YANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
Yanks, 262 S . Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. (213) 85-YANKS. Open for lunch Monday-Friday; for dinner nightly. Full bar. Valet parking at night (parking is difficult in the daytime.) Visa, MasterCard and American Express accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $28-$60.
If you took a picture of Yanks, erased the surrounding buildings, showed the picture to a friend and asked him to fill in the blanks, you would probably end up with a portrait of small-town America. The restaurant would be on some mythical Main Street somewhere on the East Coast, and your friend would pencil in sweet little houses with yards and picket fences, a drugstore on the corner, kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. Dogs would chase cats, mothers would push strollers and nice Mr. Smith the postman would be passing the time of day. An American flag would probably be waving in the wind.
Yanks is, in other words, a restaurant looking for a neighborhood. It may be smack dab in the middle of Beverly Hills, but it does its best to ignore that. It wants so badly to be a comfortable kind of place, a place where nobody bothers to dress up, a restaurant where people on their way to tables stop to inquire after their friends’ kids. The remarkable thing is that it almost succeeds.
At first glance, Yanks has the clean, whitewashed look of an Eastern cottage. Settle in and you discover that it feels like a cross between a ladies’ tearoom of the ‘40s and a New England seafood house. The tearoom air comes in part from the flowered print that papers one wall and the pine sideboard with its vase of flowers. It is the captain’s chairs, the plain white tablecloths, the gray carpet and the starchy napkins that provide the Eastern ambiance. There are more mixed signals in the color scheme; one wall is painted pale green, another pale yellow. But somehow it all works, and Yanks has the odd ability to be calm and peaceful when the room’s half empty and yet adopt a festive feeling when it is bristling with noise and people.
The food itself is straightforward, hearty, eminently American; it is, above all, reasonable. One sunny day, lunch for four, with two drinks, a dessert and lots of coffee was $42. (Remember, we’re talking tablecloths here, not to mention a chichi Beverly Hills address.) Among the dishes we ate were a bowl of real macaroni and cheese (not the kind that tastes like white stuff drowned in library paste), preceded by a huge green salad. This cost $6. A big juicy hamburger on a sourdough bun came accompanied by good fresh cole slaw, homemade potato chips (you can’t help wondering why they bother; they are not much of an improvement over the packaged ones), pickles, tomatoes . . . it was a lot to eat. Chili came without beans, a mildly spicy tomato-based stew chock full of enormous chunks of beef. It was hearty and delicious (if not quite zippy enough for my taste); with it were little pots of chopped red onions and sour cream and a wonderful corn stick filled with crunchy little kernels.
There was also one great triumph of a salad. “Yankee salad” turned out to be a giant bowl filled with greens and topped with stripes of color; these consisted of generous chunks of blue cheese, ribbons of red and yellow peppers, long tender strips of lightly cooked chicken, diced tomatoes and bacon crumbled as fine as confetti. It was so generous that I had the feeling that if you put all the chicken back on the bone you’d have the better part of the bird. We also indulged in a plate of onion rings (onions strings actually, but good) and a piece of New York cheesecake. This was the sort that looks solid but simply evaporates in your mouth; the only better version I have had in Los Angeles is the cheesecake at the Palm.
I have been less enthralled with dinners at Yanks, although here too there are some fine dishes and a couple of true bargains. Foremost among the latter is a chicken pot pie; with a green salad it costs $9.50. The pie is bubbling over with chicken and vegetables and tastes like something your Aunt Millie might make, provided you had an Aunt Millie.
Aunt Millie, however, would undoubtedly make better biscuits than the ones served here. The plain ones are tough and doughy, and some of the time they aren’t cooked enough. The pumpkin-colored ones turn out to be made of sweet potatoes, and they taste more like dessert than something you want to eat with dinner.
And there are times at night when you find yourself eating a lot of bread, for the food can be very unreliable. A chowder made of corn and crab tasted more like cream than corn or crab, and I couldn’t find a single speck of shellfish in the bowl. Crab cakes were bland, the meat more pulverized than flaked, and the tartar sauce came with a crust on the top as if it had been sitting around for quite a while. But then there was a superb sliced sirloin--a sort of American carpaccio-- topped with a tangy parsley and caper sauce as green as a lawn; on the side was one single, searingly hot, grilled pepper.
Entrees were equally uneven. One night there was a perfectly cooked grilled salmon, the flesh fresh and delicate. Another night a slice of swordfish turned out to be fat, fishy and very dry. Roast chicken had the fine tang of lemon juice, but a veal chop had very little flavor. Spicy Cajun meat loaf looked awful--a little brown square--but it proved to be filled with flavor. Unfortunately, the mashed potatoes that came with it had the consistency of Elmer’s glue.
Desserts tend to be satisfying. My favorite among them is a hefty spice layer cake with thick icing; it is exactly the sort of thing that would take a prize at a county fair. There is also a surprising and original fresh coconut tart with a tiny layer of chocolate at the bottom. The fruit crumble, however, would have been better with more fruit and less flour, and the chocolate pudding cake was not the fudgy delight I dreamed of. The wine list is perfect for the place--mostly American, well-chosen and rather reasonable.
Although the unevenness at Yanks may be annoying, it gives the place a certain authenticity. Who ever heard of a neighborhood restaurant that served consistently perfect food? And what Yanks has to offer is more than a meal--it is a little oasis of affordable friendliness in a part of town that badly needed one.