Love Is Served All Day : Matchmaker: Romance is on the menu in a Burbank Chinese restaurant where the owner doubles as spouse-hunting Cupid for eligible singles.

All Joe Steidl wanted was a good plate of kung pao chicken that summer day in 1993 when he walked into Cindy’s Corner restaurant in Burbank. Instead, he became a pet project of the Chinese Cupid.

Alone in the room but for a smallish woman who sat at a manager’s desk surrounded by her notebooks, Steidl, a 43-year-old stand-up comedian and former Los Angeles deejay, gazed up from his booth at the life-size posters of various Hollywood icons--Bogart, Eastwood, Bacall--and asked jokingly why he wasn’t among them.

After all, he quipped, he was going to make it big one day.

The woman looked up from her books. Her eyes twinkled.

“Are you single?” she asked sweetly.

In the time it took Steidl to nod his head, restaurant owner Cindy Hartman had slid into the seat across from him. She opened one of her notebooks, filled with snapshots and resumes of women, young and old, from Asia and the rest of the world--Cindy’s other pet projects.

“She looked me over with this calculating little smile and said, ‘Do you see anything you like?’ ” Steidl recalled.

He had just said the magic word--single--that turns Hartman from a restaurant owner into a matchmaker, that converts her cafe from a diner into a unique spouse-hunting agency.

“At first,” Steidl said, “I thought I was being set up, that there was some kind of charge or something. Then I just stopped and realized how innocent she was. And so I looked down at the pictures in the book. And the rest was matchmaking history.”

Since then, Steidl has dated an interesting selection of women from Cindy’s files, and now donates his time to emcee the twice-monthly meetings of the Burbank Singles Club, which was started with a few would-be couples brought together by Hartman’s instinctive matchmaking. The club has grown to 800 members--one of the fastest-growing ethnic singles organizations in Southern California.

At the center of all this cross-cultural romantic shaking and baking is Hartman, a 46-year-old woman born in Taiwan who gets her kicks matching up likely couples, often using her downtown Burbank restaurant as an initial meeting place, a romantic test site of sorts.

“When you eat at Cindy’s, you can’t even look up from your food. You’re afraid,” Steidl said. “If you even look cross-eyed at a picture, Cindy will be right there saying, ‘Is that the one?’ That first day I went in, I picked out one woman I thought was kind of cute and the next thing I knew, she came walking through the door. Cindy had gotten her on the phone.”

Hartman has been responsible for at least two dozen marriages and countless other pairings since 24 people attended her first singles meeting, a karaoke party in 1993.

Although the couples are predominantly American men and Asian women, she has become the ladle that stirs Southern California’s cultural melting pot, finding partners--often across ethnic lines--for blacks and Latinos, as well as men and women from Japan, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Europe and South America.

Since that first party, the club grew too big for the tiny restaurant, and now holds regular Sunday night gatherings, known among the singles crowd as “Cindy’s Parties,” at the Castaway banquet hall in Burbank. Men pay $22 admission, women $12.

The reasons for Hartman’s success with trans-ethnic romances are varied: Some women say they feel unappreciated by the men of their own culture. Some men want to explore relationships with women of different lands; or pursue the girl next door they never got the chance to meet. Still others are Vietnam War veterans who cannot get the women of Saigon out of their minds.

“It’s funny,” Steidl said. “Women from far-flung cultures get tired of how their men treat them. Some men are tired of getting used by those American girls they meet in Encino.”

Hartman tries to help them all. And finally, in 1992, the matchmaker met her own match. Allen Hartman, a Warner Bros. projectionist, took a wrong turn in downtown Burbank and ended up at Cindy’s Corner for breakfast.

He came back for lunch that same day. The couple were married eight months later, making the Chinese Cupid one of her own satisfied customers.

“Little by little, all by herself, Cindy has struck a chord in this city,” said Al Friedman, 51, a Northridge special education instructor who met his Taiwanese wife, Vivien, through Burbank Singles. “A lot of lonely people in this community just don’t have much luck meeting that special someone, especially if they’re interested in a mate from another culture. Cindy has taken care of that.”

Hartman got her start matchmaking back home in Taiwan, where she matched up nurses with doctors at the hospital where she worked. Eleven years ago, she divorced her husband and moved with her two children to Burbank, taking a job as a waitress.

Then she saw the vacancy sign on a former Thai restaurant on West Magnolia Boulevard. Within months, Cindy was serving up a Chinese American cuisine that had customers coming back. Not just for the food, but for the humorous antics of the restaurant owner with the sweetly broken English.

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Hartman will do anything for a match. If a male customer orders scrambled eggs every morning, Cindy will introduce him to that shy woman a seat or two down the counter with the same taste in eggs. If a male lawyer takes a seat and asks for a cup of coffee, Cindy will soon be introducing him to that femme fatale with the law degree in the last booth.

Her spontaneous linking up of individual customers led to Friday night karaoke sing-alongs. Within months, those were drawing such big crowds she had to move them to a veterans hall, and then to the even bigger Castaway.

The parties have the feel of a multicultural high school dance, with the women sitting shyly at tables until the men build up the courage to approach them. First-timers have their pictures taken and fill out a brief questionnaire, which are displayed in Hartman’s book of lonely hearts.

Almost every afternoon--and especially on Saturdays--a club member can be found sitting in a booth at Cindy’s Corner, flipping through the glossy notebook pages, appraising the pictures of the opposite sex over a plate of fried rice or noodles.

If they see something they like, Cindy gets on the telephone--sometimes while they wait--and arranges for the other person to come in and check out a picture of the interested party. If both sides are satisfied, she arranges a meeting at her restaurant, where she plays the perfect hostess, making sure both feel at home.

All day long the telephone rings--return calls from sought-after singles, seekers after true love giving it a try. Hartman answers them all, a romantic switchboard operator with a little black book in hand as she runs back and forth from the kitchen to her matchmaking desk in the back.

Hartman can’t help it: The search for perfect partners makes her feel good about herself.

“Some women I have matched up are friends of mine, divorced women from China,” she said. “When I help them find an American or someone else who will accept them as they are, I see their lives change. I see them start to live again. And that makes me feel good.”

Hartman knows that not all matches strike a fire. If a man or woman club member returns to her restaurant looking for the book, she does not judge them. “I can’t make their choices,” she said. “I can only provide opportunities.”

Al and Vivien Friedman’s relationship was not made in heaven, but the next best place: Cindy’s Corner. Married last fall, he helps her with her English. And her self-esteem.

“I have good husband and good teacher,” she said. “In China, I cooked for my man and waited for him to eat first. I walked behind him on the street and waited until I was spoken to. Now my husband cooks for me. He introduces me to his friends. He makes me feel very important.”

Of course, not all club members are so lucky. For some, weeks turn to months and years and they still have not struck romantic pay dirt. For them, Hartman has a simple word of advice:

“I tell them one thing. To never, never, ever give up.”