Barbecue Is a Mixed Grill at Lunchtime : Thousand Oaks: Crowds head over to two meat markets for a meal cooked outdoors.

With steak sizzling over hot coals, the scene in Newbury Park looks like a back-yard barbecue in Texas.

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But the plume of smoke is not coming from behind a house or barn, but from a strip mall parking lot just feet away from the Ventura Freeway, one exit away from sprawling biotechnology labs and semiconductor plants.

While Southern California may be known for salad, the lunchtime crowds at two Thousand Oaks outdoor barbecues show that there are plenty of people who are still not afraid to tear into a piece of meat in public.

The Thousand Oaks Meat Locker on busy Thousand Oaks Boulevard counts on history, rather than location, to draw its crowd. The place began as a slaughterhouse more than 30 years ago, said Kimberly Oxford, a member of the family that owns the business.

The Newbury Park Meat Market, though, says the grill by the freeway serves as better advertising than the billboards banned by city codes.

“It’s great. They’ll pull over four lanes just to get here. They’ll cause accidents,” said Mitch Beck, son of Newbury Park Meat Market owner Ralph Beck.

Well, there was just one accident, said Mitch’s mother, Pauline Beck, who works the cash register. “I don’t think we were the cause of it.”

Customers, mostly men, said Wednesday that they come for the food and the experience, not the view of eight lanes of speeding traffic.

“It’s kind of fun to go out and get gooey over lunch, then go back and play with computers,” said Tom Higgott, 45, who engineers network adapters for laptop computers at Xircom Inc. in Newbury Park.

The Becks provide their customers with plenty of napkins, but no forks and spoons.

Between bites of a tri-tip sandwich, Higgott said he had lost 13 pounds in the last month on a diet.

“I like to eat this kind of stuff at this time of day, when you can digest it,” he said.

Outside the Meat Locker, signs advertise buffalo meat and venison. Customers arrive in pickup trucks, then eat while sitting on bales of straw. Flies circle.

Inside, the walls are crowded with signed pictures of celebrity customers, including Ronald Reagan, Mickey Rooney and Heather Locklear.

Oxford said cholesterol-consciousness has not diminished the demand for meat. “People just pretty much eat what they want when it’s good enough,” she said.

Such carnivores also sustain the Thousand Oaks Elks Lodge, which holds barbecues on Saturdays at its lodge and the Carlson Building Materials Co. on Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

Still, in a city where the bowling alley is being replaced by a bookstore and where the annual Conejo Valley Days Western festival this year included vendors selling caffe latte and crepes, the future of the outdoor, red meat barbecue is uncertain.

At the Meat Locker, grill manager Steve Growney said chicken accounts for about half of the food he cooks on the two big outside barbecues facing Thousand Oaks Boulevard. And, lighting a cigarette with a mesquite charcoal plucked from the fire, he pushes the buffalo, not for its wild West appeal but because it is low in fat.

Even loyal Meat Locker customers are asking for poultry. “Red meat slows me down. Chicken is a little lighter,” Marc Tappeiner said.

Oxford said she now splits her time between the Meat Locker and Harmony Farms, a health food company that emerged from the family business. On Wednesday, she was preparing to leave for San Francisco on a business trip to sell Harmony Farms chicken to Bay Area health food stores.