1--Not Such a Lonely Number

For a time I had this job in Los Angeles that required me to go to Chicago several times a year. I’d always stay in the same hotel because I liked the bamboo writing tables in the rooms and the Art Nouveau furnishings and the way the people at the front desk seemed to remember me from visit to visit.

Instead of just being on a business trip, I felt like I was going back home in a way. Nearby was a walk-down restaurant in a brownstone building that I’d frequent because it had live jazz and house Manhattans made with Knob Creek whiskey and because it was always crowded with young women who wore silk blouses and cashmere scarves who, like me, didn’t mind dining at the bar alone.

At most restaurants you feel a little awkward eating by yourself. That’s why you’ll often see a woman who dines alone holding a novel in her hand while distractedly nibbling on a Caesar salad. Or see a man hunched over a folded section of the Wall Street Journal while a forked square of filet mignon hovers in the air midway between his plate and his mouth. As if that Wally Lamb book was so riveting that those women have almost completely forgotten that they are dining in a nice restaurant; as if what happened on the Nasdaq today is so disconcerting that those men don’t realize their expensive meals are getting cold.

But that wasn’t the case at this restaurant in Chicago. Here there were dozens of people, like me, eating by themselves. We all sat at a horseshoe-shaped bar and we said hello to each other and no one ever sat there reading a book or looking at a newspaper. You didn’t have to pretend here that you were eating alone, that there was something sad and pathetic about the experience.

I feel the same way about the White House in Laguna Beach as I did about that Chicago eatery. I have dined there in small groups, and I have sat at long tables with eight or 10 others, on occasion, trying to talk over the live music playing in the room next door, but I am most comfortable there when I’m by myself, sitting at the bar with a glass of wine and noshing on something simple like the crab cakes or Cajun shrimp and chicken pasta.

It’s not a place to go to early. Around 6 or 7, even on the weekends, the place is too quiet. This is when those who are in Laguna just for the day and still have to drive home to Long Beach or Oceanside come in with their bags from shops along Forest or Ocean avenues, exhausted, and ask for coffee with their Oriental chicken salads. After them come the couples in a hurry because they have to get to the playhouse or the movies.

But around 9, the atmosphere changes. That’s when the locals start drifting in, maybe to have a late meal or listen and dance to the live music. Sometimes, particularly in the summer, it can get to be too much, and the room becomes so humid from all the warm bodies and so crowded that it is no longer pleasant. But in winter, there are usually just enough people to make it interesting while still allowing you to have a conversation, to sit at the bar and have a plate of pasta.

I was there on a Tuesday recently and sat at the bar with a glass of chardonnay and a plate of shrimp scampi while a blues group played music that reminded me of Chicago and that other restaurant. I was not the only one dining alone at the bar. A few stools over was a woman in her early 30s in a stylish celery-colored business suit. She looked as if she’d just come from work, but she was so friendly with the bartender and obviously unhurried that I wondered if she might not be a local who simply didn’t want to go home and make her own dinner.

I ate my scampi and she ate her plate of pasta, and we both listened to 2000 Lbs. of Blues, which was the name of the group, and the bartender would ask me how I was doing and I’d say fine, and then he’d walk five feet down the bar and ask the woman in the celery-colored suit how she was doing and she’d say great, and then he’d nod and smile at both of us like we were friends of his that he hoped would get to know each other better.

“I see you in here once in a while,” he said to me as the band took a break. He was standing sort of midway between the two of us and talking to me, but his body language was including the woman in on our conversation as well.

I told him I’d been in a few times. “You live around here, right?” In Newport, I told him. Then he turned to her. “You used to live in Newport, didn’t ya?”

“I grew up in Corona del Mar,” she said. She sipped her wine.

“Now where do you live?” I asked her.

“Silver Lake,” she said. “But I come here a lot.”

“Business?”

She nodded. And told me that she worked for a public relations agency in Los Angeles. That in Laguna was one of her clients. “I’ll come down here once a month or so and stay for the night even though it only takes me 90 minutes to get home. I like it here. I like the people.”

The bartender cleared our plates, brought both of us another glass of wine, though I don’t remember asking for it. She talked about coming to the White House with her girlfriends when she turned 21. How they’d dance all night during the summer to ‘80s music, how none of them ever had to buy their drinks. “I don’t have the energy to do that now,” she said. “But I still like to come back. Reminds me of good times.”

The band came back, and while they were warming up, the woman in the celery-colored suit went up and put a few dollars in the tip jar and whispered something to the bass player. He nodded and said something to the rest of the musicians, and a few minutes later they kicked in with a pretty good rendition of an old B.B. King standard, “Everyday I Have the Blues.” The woman smiled happily and closed her eyes, swaying on her bar stool like a lily in the breeze. “I feel like dancing,” she said.

I stood up and the bartender came over and gave me my bill. “Time to go?” the woman asked. I nodded. “All right, then. But this place is just starting to get good.”

I know, I told her. That’s why I’m going home.

Outside, the night was cold and a breeze was blowing in off the ocean. There were a lot of people out, and some of the stores were still open. I walked up one side of Forest and then down the other, and when I passed back by the White House again, I saw the woman in the celery-colored suit dancing with a young man in jeans and a gray sweater. She must have seen me too because she gave me a little wave as I passed by. Or maybe she wasn’t waving at me at all. Maybe I mistook a simple dance movement, an uplifting twist of her hand, for a good-bye.

* The White House, 340 South Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-8088.

* Hours: Daily 10 a.m.-2 a.m.

David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.