Table-Hopping

In 1932, when the Gordon-Jenkins Furniture Co. collected “Hollywood’s Famous Recipes of the Stars,” Claudette Colbert offered a suitably gallic caramel custard, Marion Davies sought culinary immortality with Rarebit a la Marion and Mary Pickford chose a dish utterly unfamiliar to most Americans: enchiladas. Her recipe begins, “Make a thin pancake dough with corn flour.”

Celebrities added the spice to food in vintage Los Angeles, where the rise of dining establishments had precious little to do with sophisticated cuisine. “American Dining: California’s Role,” a genial show at the Fullerton Museum Center, is a pleasure for anyone interested in the intersection of restaurants, popular culture and Los Angeles lore. (The title is a misnomer, in that the show is overwhelmingly about Southern California, and there is hardly any acknowledgment of the immense contribution of ethnic cuisines.)

Curator Lynne LaBate has assembled a trove of menus, marketing materials, place settings, recipes and photographs documenting influences of the film industry, car culture and real estate fortunes on Southern California restaurants and fast-food outlets.

Serving food that veered between Continental snobbery and simple Midwestern carnivore’s fare, Los Angeles restaurants long were distinctive primarily for their opulent or outlandish decor and the celebrity crowds they attracted.

The Brown Derby, Chasens, Musso & Frank Grill (seen in a tape of a KCET-TV interview) and the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel are spotlighted in this show, as are restaurants serving a less gilded clientele, such as Clifton’s Penny Cafeteria (which opened in 1932 with a mission to feed the Depression-era hungry for a penny--or for free if they were broke) and El Cholo, the prototypic Mexican restaurant for non-Latinos.

A garish promotional photo from a later era shows Clifton’s children’s meal (59 cents on weekdays): baton-like pieces of breaded mystery meat, a gravy lake atop a mashed potato mountain and a slab of Jell-O lurching in its bowl like a sail in high wind.

LaBate devotes a lot of space to documenting the drive-ins of the ‘30s and ‘40s, with their ample parking and car-hop service, and the subsequent rise of the fast-food chains, which required less of the increasingly expensive land and took advantage of new freeways.

A ledger dated July 1941, from one of Carl Karcher’s early hot dog stands, documents the daily earnings of rival “curb girls” Gloria and Verna ($40.36 and $21.15 on what seems to have been a particularly busy Friday). A couple of decades later, a slick menu appeals to “Junior Suburbanites” with dishes named after Flipper and Snoopy.

Disconcerting is the show’s almost worshipful attitude toward fast-food chains and their founders, complete with upbeat details of McDonald’s national economic impact and a Johnny Rockets booth with a jukebox intrusively blaring ‘60s hits. Where does corporate public relations leave off and independent curatorial choice begin?

In any case, whether upscale or populist, Southern California restaurants before the 1980s failed to enhance the stodgy nature of American cuisine, despite the popularity of such dishes as Cobb salad, the chicken, bacon and avocado-enhanced creation named for Robert Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby. Browsing the menus, the gallery visitor can only wonder about such items as “Mexican Spaghetti,” a 25-cent El Cholo item on a menu from the 1920s.

There’s no way to get around the fact that the revolution in California food happened outside Southern California, with the 1971 opening of Alice Water’s Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Dedicated to inventive preparations of locally grown and raised foodstuffs, the airy restaurant, where the menu changes daily, soon became a mecca for foodies.

A photocopied typed 1973 menu offered such treats as fennel a la grec, puree of carrot soup with Madeira cream garnish, brochette of fish and mushrooms with chestnut puree. The cost was $6.50, a surprise to someone who recalls her impecunious graduate student days in the late ‘70s, when the seemingly pricey Chez Panisse was for a rare parental visit or student-faculty dinner.

After that Northern detour, the show picks up the path of “California Cuisine” in Los Angeles with the opening of Michael McCarty’s eponymous restaurant and the era of Wolfgang Puck and Joachim Splichal.

The exhibition also briefly surveys some of the origins of dining in America, with a look at such items as an 1890s-era menu for a June breakfast at the New York landmark Delmonico’s--a gut-bursting morning feast that included pigs’ feet, lamb, pork, Porterhouse steak, fish, flannel cakes, grits, salads and dessert.

Surprisingly, the show doesn’t provide an idea of what goes on in restaurant kitchens--a “backstage” aspect of restaurant culture that is much more lively and relevant than commercial kitchen furnishings (which the show details via a set of architectural plans).

Equally absent--but surely much harder, if not impossible, for an exhibition to impart--is a sense of the sensual pleasure of it all: the sheer joy of artfully arranged plates of food, the tastes and textures, the flow of conversation, the sense that you have had a memorable evening out.

The guest book--in which visitors are urged to jot down favorite restaurants--is the one place that gives diners a hearing. On one page, somebody fondly recalls a “whitefish liver appetizer to die for (believe it or not!)” at a Wisconsin restaurant; on another, someone tries in vain to recall the name of a favorite prime rib joint on a particular L.A. street corner.

In the end, dining out is as fleeting as stage performance, leaving nothing tangible in its wake. “American Dining” is a worthy attempt to let vintage props recall a slice of gustatory Americana.

* “American Dining: California’s Role,” through Oct. 26. Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave. Hours: noon-4 p.m., Wednesday and Friday-Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday. Admission: $3 general, $2 students, younger than 12 free. Wednesdays: $2 seniors. Thursdays, 6-8 p.m.: free for everyone. (714) 738-6545.