DINER THEATER

Ed Debevic’s Short Orders Deluxe, 134 N. La Cienega Blvd., Beverly Hills, (213) 659-1952. Open Monday-Thursday 11 a.m.-midnight; Friday and Saturday 11 a.m.-1 a.m.; Sunday 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Full bar. Valet parking (if you can get into the overcrowded lot). No credit cards. Dinner for two, $7-$20. (Also in Torrance, 23705 S. Hawthorne Blvd., (213) 378-5454.)

You eat the food at Ed Debevic’s with your mouth, but you taste it with your mind. Trying to analyze this food makes about as much sense as doing a serious critique on a Milky Way. Is the food great? Of course not. Does it taste great? Absolutely.

Ed Debevic’s is the ultimate theme restaurant. Forget about pirates and wenches and fantasy foods--walk into Ed’s and you take a different kind of trip. You remember this diner; you remember this feeling. It all exists in some sort of collective American memory. For while most theme restaurants offer an opportunity to visit a place you have never been, Ed Debevic’s is a ticket back to a place you wish you had never left.

“Move over, doll, willya?” The waitress sliding into my booth is large and cheeky, with hair in a bandanna and about a million pins marching across her substantial breast. Her glasses look like the fins on a ’55 Caddy. She lowers herself onto the Naugahyde, heaves a sigh and proceeds to fill out the checks from the other tables. “Thirty-five, 55, 85, a dollar,” she counts, penciling in the numbers. “What a night!” She then stands up, offers a toothy smile and asks us what we’ll have.

I say I’ll have a fried clam sandwich. “I gotta tellya, doll,” she says, tapping her pencil against her teeth, “it’s the only thing we don’t make ourselves. How about a nice piece of meat loaf?”

I hesitate. “It’s soooo good,” she urges, “and yer gonna love them mashed potatoes.” How can I resist? I know that this big hunk of motherly womanhood is not going to let me down. And when the meat loaf comes, my adult self may know that it is pretty pallid stuff, tasting overwhelmingly of the green peppers ground up in the meat, and that the gravy is some indescribable substance in a color I haven’t seen since I was 10. But my grown-up self is gone, leaving in her place a scuff-kneed kid sitting at the kitchen table playing with my food. It tastes great, frozen vegetables and all. Besides, I’m already full from the strawberry milkshake I scarfed down before dinner. (“It’s made with real strawberries, doll, not that syrup stuff.”)

“Ya gotta have dessert,” says my mentor. I admit I’m getting a little full. She snaps her fingers to the sound of the Big Bopper and says, “Oh, I know you have room for the world’s smallest hot-fudge sundae.” Who can tell her no? Not I. And when she returns, she is actually bearing a teensy tiny sundae, a mere morsel of ice cream, whipped cream and fudge served in a little glass that looks like an egg cup.

“What didja expect, doll?” says my friend. “It’s only 35 cents.”

“This is not a movie set. This is what life is really like outside of Beverly Hills.” This is one of the many aphorisms that grace the walls of Ed Debevic’s. It is, of course, completely ridiculous, about as true as the fact that there is an Ed Debevic. Both Debevic and his restaurant are creations of Chicago restaurateur Richard Melman--and both are a whole lot better than reality. For there never was a time when American life was as sweet and fun and downright wholesome as it is right here. Did you ever go to a diner in the ‘50s and see people of all colors waiting on tables? This is the way the ‘50s should have been.

Debevic’s is a diner done with affection, not affectation. But it is more than merely a restaurant--it is a whole new kind of dinner-theater. Ed’s has taken comfort food to new extremes. The waiters and waitresses are all playing parts--and you play right along with them.

Consider the night I took a friend and two ravenous 12-year-olds to dinner. By the time we had walked through the enormous front room (the place seats 350), sliding along to the strains of “To Know Know Know Him Is to Love Love Love Him,” and slid into our booth in the slightly quieter back room, we were all 12. Or maybe 10. We took one look at the menu and started ordering everything in sight. The Biffer, our waiter, sporting a fine Long Island lockjaw, barely blinked.

Pretty soon, the table was littered with cherry Cokes and root beers, a variety of malts and a noxious drink called Green River (“It’s great,” said one of the kids). A character with bongos drifted to the table, a ringer for Maynard G. Krebs. He sat down with us, which was, in itself, not surprising; waiters here always seem to be pulling up a chair. The surprise was that this turned out to be a person I actually know, and he seemed to be having the time of his life. He did a Krebsian rap and happily bongoed off.

In the blink of an eye, the Biffer was back to tell us about the specials in his affected accent. “Skinny spaghetti,” he began, listing a lot of dishes that were simply too too divine. We simply ended up ordering too too much. This is what we ate:

One hamburger. A pretty thick patty, lots of pickles, onions, etc., on a slightly crispy bun; in my opinion, it’s the best thing on the menu. In the opinion of the real experts in this matter, the 12-year-old critics, it rated 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.

One roadburger. Two thin patties and lots of glop. This was less popular with the entire table.

One chicken tetrazzini with frozen vegetables. Noodles and white sauce and chunks of chicken--the sort of stuff your mother used to feed you when you stayed home from school. It’s all bland and white and you’d die before you’d admit that you actually liked it.

One skinny spaghetti. A holdover from the pre-pasta past, it tasted mainly of tomato. The nicest thing I can say is that it was big.

One order of fries with cheese. It’s Velveeta, of course, but how could anything that makes you feel this guilty possibly be bad?

One farmer’s chop suey. Tomatoes, cucumbers and an anachronistic sprinkling of sprouts surround a veritable igloo of iceberg. I know it’s not chic to say so, but I have to admit to a certain fondness for the sheer crunchiness of this much-maligned lettuce.

One double hot dog. The kids did away with it before I had a chance to get a bite. They seemed to like it just fine.

One four-way chili. Decent chili topped with onions, macaroni and cheese. It was about as hot as chili used to be in the ‘50s, which is to say not nearly as hot as it often is today.

One fried chicken with applesauce and coleslaw. The tiniest little chicken you’ve ever seen, with drumsticks the size of toothpicks. This means that what you get is more fried than it is chicken. The applesauce was sweet, sweet, sweet, the coleslaw fair, fair, fair.

Frankly, I was impressed with the dent we managed to make in this food. We even ordered an extra grilled cheese sandwich--all gooey and greasy and decadent and delicious--for an unassuaged 12-year-old appetite. A passing waitress, however, was less impressed. “What’s your name?” she demanded, grabbing the half-full plate of tetrazzini. She held it up and announced to the entire room, “Mary didn’t eat her dinner. No dessert for her.”

The Biffer, however, relented and brought us the works. Butterscotch puddin’ pie. Brownies topped with ice cream and hot fudge. Apple cobbler. All so sweet and icky I couldn’t swallow them. The 12-year-old contingent, however, was in hog heaven.

By the time the check came, in fact, they had managed to down yet another malt. As I counted out the bills (nothing on the menu is over $4.95), we all began to look a bit green. Still, we snapped our fingers as we walked back through the room and assured the waiting hordes that they were going to have a wonderful time.

And, of course, they were.