A Sinatra Kind of Place

If you’re going to have lunch with Maria, you want to do it at a joint with a good bar. Because Maria is always late. Fifteen, 20 minutes, if you’re lucky; an hour or longer if you’re not.

Which is all right with me. I wouldn’t hang around that long for just anyone, but Maria is entertaining. In addition to being quite beautiful, she is also witty. Like when I ask her where she wants to eat, she says someplace with food she doesn’t have to chew. Because chewing ruins her lipstick.

Maria works in television. That’s how we met. She called me up one day two years ago and asked if she could interview me. Sure, why not, I said. She came over to my house with a cameraman and we sat in the backyard and she asked me questions for five minutes and then spent about an hour trying to film the introduction to the piece. She’d get a couple of lines out, say, “Stop,” stamp her heels in frustration, roll her eyes and try it again. She must have done this for 10 or 15 times. She wanted it to be perfect.

I suggest we get together at Maggiano’s, in South Coast Plaza, because they have this great chopped salad that you don’t really need to chew. They also have a great bar with brass lamps with pleated shades that make it look “classy” in that way that just about any place with low lighting and dark furniture is said to look “classy” because it reminds us of where our parents and grandparents used to take us for a fancy dinner on special occasions way back when.

They also serve a house pinot grigio, which I like, and they always have Frank Sinatra singing in the background. This afternoon when I walk in, he’s crooning “The Best Is Yet to Come,” which, I happen to know, is also what it says on his gravestone out in Rancho Mirage. I think they’re wrong about this, by the way. I think for Frank the best came and went in the ‘40s, which is just about the era that Maggiano’s is trying to evoke here.

Anyway, Frank seems to be the patron saint of Maggiano’s. There’s a large photo of him, arms crossed, looking immensely pleased with himself, behind the hostess stand, signed in gold ink “To Maggiano’s with very best wishes.”

If I had to guess, I’d say Frank never made it to South Coast Plaza. Maybe he went to the original Maggiano’s in Chicago, which goes all the way back to 1991. Or maybe they just paid him a wad of dough to sign a photo and have his wife, Barbara, send it on to them.

It doesn’t matter. It feels like a place Sinatra would have come to, which is all that’s important. Though I’m sure he’d never go there on a bright afternoon, like today. Probably he’d go late at night. When it was officially closed but they knew he was coming. And he’d sit in one of the big booths and order the veal Milanese and the mostaccioli and drink bourbon out of a big tumbler and ask his buddy Jilly, who is buried six plots over from Frank, how he thought the show went tonight. And Jilly would tell him it was the best ever, absolutely the best. Which is what Jilly always told Frank.

Then one of the young waiters in black pants and a white button-down dress shirt and a black string tie would nervously approach the table and ask them if they wanted some spumoni.

Frank would laugh at that. “Spumoni?” he’d say sarcastically, glaring at the waiter with his incredulous blue eyes. “Hey, Jilly, do we want any spumoni?”

And Jilly, who was sweet-tempered, would smile and look at the waiter and say, “I don’t think so, kid. Not tonight.” And he’d slip him a hundred dollar bill.

That’s the kind of place Maggiano’s is.

So I sit at the bar, working on my second pinot grigio, waiting for Maria to make an appearance. Every 15 minutes or so the hostess, a young, attractive woman in a long black skirt, comes over to the bar and asks if my party has arrived yet.

Nope, I tell her. My party has not arrived.

It doesn’t matter. I’m enjoying myself. And by the time Maria strolls in, turning every head in the place, we have our pick of any table in the dining room. Maria looks enviously at my pinot grigio but orders a sparkling water. She’s “on camera” in a couple of hours, she tells me. Hours of work still ahead.

Not me, I tell her. I’m done for the day.

“Lucky you,” she says, and, frankly, that’s the way I’m feeling this afternoon. While I look at the menu, Frank sings “All or Nothing at All.” When the waiter comes back with her water, she orders a chopped salad. “Half order.”

I’m feeling decadent today. I’m feeling like Frank. So I order the four cheese ravioli. And the veal scaloppine.

“My, my,” Maria says, smiling.

We get the small talk out of the way quickly. She tells me about a recent trip to London. I tell her about my son going to New York to look at colleges. There’s a pause in conversation just before our meals come.

“So,” says Maria, lacing her fingers together and folding them in front of her face. “What’s really going on with you? I think I’ve missed some installments. Tell me the latest.”

That’s what I really like about Maria. The way she turns everything in both of our lives into a little soap opera. With us as the major figures. Our meals come. We eat. We talk. Knowing she has to get out of here soon and back to work, I only give her a nickel version of The Days of Dave’s Life. But it’s enough.

“You know,” she says, pushing away her chopped salad, “your life sounds like a movie script.”

I know, I tell her. Maybe someday it will be.

She smiles, searches for the lipstick in her purse. “I want in on it when it happens,” she says, looking at herself in a compact mirror as she draws curved lines over her puckered lips.

You will be, I tell her, paying the bill. You will be.

* Maggiano’s Little Italy, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa. (714) 546-9550. Hours: Monday-Thursday, 11:15 a.m.-10 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 11:15 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sunday, 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.

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