A Stable Table Setting

The three of us sit on wooden benches outside the Crab Cooker in Newport Beach waiting for a table. My wife, Jan, and I slowly eat red clam chowder from paper cups. Jenna picks at her shrimp cocktail. Jenna is 16, a sweet girl with blond hair, which is pulled back into a bun, and an impish smile. Jan is Jenna’s high school mentor. They get together once a month and talk about advertising and marketing, which Jenna is interested in, and what she wants to do when she graduates. The program is almost over, so tonight we’ve decided to take Jenna out to dinner. She eats her tiny cocktail shrimp one at a time--spearing them with her plastic fork, examining them like a child studying a caterpillar, then slipping them into her mouth as delicately as you might a spoonful of frozen yogurt. While we sit and eat, shivering a bit in the cool foggy Newport evening, Jenna tells us a story. About her grandmother. About how, on each of her grandchildren’s birthdays, she would take them out to lunch someplace special at South Coast Plaza. “But that wasn’t the best thing,” Jenna says, holding up a speared shrimp in front of her mouth as if she were Audrey Hepburn with a cigarette holder. “The best thing was that after lunch she’d take our picture on the merry-go-round. Each kid, every year. So we have all these pictures of us on our birthdays on the merry-go-round.” The very idea--a photo album of birthday pictures on carved wooden horses--seems to please Jenna. She smiles, delighted at the memory, and shakes her head. Finally we are called for our table. We sit close to the kitchen. Jenna, amused, cranes her head to look at the stuffed shark swimming in the air over our table, the dangling crabs, the mounted fish. There’s a grandfather clock in the corner with a pendulum the size of a Chinese gong, and an old-fashioned barber pole spins beneath a white globe. Though Jenna has lived all her life not five minutes away from this restaurant, which is as much an institution in Newport Beach as the Balboa ferry or the dory fleet by the pier, she has never been here for dinner. “I’ve had takeout from here dozens of times, but I’ve never actually eaten here,” she says, gazing around. “It’s kind of fun, isn’t it?” It is kind of fun. It’s old and familiar, and as idiosyncratic as a French chateau on oceanfront property. It’s in an old bank building, for one thing, the restaurant’s refrigerators being just about where the vault used to be. And the meals are served the way they might be at a company picnic--barbecued fish on paper plates and house wine poured into clear plastic cups. Paper place-mats, paper napkins, those cheesy white plastic forks and knives. The only thing missing is the watermelon-eating contest and the sack race. Jan tells Jenna how we had our first meal out as newlyweds at the Crab Cooker. We were married in Oregon and drove down to Newport Beach to honeymoon. Stayed at a cheap hotel just a block away and walked over here on a warm June evening some 20 years ago, sharing a crab cocktail while waiting for a table, amazed at the very idea that we were now husband and wife. Back then it seemed like we were the king and queen of the world, that our happiness would last forever. “I’ll bet some of the waitresses working tonight were waiting tables back then,” Jan says. Jenna doesn’t believe it. So I question our waitress, who has only worked here for 18 years, and she says one of the managers has been at the Crab Cooker for 45 years, and “a couple of the ladies,” as she calls them, for over 35 years. Then they were young girls. Not much older than Jenna, probably. Girls who wore their hair in an Annette Funicello flip and saved their tip money to go see the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. And here they are, years later, still wearing their hair like Sandra Dee. What I’ve always liked about the Crab Cooker is the simplicity of the menu. It’s basically just barbecued fresh fish, crab and lobster. Nothing fancy. The owner, Bob Roubian, learned how to grill fish over a mesquite fire when he was a kid back during the Depression. He has stuck with that method of cooking since opening the restaurant in 1951. Back then, it had the oh-so-easy-to-forget name of Seafood Varieties. But nobody called it that. Instead, they’d say, “Let’s go have dinner at that fish place in Newport Beach. You know, the joint with the crab cookers.” After a few years, Roubian caught on and changed the name. They say that people who grew up during the Depression have never forgotten how tough it could be to make a dime. You can see that in the Crab Cooker. Maybe that has something to do with the paper plates. Or the fact that they serve you water only if you ask for it. Certainly it’s evident in the Blue Plate Special: a bowl of soup, a tasty fish salad, and a cup of coffee, all for less than $5. Who offers a cup of coffee with the dinner special anymore? The first time I came here as a newlywed, I ordered the combination plate: shrimp, scallops, and chunks of fresh fish on a skewer. Romano potatoes and cole slaw. Tonight, just for the hell of it, I order the same thing. As does Jan. We take our time eating, talking about the high school water polo team Jenna plays on and her thoughts about college. Her parents went to UCLA, and Jenna admits that they’d like her to go there as well. But you can tell listening to her that the idea doesn’t really excite her. Maybe it’s still too far away to think about. Maybe she has other ideas. She talks freely and openly about her family, her boyfriend, how she is doing in school. But you can tell she also has a secret life. One that she keeps largely to herself. Maybe that comes from growing up in a family with four girls, each vying for attention. Maybe it’s just from being 16, that age when we are filled with desires that eventually expire like cooling coals--the feeling that you can last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all its creatures. The same feeling, no doubt, once held by some of the women still working here. Or their customers. As we leave the restaurant, I ask Jenna what her plans. She shrugs, either uncertain or unwilling to reveal them. “Maybe I’ll work at the Crab Cooker,” she says, her pale blue eyes twinkling. “Who knows?” Somehow I doubt it. But I might be wrong. You know how it is with youth--you never can tell how the story is going to turn out.

The Crab Cooker, 2200 Newport Blvd., Newport Beach. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday-Saturdays. (949) 673-0100. There is also a Crab Cooker in Tustin at 17260 E. 17th. Open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday-Saturdays. (714) 573-1077.

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