RESTAURANT REVIEW CALIFORNIA PIZZA KITCHEN : Pie in the Sky : It’s part of a chain and it’s in a mall--but Santa Barbara’s CPK serves pizza as good as you’d get at the “chic” spots.

It seemed only appropriate that my first visit to the new California Pizza Kitchen in Santa Barbara’s downtown Paseo Nuevo Mall should be with Tomas, a friend from Rio de Janeiro. Rio is, after all, absolutely jammed with pizza. Tons of Italians have settled in Brazil over the decades. There are probably more pizza places per capita in Rio than in Milan or Rome--or New York City.

The Pizza Kitchen is a chain operation, and I hadn’t tried it before. But it had a reputation good enough, I felt, to try it the first time with Tomas. CPK, as it’s called, did, after all, originate in Beverly Hills and prides itself on its “gourmet pizza” reputation.

Its two dozen or so locations spread from Hawaii through Las Vegas and into Georgia. It apparently was begun by a couple of attorneys. They must have decided to go legitimate.

What Tomas and I found that day was maybe the best Italian food in Santa Barbara--good enough to compete with the offerings from the “chic” spots in town, such as Pan e Vino and Piatti’s in Montecito and Emilio’s down on Cabrillo Boulevard in Santa Barbara. All this in a contemporary environment of white, black and yellow tiles and lots of noise when the place is crowded.

The surprising thing is that I found that the stars on the menu are not the pizzas--which are well worth ordering--but the pastas. The pasta menu usually gives you a choice of penne or spaghetti, or angel hair or linguine, all made daily. The vegetable Marsala-marinara pasta, made out of fresh herbs, tomatoes and a Marsala wine sauce, adding fresh vegetables and Parmesan cheese, has enough garlic in it to make you think that you’re at some joint in a marginal area of Chicago--which is fine with me.

And the chicken-tequila fettuccine, which comes with moist chunks of chicken, several types of peppers, red onion and cilantro, gets much of its flavor from the jalapeno cream sauce, with tequila and limes added. It’s got just a touch of the Southwest--a flavor that I doubt an Italian mamacita would necessarily recognize.

But the straight Italian approach is well-represented at the bottom of the menu. Down there is the grilled sausage and pepper pasta. This one comes with spicy and sweet Italian sausages and with onions, peppers and Parmesan cheese in a tomato and herb sauce. It’s spicy and certainly avoids the “nouvelle” image that some of the other CPK dishes have.

Before I get to the pizza, let me mention the calzone. A calzone is a large slab of pizza dough, folded over and filled and then, at CPK, wood-fired to blend the flavors. Their moo shu chicken version is packed with chicken, mushrooms, green onions, been sprouts and cheese, and flavored with hoisin sauce and sesame oil. Tomas liked this dish the best. Maybe because it was unlike anything you’d get in Rio.

I am still a little puzzled as to how to describe the CPK pizza crust. Is it thick--or thin? We asked our waitress. (Considering the fact that they’re all young, the whole staff here is exceptionally professional, obviously well-trained before they even get near a guest.) The waitress went back and asked.

“Beverly Hills style” was what she came back with. Which I guess means that it’s just a bit on the thick side of being thin.

The goat cheese pizza comes with bacon, red onions, peppers, fresh tomatoes and, of course, goat cheese. I especially enjoyed it when I tried it sitting at the counter a few days after our first visit.

One of the restaurants’ most popular items is the original BBQ chicken pizza, which comes with chicken, red onions, cilantro and smoked Gouda cheese--plus barbecue sauce. I’ve had that a couple of times. I can see why it’s a favorite.

I’m less enthusiastic about the other big seller, the Thai chicken pizza. Its marinated chicken and Thai flavors just left me unsatisfied.

These are “gourmet” pizzas, as the menu describes them, but the one I liked best was the simplest, the five cheese and tomato pizza. All it has are fresh sliced tomatoes, fresh basil leaves and then the five cheeses: buffalo mozzarella, fontina, smoked Gouda and a couple of romanos.

You can ignore the desserts. They all sound great, but the hot fudge sundae is just a huge mound of whipped cream, then ice cream, sitting on but not covered by, as it should be, hot fudge.

In Santa Barbara, California Pizza Kitchen may well have the best pizza in town, and I’ll put its pastas up against the fancier Italian restaurants in town. But beware at some of the other locations. It seems that the company’s Los Angeles-area locations are served out of a central commissary. In Santa Barbara, much of the work is done on-site, by hand--like cutting up the chicken, grating the cheeses, etc. It seems to me that might give this location an edge.

* WHERE AND WHEN

California Pizza Kitchen, 719 Paseo Nuevo, Santa Barbara, 962-4648. Open 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 10 p.m. Sundays. Major credit cards accepted; no reservations. Beer and wine. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $9-$24. Recommended dishes: moo shu chicken calzone, $8.95; grilled sausage and pepper pasta, $9.50.