Cafe Society : Small town: Farm workers, ranchers and commuting professionals come together at the only eatery in Somis.

By 6 a.m., cars and trucks had already pulled up to the Somis Cafe. Truckers, field hands and construction workers ran inside, grabbed coffee or soft drinks, and quickly disappeared into the foggy morning air.

And so another day began inside the tiny stucco cafe that is the only restaurant in the small rural farming community of Somis.

Part fast-food stop, part local meeting place and a favorite lunch spot for working professionals from around the county, the cafe is usually the only reason people stop along the three-block stretch of Somis Road that runs through the center of Somis.

Inside, four men were huddled at one of the tables closest to the coffee pot. “We always sit right here,” said Don Lynch, a 62-year-old Camarillo resident who owns an equipment repair business, “and we always come this time of day.”

This was the first wave, one of three different groups that always seem to appear, owner Aurora Quinones said, “depending on what time of day it is. Between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., it is the working people. Then there’s ranchers between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., then another group for lunch, between 10:30 and 2:30 p.m.”

On this day, the first group included an electrician, a citrus ranch foreman, a construction worker and a citrus packinghouse employee, all of whom said they were on their way to work.

In the second were a cattle rancher and two avocado farm owners who had already been up and working a few hours.

The lunch patrons included several office workers from Camarillo, Marines from Point Mugu, a title insurance salesman and a contractor from Ojai.

The cafe is a simple place, no bigger than a two-car garage, with seven battered Formica tables lining the side walls and four more pushed together in boardinghouse style, down the center. Mismatched plastic chairs are set around the tables, and a few Western prints of cowboys and Indians adorn the walls.

Somis has few other businesses--a hardware store, a beauty shop, Carlota’s Chic and Casuals clothing store and a dozen other small concerns. A cabbage field is directly across the street from the cafe.

Before the lunch-time crowd showed up, the cafe was filled with small-town camaraderie. “Everybody sits, feels good, because it’s like in a house,” said Quinones, a short, dark-haired 47-year-old with large, bright brown eyes.

It is the kind of place where people serve themselves the coffee and fill the empty cups of people at nearby tables without being asked.

Quinones, a native of Mexico, makes her own salsa every morning, but Lynch brings a jar he prepares himself. People who prefer to pour his chokingly hot concoction on their morning burritos get it themselves from the kitchen refrigerator and then put it back.

“That table there would be the Somis planning commission,” Chuck Wilson called out from one table, pointing at Lynch and his companions. A stocky man in overalls, Wilson runs a wind-machine business and is part of the first wave of customers.

His comment started off a morning ritual of jokes, insults and tall tales punctuated with loud and frequent laughter. Somis, as an unincorporated area of the county, has no such commission.

“We have to decide whether it’s going to rain tomorrow,” joked Lee Fugate, a gray-haired Somis resident on his way to work at Point Mugu.

Quinones starts her day at 4 a.m., she said one recent morning as she swiftly moved from pot to pot to check the freshly made chicken soup, enchiladas and chile verde. She previously operated a catering truck, she said, before buying the Somis Market, next to the cafe, in 1981. For a while, she used a corner of the market to prepare and serve burritos. In 1984, she opened the cafe in what was once the post office.

“The funny thing is, I get more American people, not too many Mexican people,” she said. Quinones’ 22-year-old daughter, Julie, who operates the cash register in the market, observed that this was not so before the cafe opened.

Now the Latino field hands or construction workers tend to order food from the take-out line, rather than eat there. Several shrugged and had nothing to say when asked why this was so, but Danny Ramos, a 23-year-old gardener, said, “I don’t have time” to sit.

“This is the local meeting place,” Yvonne Yanez said as she and her husband, Ray, ate breakfast before starting work at their horse- and mule-training ranch in Somis. “This is where you find out everything.”

It’s also a good place to find someone you need to reach, lemon grower Carl Grether said. “If you need someone to repair your wind machine or tractor, or need the electrician, you come here, before 7 a.m.,” he said. “If you miss them here, they can be hard to find the rest of the day.”

People tend to discuss local problems, said Margaret Butchko, owner of an avocado farm in Somis. On this morning, Butchko and Mary Frost, a former teacher and “full-time mother,” talked about how commuters and truckers increasingly speed along nearby Los Angeles Avenue, a two-lane road that slices through vegetable farms and citrus groves to cross the county.

“We have 1990s traffic on a 1930s road,” Frost said.

“It’s really changed here in the last few years,” because of the large amount of new construction, Grether said, and he wondered how long the working ranches would survive.

“It’s a lot of 20-acre farms with big homes,” he said. “With land prices going up, it’s not worth it to buy acreage for lemons. They want $35,000 to $40,000 an acre now.”

At one point, a short, older man wearing a gold necklace, an unusual sight among the jeans and cowboy boots that are the common garb, drank coffee alone at a table. The stranger said he was Cecil Lovatt from Simi Valley and was a food-charity volunteer. He had 300 day-old doughnuts in his van outside and planned to distribute them among the produce pickers in the fields, he said, “as soon as the fog lifts.”

“I was born and reared on a farm,” he said. “I know what it is, you get hungry. They are very appreciative, and I love the countryside.”

As lunch hour approached, there were more women in dresses and men wearing ties. Rodger Embury, a contractor from Ojai, sat with a portable telephone next to his food. David Bunker, a title insurance salesman, used the pay phone outside while he waited for a company messenger, so they could exchange documents. “People know where this is,” he said. “There’s nothing else around.”

Next door, in the current post office building, clerk Bernice Taggesell said she likes the cafe but feels the daily throng creates a local parking problem.

“They don’t have their own parking,” she said of the cafe, “so people use our lot, and that makes it bad for our customers.”

But Gabe Robles, the local barber, said hopefully, “Actually, I don’t mind. Because of the traffic going to the cafe, a lot of people notice me.” But at that moment, while people were lined up down the street, Robles sat alone, watching television.

Quinones, who closes at 5 p.m., said she is often tired of her 13-hour, six-day-a-week schedule. “Sometimes I think, it’s too much, but if I didn’t come, who would cook?” she said, adding: “Last year, I closed Sundays. I say, I need one day off.”