If You Want To Be Fulfilled, Try Zoopa

----------------------------------------------------------- XX Zoopa, Andover Parkway at Strander Boulevard, Tukwila. Salads, soups, pasta. Lunch and dinner ($5.50 to $5.95) 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday; until 9:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday. Beer, wine. Major credit cards. Nonsmoking area. No reservations: 575-0500. ----------------------------------------------------------- It is possible, I suppose, to leave Zoopa hungry, but it would take an enormous act of self denial.

Zoopa is an all-you-can-eat, cafeteria-style food dispensary on the east side of Southcenter that may well be the busiest commercial eatery in the Puget Sound region.

Business is brisk; business is almost nonstop. The lines form early, move quickly and they persist. In the middle of a Sunday afternoon while half the city was preoccupied with the torturous Clarence Thomas affair and the other half was preoccupied with football, Zoopa was still at least three-quarters filled.

None of this was accidental. Zoopa was conceived and designed by Restaurants Unlimited (Cutters, Scotts, Triples, Palomino, et. al.) as a possible forerunner of other mall enterprises. The concept: premium food in unlimited quantities at bargain prices.

In other words: feed mall shoppers by the thousands.

This it does - and does well. But it does not do so flawlessly. There's a ton of food served daily at Zoopa, but some of it is less than perfect.

This is how the place works. You enter, pick up a tray and a plate. You make a choice of the salad bar and either soup or pasta. That costs $5.50. The better choice is the $5.95 option. For the additional 45 cents you get access to the salad bar and the soup bar and the pasta bar, and the desserts, breads, muffins and everything else in sight.

You start out with several kinds of greens: lettuce, romaine, spinach, etc. All are flawlessly fresh, well cleaned and crisp. Next comes an array of salad complements: tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, green peas, olives, baby corn, pickles, shredded cheeses, relishes and - at last count - 11 salad dressings. The low-calorie house Italian was fine.

Next in line is a series of mixed salads (specifics change daily), such as pasta salads, chicken salads, chopped ham and seafood salads, slaws, potato salads, gelatin and fruit salads and puddings. Most are excellent.

That brings you to the cashier. If you pay her $5.95, you are given two additional plates, one for pasta, the other is a soup bowl. You go and help yourself to one of two pastas (or both) and a choice of four or five soups.

Before exiting the serving area, the final stops are at a fresh-fruit bar, the bakery, hot and cold beverage dispensers, cookies, baked desserts and a frozen yogurt dispenser with cones that are a little too small for comfortable handling - especially by young children.

You can return to the serving tables and get as much of any of it or all of it if you choose. Theoretically, you could go into Zoopa in the morning and eat your way into history for $5.95 for nine hours a day.

But you might not want to. I found most of Zoopa's mixed salads to be laudable. There was, for example, a fine chicken salad with large, moist pieces of breast meat. The potato salad was exemplary. But a curried pasta salad was harsh to the point of unpleasantness.

The muffins, in general, were excellent (I ate two in quick order) but the bran muffin could have been lighter, both in texture and in flavor, and the raspberry muffins were riddled with seeds.

A bowl of chicken noodle soup was grand. But the chili was not; it was long on onions and beans but pale brown instead of a good bowl of red. "It may have been made from scratch but it tastes like it was canned," a friend said. A glance into the kitchen confirmed that the beans, at least, were.

I enjoyed the cauliflower and cheddar cheese soup. But the black bean soup was not subtle (basically beans and cilantro) and could have benefited from added texture (celery and/or onion) and color. A touch of tomato or red ancho chilis would have helped.

The two offerings at the pasta bar consisted of bow-tie macaronis in a sprightly white sauce with zucchini, and rotini in a very indifferent red sauce that - like the chili - was laced with coarse chunks of onion.

This is, of course, high quality volume feeding. The intention is neither elegance nor haute cuisine. The combination of an opulent salad bar with attendant bakeries, pasta and soup kitchens is appealing. Indeed, it is almost sure-fire.

Zoopa is a little more than a year old and it might be time to fine-tune an occasional recipe, re-examine a few ingredients.

If any of this suggests that Zoopa is less than successful, be advised that this cafeteria-type, multiple-kitchen restaurant serves literally thousands of satisfied, repeat customers a week - and runs a lively take-out business as well.

My reservation: Restaurants Unlimited is a highly sophisticated food-service company, with considerable expertise and research skills. I think they can do a little better.