Pass the Politicos : Schmoozing: Armed with cellular phones, legal pads and appetites, Capitol Hill’s power elite march into landmark eateries to make their deals.

It’s 1200 hours and Nancy Sherwood and Joseph Day are at their battle stations near the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Soon the invasion begins, building to a crescendo in about 15 minutes as a blue- and gray-suited army sweeps past the line of presidential portraits and pseudo-mahogany wainscoting to where Sherwood awaits.

A commanding maitresse d’ in a short black dress and pearls, she confers constantly by phone with manager Day upstairs as they deploy the incoming troops.

“Only one table left,” Day reports to Sherwood at 12:25, contentedly surveying a field of well-heeled patrons in red banquettes flanked by photos of hundreds of notables who’ve dined and dealt at the Occidental Grill over the last nine decades.

The Occidental, a survivor of battles as pitched as the political struggles that periodically change the occupant of the mansion next door, is one of a dozen Washington restaurants currently in favor among politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists who, even in the austere ‘90s, still gotta eat.

Indeed, relieved restaurateurs from Dupont Circle to Capitol Hill talk hopefully of the example set by the new commander-in-chief, who appears never to have met an entree he didn’t like.

“The big difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats eat out more,” said Steven Damato, an owner of Nora’s, a not-new but newly trendy restaurant near Dupont Circle that serves organic food.

“President Clinton is all over town; these guys are all over town. Clinton and every Cabinet official have been here.”

Damato also praised the Administration for being serious about reforming health care but not for the reason one might think.

“Every conceivable health group from nurses to gynecologists to drug companies has come to Washington to lobby,” Damato said gratefully. “It’s benefited the restaurant industry enormously.”

Besides Clinton, who came for dinner, Attorney General Janet Reno, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and White House Chief of Staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty have eaten at the Occidental, a lunchtime haunt of high-powered lawyers.

“The Occidental is the one where the hidden business gets done,” said Ben Giliberti, a Justice Department lawyer who doubles as wine critic for the Washington Post. “It’s not as flashy as Duke Zeibert’s and you’ll see more cellular phones in the Occidental than anywhere else in the city.”

Reconstructed in 1986 along with the adjacent Willard Hotel, the old Occidental was the scene of the ultimate power meal: In October, 1962, a KGB agent passed to then ABC State Department correspondent John Scali the Russian offer to withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba, which eventually defused the worst superpower confrontation of the postwar era.

Nothing so momentous has happened in the culinary world since, though a truce meal, albeit unsuccessful, was staged last year between Clinton and his Republican nemesis, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, at another Washington monument, Duke Zeibert’s.

Like the Occidental, a veteran of Washington’s restaurant wars that lost its original home to a wrecker’s ball, Duke’s is chopped liver to the Occidental’s charred tuna.

One of several establishments that sell ersatz New York Jewish comfort food to primarily middle-aged males, Duke’s is home away from home to CNN talk-meister Larry King and the owner of the Redskins football team, Jack Kent Cooke.

“Do I come here often? Oh heavens, no. Only five days a week,” joked Cooke as he vacated Duke’s premier booth about five yards into the cavernous dining room overlooking Connecticut Avenue.

Conspicuous at the restaurant entrance are glass cases housing three Super Bowl trophies won by the Redskins.

“I’m privileged to put them here with dear Duke,” Cooke said. “He’s truly an icon in this town--a genuine one.”

An octogenarian, like Cooke, Zeibert has passed management of the 45-year-old establishment to his son, Randy. To hear the patrons tell, however, nothing about the place has changed.

“They give a good fast lunch with meat and potatoes,” said Tom Korologos, a premier lobbyist who says his client list includes the National Rifle Assn. and Anheuser Busch.

Korologos, who has done more than his share of power lunches since he arrived in Washington in 1962, asserted that the institution was on its way out and being replaced by the power breakfast.

“In the old days you had semi-unlimited expense accounts and the ethics rules and deductions rules were different,” he reminisced. “Now you can’t take some poor slob making $57,000 a year to the Watergate because that guy has to buy his own lunch.”

Korologos, whose salary is obviously somewhat larger, said he does his early morning networking with the likes of Washington Post top executive Katharine Graham and veteran deal-maker Bob Strauss at the Hay-Adams hotel, where orange juice and eggs can run $30. As for lunch, he said, “I buy more lunches in the slop shop in the Senate basement than I do at restaurants.”

Fortunately for Capitol Hill eateries, not everyone shares Korologos’s mid-day habits.

“I still think the power lunch goes on,” said Paul Zucconi, manager of La Colline, a classic French restaurant that has lasted a dozen years on Capitol Hill. “Of course, the consumption of alcohol is drastically off from what it used to be.”

Gone are the days when a frolicsome Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and his old drinking buddy, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), are said to have pulled their framed photos off the wall by the bar, thrown them down on the floor and danced on them--a story Zucconi, in hallowed Washington tradition, refused to “confirm or deny.”

“Sen. Kennedy is a customer of ours along with his wife, Vicki,” was all Zucconi would say on that subject.

On the secret of La Colline’s success, he was modest.

“I’d like to think we are good because of our longevity in this town but would we be this busy if we were not located across the street from the Senate? I think not.”

Location is key for the lunchtime crowd, who rarely stray far from their offices.

“Noon to 12:30 is the main time for a reservation, and one hour and 15 minutes is the maximum they stay,” said Larry King (not to be confused with the CNN host), the manager of 701 Pennsylvania, a sleekly modern 3-year-old restaurant that attracts patrons from the nearby Justice Department, Federal Trade and Securities and Exchange commissions.

“They come from a meeting and are talking about business when they arrive, they continue their business during lunch and they’re still talking about it when they’re done,” King said. “There are not too many pleasure lunches around here.”

Even Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., the still powerful if scandal-tinged chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, reserves his famous appetite for lobbyists’ attention and rare meat for the dinner hour at Morton’s of Chicago, a steakhouse in Georgetown.

Although Clinton went to the lovely historic neighborhood to consume a mammoth Italian midday repast at Filomena’s in January with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, “nobody goes to Georgetown for lunch unless you work there,” said an influential trade lawyer with a Los Angeles firm, who asked not to be identified.

“It is inconceivable that you would go as much as two miles for lunch,” the lawyer said, “where in L.A. you would think nothing of going 20 miles.”

Where downtown power lunch choices were once limited to Sans Souci (which closed in 1979), Maison Blanche, another French spot near the White House, and Duke’s, a variety of cuisines have become available over the last decade as bureaucratic tastes have become more sophisticated.

The Bombay Club, next to Lafayette Park and Red Sage on 14th Street, attracts a fair slice of high-profile journalists and Administration officials (though a “depressing number” of the latter, including Clinton top adviser George Stephanopoulos, eat at their desks, according to Times White House correspondent David Lauter).

Many lawyers and lobbyists along the K Street corridor like the Italian restaurants Galileo, i Ricchi and Primi Piatti, as well as steakhouses such as Sam and Harry’s and The Palm.

Officials of the International Monetary Fund go to Mr. K’s, an expensive Chinese restaurant on K Street, when they’re not dining at their in-house cafeteria.

Taberna del Alabardero, an elegant Spanish restaurant in the same neighborhood, is also popular with the diplomatic corps.

Although the Kennedy Administration is often credited with sparking the development of fine restaurants in Washington, the L.A. trade lawyer said it was really Richard Nixon’s doing.

“All those regulatory agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, got their start under Nixon and that’s what brought the lobbyists,” he said. “Before that, it was a wasteland.”

Hot spots come and go: for the last two years, the southwestern-flavored Red Sage; before that, the Tuscan i Ricchi.

The key qualification, the lawyer said, is not so much the food as that the restaurant “treats you well so that if you call at 11:59 and need a table for noon you can get one.”

“Of course,” he added, “the ultimate power restaurant is obviously the White House mess.”

No reservations accepted there.