Soul Oldies

The M & M Cafe in Gardena is a cheerful place, a converted coffeeshop on a fast stretch of boulevard halfway between Compton and Lawndale, always crowded, brightly lit, the legend “Down Home Mississippi Cooking” painted on its front.

Inside, the restaurant is split into two legs. Sometimes almost all the customers watch TV while they power down catfish, good meatloaf, soul-fried chicken--typically an episode of “Roc” will be on one screen, a Laker game on the other--and M & M is famous for the best macaroni and cheese in town, shamelessly rich and trashier than most cafes would even dare. There is decent okra gumbo on weekends, and salmon croquettes for breakfast. Of the half-dozen Southside restaurants in the M & M soul-food empire, the Gardena branch is probably the most popular.

But the original branch of the M & M, a small, window-barred restaurant on a tidy strip of auto-repair shops and storefront churches in the heart of South Central L.A., is, simply, what you are hoping for every time you step into a soul-food cafe: a spare, well-scrubbed place, decorated with a state-map calendar from a Mississippi funeral home and a couple of hand-scrawled signs, one that serves gargantuan portions of perfect Southern food.

A jukebox is well stocked with soul oldies; fiery sauce and pepper vinegar sits on the tables; a security guard hangs out in a corner, perpetually nursing a plate of chicken wings. The dining room always smells like Thanksgiving. In a part of town where “country” can sometimes be taken as an insult, M & M is country in the best sense of the word, a sort of outpost of rural Mississippi in one of the most urbanized areas on Earth, a monument to the Southern institution of meat-and-threes.

Each day, there are about half a dozen entrees to choose from. You get to choose three side dishes with your meal, tremendous stewed collard greens, candy-sweet yams, rice and gravy, green beans cooked with potatoes so long that they fall apart when you look at them, perfect creamy macaroni and cheese. This is the place for sweetened ice tea served in tumblers so immense you can barely get one hand around them, fresh lemonade that tastes the way your grandmother’s probably did, crusty, dense corn muffins with slabs of margarine.

A pan-grilled T-bone steak, blackened and sinewy, comes well done but still full of juice, smacked with black pepper, garnished with a big pile of black-rimmed grilled onions and a puddle of steak gravy--it must be the manliest meal around. Short ribs, which seem pretty long by anybody’s standards, are smoked and peppered like pastrami, glazed with brown gravy; oxtails, stewed to the gelatinous richness you might associate with $50 queue de boeuf in Michelin-starred Parisian restaurants, are as good as you’ll find in Los Angeles outside of l’Orangerie. Fried catfish--a whole one, plus three fillets to an order!--are crisp and meaty; even turkey wings with stuffing are swell. If you have not stuffed yourselves insensate, there are giant bowls of peach cobbler.

“Are you related to the M & M on Rosecrans?” I asked. “I like that place, but this food. . . .”

The waitress smiled. “I know that,” she said, her expression saying, “Fool.”

“We were the first, and we will always be the best.”

* M & M Cafe

9506 S. Avalon Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 777-9250. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. 2222 W. Rosecrans Blvd., Gardena, (310) 327-7503. Open Tuesday-Thursday, 8 a.m. 8 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sunday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Cash only. Takeout. No alcohol. Dinner for two, food only, $13-$20.