POSTCARDS : TRAVEL TALES SAMPLING VENTURA'S NIGHT LIFE.

Byline: Jeremy Bagott Daily News Staff Writer

``Liquid bread,'' says the man, pointing to my wife's ale. ``Sure, that's all it is - malt, hops, barley, wheat and yeast.''

Inside Ventura's Shields Brewing Co. and Restaurant, a heavyset patron in his mid-60s with a Wilford Brimley mustache and wearing a T-shirt and suspenders with little beer bottles on them lectures my wife on, as far as I can tell, making beer.

Shields - in an older industrial area along Santa Clara Street in Ventura and hardly noticeable with its featureless white brick exterior - attracts an eclectic mix of diners and local beer connoisseurs. It is a fixture on what the locals here unofficially call the Ventura Pub Walk.

Known for much of its modern-day existence as a beachy city with a few gingerbread Victorians and an accident-prone pier seemingly always under repair, Ventura is an easy outing for Valley-ites - just 50 miles northwest off Highway 101. It's slowly emerging as the place to be after dark.

From the Cafe Voltaire - more trendy than literary, in spite of its classy name - to the jazz-centric California 66 restaurant; from the hopelessly raucous Nicholby's on Main Street to the Bombay Bar & Grill, a self-described ``singles bar'' marooned in an era before Peter Brady's voice changed, Ventura's eateries and night spots are coming into their own.

Capturing the city's deeper yearnings is local poet Gwendolyn Alley and Extract, an area band whose twangy, balladlike sound has been described as a cross between Patsy Cline and Chris Isaak.

``Endsville, man,'' is how one beret-domed, hepcat summed it all up over a double latte in one of the city's beatnik-inspired coffee houses.

Avalon should be this cool.

Back at the Shields brewery, my wife and I quaff our pints of ``liquid bread,'' the brewery's wheat beer, over plates of black beans, brown rice and fish tacos, made of rock cod caught off the nearby Channel Islands.

As we sit beneath industrial drop lights, exposed pipes and conduits and next to a half-dozen giant polished vats called serving tanks, I watch Bob Shields, who owns the place along with his wife, Trudy. He is filtering yeast sediment from what is or will soon be ale.

As Shields is quick to point out, the brewery is not a pub that also brews beer but a working brewery that just happens to contain a pub.

The brewery also makes grain beer bread, bread made from grain used in the brewing process; Southern-style raisin beer bread pudding topped with caramel ale sauce; ale-batter onion rings and ale-batter fried veggies.

Studying the breath mints we receive with the bill, I wonder if they, too, are somehow made with ale.

Outside Shields, the night air is filled with the din of far-off live music. Somewhere, Cajun zydeco is being played.

To the north, along Main Street, is Nicholby's, an establishment that defies all description. But if you had to describe it, you could say it was an antique mall, coffee house, pool hall and nightclub.

There are, to be sure, very few places in the world where a person can come in off the street, purchase a Hepplewhite armoire, sip espresso over the want ads, shoot a game of Eight Ball and then boogie down to the '70s disco sound, all without venturing more than 60 feet in any direction.

The nearby Italian Cafe, housed in a giant former bank building, exudes a more staid, traditional air, containing only antiques, ice cream, espresso and a full-service Italian deli.

Then there is the standard prerequisite for all up-and-coming nocturnal stomping grounds - the late-night '50s-themed burger hangout, which in Ventura is met by the Busy Bee Cafe on Main Street.

Seeing the time slip away and lamenting that we've taken in only a fraction of Ventura's nocturnal pleasures, we repair to the Daily Grind coffee house on Main Street, which I am instantly drawn to, its newspaper front page-like logo looking a lot like that of my own paper.

After picking up a pound of the exotic-sounding Indian Malabar coffee beans for - the clock now shows well past 1 a.m. - what will be today's breakfast, my wife gets the idea that we should walk back to the brewery and pick up some fresh bread to go with the coffee.

We head in that direction, but find to our disappointment that the brewery is closed for the night. As we walk back to our car, a carload of rowdy-looking youths cruises by us on now-deserted Santa Clara Street.

But its occupants just wave as they drive past, the reverberation from the stereo system doing the Doppler thing as they disappear who knows where.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: The Busy Bee Cafe in Ventura caters to nocturnal din ers in search of the classic American burger.

Jeremy Bagott/Daily News