Nate n’ Al: Hold the Wry : In a city of changing delis, it’s like Mom’s chicken soup

Nate n’ Al Delicatessen Restaurant, 414 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. (213) 274-0101. Open 7:30 a.m.-8:45 p.m., daily (until 10 p.m. on Saturday). Street parking. Beer and wine. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Meal for two, $10-$25.

My father thought that breakfast cereals were a nefarious American conspiracy whose sole purpose was to deny him a real meal in the morning. He refused to have anything to do with them.

When he sat down to breakfast, he expected the table to be laden. And it was. During my childhood, my mother never served less than three kinds of bread, four kinds of cheese (including the much-dreaded Liederkranz), ham (actually Dad preferred Canadian bacon), salami and coffee cake for breakfast. My father thought eggs were sort of silly, but he would condescend to allow them on the table. Orange juice was fine too, so long as it was fresh and did not displace the essential pot of strong hot coffee.

Is it any wonder that I think of him whenever I walk into a delicatessen?

But I am not alone. A deli is not really a restaurant; it is a family affair. Even if your father happily consumed Corn Flakes every day of his life, a good deli should make you feel instantly at home. A restaurant may be there to feed you, but a deli is there to make you feel good.

That must be why people feel so strongly about them. People love their favorites, they feel loyal to them, and they want everybody else to feel the same. Every time we write about delis, we get a lot of mail. When I did a pastrami tasting last spring, the letters came flooding in. “What,” asked one writer, “do you know about pastrami anyway?” When Jonathan Gold, who has been going to Junior’s for his entire life, wrote about the recent remodel of that venerable institution, the mail was equally intense.

We’ll probably get a lot more mail now. Because with all the hoopla over the opening of that Batman of deli’s, the Carnegie, and the hullabaloo over the half-million-dollar face lift of Junior’s, I fear my favorite deli is being overlooked. As far as I’m concerned, it’s time that attention was paid to Nate n’ Al.

When I’m in need of comfort, it’s the first place that I head. I sit down and wait for one of those surrogate mothers to come over and find out what I want. I know that when I order matzo brei (they’ve got the best in town--the mixture of fried eggs and matzos has the perfect amount of crisp edges and crunchy bits), she’ll insist that I have a half-order. And that she’ll be disappointed if I don’t manage to polish off the Gargantuan portion. (I’ve never been allowed to see a full order, but I can’t imagine how large it must be.) I know that she’ll keep bringing coffee until I’m ready to float away, and that she won’t bring the check until I indicate that I’m ready to leave.

But the waitresses aren’t the only wonderful ones at Nate n’ Al; the customers are swell too. You have the feeling that if you got up and fainted, everybody in the place would come rushing to your assistance. And even when you’re feeling fine, your fellow diners are incredibly entertaining.

I was there just the other morning eating a sandwich No. 4 (rare roast beef, turkey, Swiss cheese, cole slaw and Russian dressing--very satisfying) and listening to the woman in the next booth agonize over scrambled eggs with lox. It wasn’t on her diet, but she permitted the waitress to talk her into ordering it anyway. Just as she succumbed, she spied a friend walking out, dressed to the nines in a magenta silk shirt.

“Aha,” she said happily, “cheating I see.” “Oh, no,” said the woman in the magenta blouse, flashing matching nails, “I’m sticking to the diet. I just had a manicure and I stopped in for a little bite. All I had was egg whites and lox. And I hardly touched the lox.”

From the distance, the waitress caught my eye. I’m sure she winked at me. Meanwhile, the woman in the magenta blouse went off to pay, plucking a bottle of virgin olive oil and some imported jam from the shelf as she walked. At Nate n’ Al, you never forget you’re in Beverly Hills.

But it isn’t all mink and manicures. In the booth behind the dieting woman were two older ladies. They seated themselves at a table and ordered coffee and toast. Then one pulled a plastic bag out of her purse. Removing an avocado, she started to slice it onto a plate. The waitress looked on beatifically. Is there another restaurant in the world that would permit this?

But Nate n’ Al isn’t just a restaurant. It’s a place that cares. When I finished my sandwich (no mean feat), I ordered a hamantaschen to go. The guy behind the counter looked at me. “I gave you poppy seed,” he said. “That OK?” I allowed as how I really wanted prune. “No trouble,” he said, pulling the pastry out of the bag. “No trouble at all. You should have what you want.’

Nate n’ Al almost always has what I want. I like the food too, but as almost everybody knows, the food here--as at any traditional deli--is very much beside the point.

Every deli worth its pickles, after all, has a menu so large that you’d have to be from Mars not to find something appealing upon it. And there’s probably not a person on the planet who could eat his way through an entire deli menu.

Except, perhaps, my father on a particularly hungry morning.