RELISHING RENDEZVOUS RESTAURANTS

In my last year of high school, I lived for a while in a boarding house and supported myself washing dishes in a restaurant for as long as 60 hours a week. This was to avoid a lengthy and extremely cold bus commute to school in Upstate New York. It was also a minor declaration of independence and a time of raucous adventures, and it left me with a quirky affection for restaurants, although not for washing dishes.

The affection is not a common response. George Orwell’s reports, in “Down and Out in Paris and London,” on the hotel and restaurant kitchens he worked in are ghastly enough to put you off public eating forever.

I occasionally glimpse, with an envy born of experience, the mechanized modern dishwashing facilities in current restaurants. My memories are of a fear that my arms would soften and melt away at the elbows from being in water so much.

The horror of the job was trying to keep alive the coal-burning hot-water heater, a surly and malevolent device resistant to ignition in all circumstances. For further excitement, my fellow dishwasher was a cockeyed French-Canadian who threw cleavers in moments of anger or hilarity, and had no other moments that I remember.

Still the restaurant was a town center, a refuge of warmth and strong coffee in those sub-zero winters, and it enjoyed a close and amiable rapport with its regulars. Forgetting the backstage traumas, I’ve sought out restaurants with that kind of ambiance ever since.

I have found it several times in Los Angeles. The trouble is that restaurants, like movie studios and other intimate enterprises, tend to be the lengthened shadow of one person, or one family. They have life spans; they rise and flourish and one day they’re no more, leaving hundreds of us gazing forlornly upon leveled lots.

Once upon my early days in California there was a string of Frascati restaurants. One of them, across the street from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, was favored by so many film people you could cast a movie at any hour of day or night. Especially night. Another Frascati, at Crescent Heights, featured an extraordinary pianist named Calvin Jackson, who never quite reconciled himself to customers who would rather talk than listen.

The Bantam Cock transmogrified early into the startling La Cage aux Folles. The Tails of the Cock have both lately departed, and where the faithful are regathering I have no idea. Johnny Guarnieri, who played at the Valley Tail for so many years, had predeceased it, but the place remained a refuge from the storms, climatic or personal.

Jim Murray, a colleague at Time-Life in those days, introduced me to the Swiss Cafe on Rodeo in 1959, and from then until the night a couple of years ago when it finally closed, it was a home away from home, where family birthdays and graduations were observed, triumphs celebrated, wounds nursed, projects plotted, interviews conducted.

Joe Marino, now at the Bistro Garden, played his elegant piano there for years, followed by the Fred Kornell-Irv Edelman piano-bass duo, making music similarly unhackneyed and tasteful.

It was thought that Laura Hug, who founded the Swiss with her husband Fred, would relocate, having been confronted with an offer for the property that she couldn’t sensibly refuse. But she obviously concluded that she’d earned more than a few nights off, and I can’t blame her.

What I’m saying is that sneeze bars, chilled salad forks and artfully sculpted carrots on a leaf of wet radicchio do not necessarily a restaurant make. Among other considerations, there is a lingerability factor (can you linger?). And is there a possibility that somebody will remember you from last time, maybe even from the time before that? There are still the maitres d’ and the captains with the power to render you invisible; let us depart from them forever.

All is not lost, of course. The Cock ‘n’ Bull on Sunset is still an outpost of the British Empire as it perhaps never quite was. Ben Dimsdale preserves his own traditions, upmarket but not stuffy, at the Windsor Restaurant.

If there is an immutable law of eateries, it is that there is no substitute for an owner on the premises. Tony Bill’s presence has a lot to do with the success, as restaurant and gathering place, of 72 Market Street.

I was moved to think about restaurants, and my soapy past, when I stopped in recently for a late lunch at Musso and Franks in Hollywood, a marvel of persistence. It is currently being earthquake-proofed amid a certain amount of clutter. But more than 60 years later, it is still in the same family (John Musso’s daughter has been in charge for the last 15 years), offering the same massive menu of good, no-nonsense food and unceremonial but very efficient waiters.

The back room where the writers had their own table is no more. But it’s no effort, amid the unchanged booths and beneath the dark and undisturbed murals, to imagine Scott Fitzgerald, a regular, and Mrs. Parker and other displaced Algonquinians threading through the narrow aisles, to talk. The stars went to the Brown Derby over on Vine; the creators favored Musso’s and they still do, inventing a future amid reminders of continuity.

There’s no place like home, but it’s nice to leave the dishes in somebody else’s sink once in a while.