Table for 31, Please

“Everyone will make [a dish] a little bit different. It’s your touch. You make it your own.”

--Javier Prado, age 45

*

Like most Saturday nights for about as long as he can remember, 22-year-old Javier Anaya--in crisply pressed suit, silk dress shirt open at the collar--is dressed for the party.

The party of 14--late, but on the way. The party of four who thought they might be able to stop in for a quick dinner on the way to the theater, being “regulars and all.” And part of a party of 12, the rest not due for another half hour or so. “Oh, we’ll just wait at the table. . . .”

Javi knows this isn’t possible, that the 85-seat restaurant he manages, the Original Cha Cha Cha on Virgil Avenue, already is bursting at the seams, like a house party that’s just getting warmed up and already is spilling out onto the sidewalk.

But he doesn’t say no. Instead it’s: “Let me see what we can do.” He rolls up his sleeves--carefully, mind you--to reconfigure the floor plan. A little nip and tuck. . .

A few traffic lights west along Melrose Avenue, then south to Beverly Boulevard, Javi’s older brother Miguel is installed behind the host stand at Cava, his serious face lit by the glow illuminating the reservation log. Miguel and Javi’s cousins Joey and Alberto Prado (who is better known as Stretch) keep order in Cava’s trio of baroque and bustling dining rooms. Stretch is running the supper-club action upstairs. Joey tends bar, offering up blushing Cosmopolitans and Cava’s newest concoction, a Cointreau/Chambord combo called the Latin Lover, with a smile equal parts shy and impish. . .

Start with a pungent pinch of garlic, the six-eight beat of congas and timbales, cut the heat with the sweetness of passion fruit, mix in walls the shade of scotch bonnets and garnish it all with outlandish tall tales. And you have but a drop of the family secret.

In a city infamous for its short attention span, Cha Cha Cha and Cava--flagships of L.A.’s Latin/Caribbean cuisine--appear indefatigable. But the same may not be true for their head chef and master mind, Toribio Prado, the family filament, who at 36 is feeling a bit crisp around the edges and in need of room to wander (if only for a little while).

So he’s taking a break from the daily routine and reveling in his newfound spare time (he just got back from New York, where he prepared dinner for the prestigious James Beard Foundation). Happily--miraculously, his family and business partners agree--his decision coincides with a crucial development: that several of his nephews all have come of age.

Having grown up working for their uncle for pocket change, gas money, car payments and college tuition, they’ve now taken keen interest in the family business--number crunching, scheduling headaches, long hours and all.

“We realized,” says Stretch, “that we had to act upon what we had always talked about. About having something together.”

Through a carousel of business partners and personal and professional setbacks, family--Toribio’s 13 brothers and sisters (Javier, Jose-Luis, Guadalupe, Josefina, Masedonio, Raphael, Chui, Martin, Ophelia, Grasiela, Luz, Teresa, Maria) and their scores of children and grandkids--has been not just their safety net but their recipe for success.

*

“You can’t just read recipes,” says Miguel. “You have to understand the flavor. Some people just naturally have a palate for flavor. And when the food is flowing, it’s like music. That’s what it is when you go to cook at any of our houses. It’s the food singing--honestly. That was the God-given talent to the family, to understand food.”

Like recipes, family histories are seldom written. They are handed down. Told before bedtime. On long walks at odd hours. Around a noisy dinner table, lifted glasses in hand.

And like recipes, these histories are subject to the tricks of memory, extrapolation and interpretation. Where memory fades, invention takes over to power the tale. Count up all the descendants, in-laws, etc., of Rafaela and Toribio Prado Sr., who followed their children here from Michoacan, Mexico, in 1989, and you’ll hear more than 100 voices. Like that of any family in any city, theirs is a history studded with titillating episodes, a telenovela of family feuds, eccentric uncles, prodigal sons, jealousies, love won and lost.

As common lore has it, it all started in 1986 with a squat afterthought of a space at Virgil and Melrose avenues. The brainstorm of Mario Tamayo, a self-styled impresario who sought out Toribio Jr. to be the restaurant’s secret ingredient, Cha Cha Cha seemed to push itself up suddenly on the edge of east Hollywood out of a lot full of crushed Tecate cans, broken Coke bottles and wild weeds.

More than a decade later, it has spawned a host of relatives, close and distant: Cava, Prado (elder brother Javier’s place on Larchmont Boulevard near Beverly), Cha Cha Cha Long Beach (managed by nephew Jorge Anaya), Cafe Mambo (now defunct), Cha Cha Cha Encino (no longer part of the family business). The most recent link in the chain is the coast-hugging Cha Cha Chicken in Santa Monica, run by Toribio Jr.’s ex-wife, Elvira. Not to mention a host of imitators started up by old business partners and ex-employees.

That version of the story, however, steamrolls past a foundation erected years before on dogged optimism, hard work and thick skin, a living canvas of kitchen burns and paring knife scars.

It’s a long way from the night in 1972 that Jose-Luis and Javier spent on a bench in MacArthur Park: Having come ahead of the rest of the family, they were nearly penniless, ditched by the guides who’d been paid to bring them here to shelter and safety. But it isn’t so far emotionally. No one has forgotten the distance that’s been walked to build something tangible--a legacy to pass on.

From busing tables and washing dishes at the Ambassador and Beverly Wilshire hotels, members of the family went on to begin the first business of their own (Belmont Pier, a restaurant that predated the first Cha Cha Cha by 10 years). Others began to accept positions as prep and line cooks and ultimately as chefs at such landmarks as Le Restaurant and the Ivy (where a number of them still work).

Building a more expansive future meant long predawn to post-midnight hours that took brothers and sisters--who by then were fathers and mothers--away from their homes and families. Before long the restaurants--those in which they were employed, the others they started to own--evolved into ad hoc meeting places to trade news of the day, and look toward the future.

“They looked out for one another,” Joey explains. “So when my dad [Jose-Luis] landed a job as a dishwasher . . . he’d bring in his brother. . . .”

“That’s how it works,” says Stretch. “There’s a continuous flow of migrant workers that know that restaurants are the first place you go. Soon the restaurants were filled with a family of workers instead of workers from different families. It was comforting--being with your family in a strange land.”

In the beginning the family settled in L.A.’s Pico-Union district, but, saving their money, they began to build a family homestead, a network of apartments, houses, duplexes in midtown L.A., if not on the same block, at least within walking distance.

“To split all of that up,” Stretch suggests, “would be like swimming with one hand.”

But “Toribio was always different,” says brother Javier. “I mean, you go to a family function and everyone else will be dressed traditionally and then in walks Toribio in velvet or lace or whatever, looking like that psychic, Walter Mercado. . . . .”

*

Another city, another street named Melrose. Toribio Prado zips off the main drag and ascends the hill. The sunroof of his black Mercedes open, he blasts Spanish love songs as warm and bright as the sun. His thick black ponytail waves in the wind like a scarf. In this sleepy-but-ever-growing San Diego County community of Vista, where he has lived since 1995 when he opened the short-lived Cha Cha Cha La Jolla, he is like a loud boutonniere brightening up a standard-issue navy blazer.

“A lot of my friends don’t think he’s my dad,” says Ricky, 16, the oldest of Toribio’s three kids. “They tell me: I saw your brother driving up the hill! And sometimes he feels more like my brother.”

The car curves into a thatch of tract homes, a quiet and orderly neighborhood where a little something sets the Prados’ white split level apart from all the rest: “How could I not have sugar cane growing here?” Toribio booms. “Being Cuban and all!”

Cuban? It’s not the only, um, exaggeration. There was the time he lived in the trees in Brazil. The time he ran away from home for 10 years and lived off the lean and the fat of the land. The time he went to Africa. “You were in Africa, Dad?!” Ricky asks, pop-eyed, setting the table for lunch. To which father crinkles just the edges of his eyes into a smile--and then giggles: “Silly!” His stories are much like his restaurants--lush, exotic evocations. It doesn’t take long to understand why his nieces and nephews call him “Tornado” or “Torpedo.”

The house is a gallery: There are his hand-painted Dali-esque turns on a Japanese screen, little altars everywhere, drooping palm fronds, bar stools the shape of Ricky Ricardo’s beloved “Babalu” conga. The most revelatory piece is a large, canary-yellow wooden cross detailed with red roses creeping like ivy. A birthday gift made and inscribed by Ricky, in the voice of his father:

“You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt to tell you lies. Particularly when there is no answer.”

Kicking off his motorcycle boots, Dad, in denim shirt and baggies, pads around his comparably sedate kitchen in white socks, checking his roast pork wrapped in banana leaves with touches of apricot, garlic and ginger. It isn’t your usual midafternoon lunch, but Toribio isn’t your typical stay-at-home dad.

“I don’t know if it ever really crossed my mind that I was going to be a chef, but I knew that I always wanted to be a good cook,” he says, taking a spoon to the escargots in butter studded with chiles. “For someone like me . . . considering my background, it was either the restaurant business or gardening.”

But until now, he has been driving his life at fast speeds in L.A.’s culinary fast lane. His marriage just ended, the business overwhelming . . . something, he’s the first to tell you, had to give. “I was working 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week trying to support my family in the early days. I think I did that for too many years.”

The stay-at-home life will allow him the luxury of testing out recipes on his kids (daughters Adrianna and Laura as well as Ricky), and teaching and taking classes at UC San Diego and the Oceanside Reading/Learning Center. He’s also thinking about books and cooking shows.

He’ll still make kitchen rounds a few days a week. “I used to feel I had to be in the kitchen all the time. Miguel and the nephews do a decent job. . . .” Indeed, this generation of Prados--not just in the kitchen and the dining room but in the front office as well--already has begun to put its own spin on things, to add, as Tio Javier advises, their own touch.

For now, Toribio will watch his business from the wings. This particular Saturday night, he does just that, trading stories in front of Cava as if it is his patio at home. He and Miguel and Octavio Madrid, Cava’s dapper burgundy-jacketed maitre d’, known for his flaming aperitifs, recall the days when dinner in a restaurant was the main event, something theatrical that lasted for hours, not something to breeze through on the way to a screening.

Then: “Can you keep a secret?” asks Miguel. The lines of his face fashion themselves into a smile.

“Of course!” Toribio’s eyes crinkle at the edges.

“We’re going to have a baby!”

Throwing both hands up in the air, Toribio toasts his nephew with one of Madrid’s potent concoctions and then in a flash is up, bounding toward the kitchen. Miguel watches after him, realizing, with a bewildered shrug, that the entire clan will know by morning.

“That’s Toribio. His such a kid. It’s like the rest of our family taught us how to work--that strict work ethic. Toribio, well, he’s taught us how to reach. To dream.”