Odds-On Favorite

The Derby is a splendid place, an old race-track restaurant a few furlongs east of Santa Anita, hard by chain restaurants and coffee shops and bars with fragrant names such as “100-1” and “Drinkers’ Hall of Fame.” The Derby sign is a violent burst of neon in the warm San Gabriel Valley night. There are a lot of horsy restaurants in the Southland, in the South Bay and down on old Route 19, but the Derby might be the grooviest, crowded with well-fed men, many of them pretty obviously ex-jockeys; women customers gone prematurely blond; pinky rings, pearls and rakish sports coats.

Waitresses wear tight riding silks, kid around with each other and serve you flaming baked Alaska on your birthday. The Derby is dedicated to the memory of George Woolf, a jockey who ran the restaurant until he was thrown from a horse and killed in 1946, and the restaurant is something of a dark-wood race-track museum, with track souvenirs, race-track murals and portraits of the great horse Sea Biscuit . . . Woolf’s favorite mount. Old racing columns (“Rube Barbs”!) mentioning Woolf are printed on the backs of the menus, and autographed jockey pictures line whatever wall space Sea Biscuit has left them.

The first time I went to the Derby, after winning the price of a steak dinner on a turf race down the street, I almost believed, at least for a minute, that I had stumbled into the single best restaurant in the world.

“A rye Old Fashioned?” the waitress asked. “Will that be a regular, or would you like to make that a Daily Double?”

A minute later, she delivered a tumbler of rye big enough to intoxicate all of Vermont.

“We serve a good drink here at the Derby,” she said.

At the Derby, you will find stuffed mushroom caps, and Cobb salads, and good shrimp cocktails that sit on a bed of what could be interpreted as celery remoulade. There is a respectable assortment of luxury fish and “scampi”; also grilled chicken-breast dishes for those who have wandered into here by mistake.

With your meal, you have a choice of gooey, cheesy onion soup, kind of bogus but also kind of delicious, or a salad tossed at table. (The croutons are tasty, the greens crisp and fresh, but the house dressing the waitress describes as “sort of like a Caesar” is more like an oversweet vinaigrette: go for the blue-cheese instead.) There is garlic-cheese toast, the powerful, soggy kind that is in theory mildly detestable but in practice everyone demands more of--”I feel embarrassed that I have to serve you this terrible stuff,” a waiter said last week, winking as he set down a basketful, “but it seems to be company procedure.”

“Brasholi,” charred steak rolls sauced with an old-fashioned marinara that tastes overwhelmingly of tomato paste, should by all rights be dreadful, but somehow ends up as something wonderful, a crisp, pungent epitome of ‘50s dinner-party food.

Mostly, of course, as at all track-oriented restaurants, the specialties involve giant hunks of cow: great slabs of Prime rib with horseradish-reinforced whipped cream, rare grilled strip steaks encrusted with peppercorns, Brobdingnagian hamburger steaks with brown mushroom gravy on the side. Rare filet mignon wrapped with bacon--”Odds-On Favorite,” says the menu--is a ruddy disk of meat, so soft it seems a little like meat-flavored butter, the best thing in the house. Chateaubriand for two is the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s forearm, a tremendous, tender piece of meat rimmed in black char, served with a sauce boat of Bearnaise sauce and carved table-side with great ceremony.

If you are for some reason not sated, there is smooth, cool cheesecake, not too sweet, . . . or one of the Derby’s special coffee drinks.

“Our cappuccino is made with five different liquors, which I cannot tell you what they are,” the waitress said. She put a finger to her lips and cocked her head.

“It’s a Derby secret.”

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* The Derby

233 E. Huntington Drive, Arcadia, (818) 447-8173. Second location in Glendora. Open Monday-Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m. to midnight; Saturday, 4 p.m. to midnight; Sunday, 4 to 11 p.m. All major credit cards accepted. Full bar. Valet parking. Reservations recommended, essential during racing season. Dinner for two, food only, $25-$35.