of ‘cue stand that has an armed sentry out front--it doses its smoked brisket with a gutsy sauce that’s well worth guarding. World-class barbecue will make it to the suburbs just as soon as continental drift juxtaposes Compton and Encino.

Dr. Hogly Woglys Tyler, Texas Bar-B-Que has two locations, and the other one is actually in Tyler, Tex. The hardest part about finding the Van Nuys branch is asking the information operator for the address without giggling. If the wind is right, your nose can lead you to the restaurant from the freeway unaided. It’s a sit-down place, which means you don’t have to eat your hot links in the car.

When you finally find a parking spot, you sign a register and wait at one of the picnic tables set on an Astroturf-carpeted patio outside. Hogly Woglys, less Hogarthian than most rib shacks, looks like a basic, clean, small-town restaurant, with lots of Leatherette and Formica, mass-produced art on the walls and “wood” paneling slightly darkened by wood smoke. None of the waitresses is up for a part in “Knot’s Landing.”

The menu is simple, listing mostly combinations of half-a-dozen barbecued meats, and it is almost possible for two extremely hungry people to taste everything in one sitting. After watching half the population of Panorama City file through the doors of the tiny place (the wait can be up to 45 minutes on weekend evenings) you are led to a comfortable booth once your name is finally called. Soon after you order, you are brought a hot, crisp-crusted loaf of fluffy, fresh-baked bread with a couple of globs of melting butter--a nice improvement on the two limp slices of Wonder Bread you usually get with barbecue--the side dishes and two intensities of sauce.

Beans are terrific, not mealy and distinct, but all melted down into a sort of thick, sweet sauce whose texture is reminiscent of a perfect cassoulet, and are spiced hotter than most people’s chili. The coleslaw is spicy, too, and spiked with dill; potato and macaroni salads are less industrial-tasting than most examples of the breed, and are obviously homemade.

A waitress trips out carrying an enormous platter of mastadon-size beef ribs that look like the ones that tip Fred’s car over in the credit sequence of “The Flintstones.” The ribs are charred and crusty, bursting with grease and sweet juice. You tear at one with your teeth, and a great strip of meat comes off the bone. You experimentally taste the mild sauce--tomato-based, not too sweet, lots of garlic, enough black pepper to set off a marvelous slow burn--and find it among the best, most complex mild sauces around. You try a squirt of the hot sauce and surmise that it is probably the mild doctored with too much Tabasco. Mix and match.

Barbecued chicken is huge, the Bubba Smith of the poultry kingdom, with turkey-size legs and pecs the size of mangoes. It is crisp-skinned, juicy and has absorbed the smoke flavor better than any other meat in the house. Beef brisket is stewy, as if it had been pot-roasted instead of barbecued; hot links are more like Polish sausage than the evil, crumbly things you adore; pork spareribs are too fatty and sweet. But the sweet potato pie, if you have room, is surprisingly good--it tastes like sweet potatoes, which is no mean thing.

“You need no teeth to eat Mr. Jim’s beef,” goes the radio jingle for the best barbecue shack south of Everett & Jones in Oakland and, if you actually have no teeth, it rhymes. Hogly Woglys is no Mr. Jim’s, but it’s as good as almost anything that isn’t.

Dr. Hogly Woglys Tyler, Texas Bar-B-Que, 8136 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys, (818) 780-6701. Lunch and dinner seven days. Beer and wine only. Parking in lot. No credit cards accepted. Lunch or dinner for two (food only) $20-$30.