PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD : Orange County Is Developing a Taste for Pastas Peppered With Piano Solos and Brunch With a Side of Salsa

It’s Saturday night at Bistango, that attractive, art-festooned purveyor of nouvelle pizza and pasta in Irvine, and, as usual, the dining room is full. On a small bandstand that’s visible from most of the tiered room, singer Bobby Gantt, backed by piano, saxophone and bass, is crooning “Unforgettable” in brandy-hued tones that Nat Cole himself might admire.

While a handful of couples circle slowly on the small dance floor in front of the bandstand, other diners are enjoying creamy, garlic-scented soup, spinach salad with duck-confit and fuseilli with grilled shrimp while conducting animated conversations. The tinkle of wine glasses adds a percussive touch to a piano solo. Later, the saxophonist switches to flute for tones that are light and crisp as a good Pinot Grigio. Some diners, after finishing their meals at one of the tables, move to the bar to linger over the music and the spirit of choice. Gantt keeps the mood mellow and romantic with tunes such as “My Funny Valentine” and a rhythmic treatment of “The Days of Wine and Roses.”

It’s the kind of scene that, with certain variations, is repeated in a number of local restaurants, ranging from those offering sophisticated preparations to more modest establishments that serve taco-enchilada combinations. Suddenly, it seems that jazz, in all its various forms, is being presented in eateries throughout the county.

Dining and music, like love and marriage, have gone together since our distant ancestors gathered around campfires for roasted game and percussion jams with the leftover bones. While the setting, and the cuisine, is in most cases far more civilized today, the pleasures of the experience are probably much the same.

David Wilhelm, president of Bistro 201, the three-year-old bastion of contemporary California cooking in Irvine that has entertainment seven nights a week, says that music was always part of his concept for the restaurant. “I worked in New York before coming to California and always enjoyed going into restaurants, often in hotels, where you could hear a piano duo or jazz trio. Music adds so much to the ambience.”

Cary Redfearn, owner-manager of Oysters in Corona del Mar agrees. “Music really contributes to the dining experience. You feel like you’re somewhere special when you walk down the ramp into our dining room and the music is playing. We look at entertainment as we do buying art. It adds to the atmosphere.”

“It’s part of the restaurant, an accompaniment to everything we have here,” says Norbert Moha, manager of Bistango and himself a guitarist who appears occasionally with Dr. Charles Rutherford’s big bands. “We are known as a restaurant, but now we are known for our music as well.”

Some restaurant owners see entertainment in an even larger context. William Gustaf Magnuson, one of the owners of Gustaf Anders in the South Coast Plaza Village in Santa Ana, sees the dining-out ritual as part of a larger cultural experience, and suggests that it’s important not only to his establishment’s success, but to the community as well. “Good food, good music, good art--it’s all part of the same thing. It’s important for Santa Ana to have all those ingredients, that’s what makes a city alive. Business, by itself, is not enough.”

To that end, Magnuson keeps a constantly rotating selection of art on his walls and has booked music ranging from classical string quartets to combos featuring such West Coast jazzsters as trumpeter Shorty Rogers and saxophonist Bill Cooper.

Despite these lofty aspirations, business is still a big reason jazz is on the menu at many restaurants. “To stay competitive, you need to look at what trends are currently taking place,” says Bistro 201’s Wilhelm, “and today music is part of that.”

“With the economy the way it is, you have to offer something more than what the competition is offering. What (having music) leads to is a greater perception of value and a better experience for our customers. People have the option of going to places with no entertainment, but they often prefer places that do.”

“We’ve had a significant increase in business since adding jazz last October,” says Jim Vaughn, manager of Maxwell’s By the Sea in Huntington Beach.”When we started looking at entertainment in Orange County, we found a need for a place to provide mainstream, straight-ahead jazz, and that’s the niche we’ve carved for ourselves.”

The success of the music policy at Maxwell’s, which has featured a piano trio on Friday and Saturday nights and special guest artists--including “Tonight Show” cut-up and saxophonist Tommy Newsom, trumpeter Snooky Young and trombonist Bill Watrous--on Sunday afternoons, has recently prompted them to include guest musicians with the trio on Fridays and Saturdays as well.

George Gallardo, formerly one of the owners of El Matador Mexican restaurant in Huntington Beach, says the introduction of music three years ago turned the place around. “It tripled my business. It brought in a clientele that we didn’t know existed, people who came looking for entertainment and food, not just food. From there it snowballed. Some people started coming in three, four nights a week just to hear the music. It gave me the kind of consistent business that I didn’t have before.”

That music policy, a mix of blues, big bands and contemporary jazz names booked by bassist Luther Hughes, became so popular, Gallardo has carried it on to a new restaurant, Mucho Gusto, that is specifically designed for dining and listening. The restaurant, scheduled to open Saturday in Costa Mesa, will feature Central and South American cooking, and the kind of rhythmic sounds that go over so well at El Matador.

“We’ve set (Mucho Gusto) up with a sound system designed for the room and special lighting that the musicians can control from the stage. We attempted to convert El Matador to music, but the way it was set up, not everyone could see the bandstand. Here, it’s visible from everywhere in the dining room.” In addition, closed-circuit television will allow those in the bar area to catch what’s going down on the bandstand.

But not everyone who goes to a restaurant wants to hear music, and establishments are careful to shield those who would prefer not to be serenaded directly. “We try to offer an option,” says Wilhelm. “If they want to be close enough to see the music being played, we accommodate them. We can also take care of those who do not.”

“No matter what you do, someone is going to be unhappy,” adds Magnuson, who says it’s a matter of knowing the clientele and seating them accordingly. “During the dinner hour, we keep the music quieter. Later on, when people are in the mood to listen, we add a bass player to our pianist and the sound picks up.”

“We’re actually getting two crowds now” says Moha of Bistango. “The group who comes in for dinner, and a group that comes in later, after 9:30, for the entertainment. And we keep some of that dinner crowd longer--they stay to hear the music. It works out very well.”

But playing restaurants can be difficult for musicians who come in expecting an attentive audience only to find their work obscured by conversation and the clatter of tableware. Drummer Wally Stryk, whose trios have played a number of Orange and Los Angeles county restaurants, says band members must have reasonable expectations about the kind of crowd they’re entertaining. “When you’re playing in a restaurant, you’re playing for people that would not normally go to a jazz club and pay a cover to hear the group. It gives you the opportunity to expose them to sounds they otherwise wouldn’t hear. But you have to keep your head screwed on and not be offended if someone is talking or not responding with applause to what you’re doing.”

Most of the restaurateurs we talked to agreed that presenting a variety of sounds is important to a music policy’s success. “We try to mix it up, and keep it fresh” says Wilhelm, referring to the different genres offered at Bistro 201.

Early one recent Sunday evening, only a few tables were occupied at the Bistro when World Beat, a Latin-jazz quintet, started up the sultry bossa nova rhythm of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave.” Singer Tina McLean, swaying slowly to the sensuous beat, delivered the lyric in clean, straight-forward tones as guitarist Andy Kotz added color. Later, as the room began to fill, the band’s leader, percussionist Michael J, moved out in front of his assembled rhythm makers, gyrating energetically to the beat, passing out various noisemakers to the crowd and allowing them to participate in the music-making. Conguero Gino G added rippling patter to the mix and a few couples took to the floor in front of the band to dance.

OK, it’s not exactly Rio, but such regular offerings (World Beat plays every Friday and Sunday at the restaurant) do add diversity to Orange County’s musical scene.

And there’s more. On any given night, diners can be entertained by fusion sounds at the Studio Cafe in Corona del Mar, an R & B vocalist and her band at Cafe Lido in Newport Beach, a piano soloist singing standards at Bistro 201 or a Latin band at Carmelo’s in Corona del Mar.

Vaughn reports that such variety is responsible for the mainstream jazz philosophy at his restaurant. “We wanted to set Maxwell’s apart as having a different type of jazz than our friends at the Cafe Lido or El Matador or Bistango,” he says.

“And it’s great that we don’t seem to be getting in each other’s way.”