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Make Yourself at Home

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

There are no menus at Willy’s in Manzanillo, Mexico. Instead, you go to the kitchen of this seaside restaurant and look over the ice-filled metal trays stocked with dorado and yellowtail and huachinango, all caught that morning in the local waters, and tell the cooks what you want and they grill it over a charcoal fire while you start off with a bowl of mussels or the ceviche served in a tortilla bowl.

Or you can just tell your waiter you want the split langostas and cold cervezas and he will keep bringing them out until you tell him to stop. You eat the sweet meat with your fingers, dipping it in Willy’s chili garlic sauce, and pile the empty shells on a large white platter in the middle of the table, and later Willy will figure out how much you owe by counting up the empty husks and bottles. Even if you have two or three of the smallish Pacific lobsters and as many beers, your bill will be less than a good bottle of Scotch.

I had dinner last Sunday at Willy’s with Luis Fernando Sanchez Tena, who is from Mexico City by way of Acapulco, where he worked at the venerable Las Brisas for a number of years. We sat under a palapa, eating plates of the small grilled lobsters and drinking tall glasses of sangria and bottles of Negra Modelo as we spoke of Rodolfo Acosta, a renowned Mexican tenor from Mexico City who had stopped by Manzanillo on his way to New York City the day before and ended up singing Puccini arias for stunned diners, myself included, at the hotel where Luis worked and where I was staying.

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How, I wondered aloud, had Luis gotten Senor Acosta to perform in an outdoor restaurant where the crashing of waves against the rocks at the foot of our palapa was almost as loud as the opera singer?

Luis shrugged, as if this were a silly question. “I just asked him to sing, so he sang,” he said. “We are a very hospitable people.”

As always happens when I return from Mexico, I was a little bit homesick for the hospitality of its people--and for the food--so my first day back, I drove south along Pacific Coast Highway, thinking of Luis and the Mexican tenor and our dinner at Willy’s. I was on my way to the original Olamendi’s, near Doheny Beach.

For two days the rains had fallen, but now it was clear out and the water sparkled and the hump that is Catalina looked close enough to paddle to in a small boat. Jorge Sr. was not there but his wife, Maria, was, and she greeted me when I walked in, telling me from the kitchen, where she was busy putting together a take-out order, to sit wherever I wanted. Maria has black hair and high cheekbones and looks beautiful. It is impossible to tell her age by looking at her, though I know she has five grown children, all of whom have worked at one time or another in the family restaurant.

On this day, her oldest daughter, Raquel, is bustling about, working the cash register one moment and bringing out hot plates of beef and chutney-stuffed chiles the next. I sit in the back of the restaurant, near the open kitchen, where I can watch the two female cooks, white bandannas on their heads, ladle bowls of albondigas or spoon the dark mole sauce over chicken sauteed in tomatillo and masa and a spicy salsa, something Raquel has created.

They say, “My house is your house” in almost every Mexican restaurant, but it seems particularly true of Olamendi’s, where almost everyone who walks in is greeted by name, where questions are asked of where you have been since the last time you were in, and where mother and daughter work in perfect harmony to make sure you always have a cold drink and plenty to eat.

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Like any good restaurant that has been around awhile, part of Olamendi’s charm is the familiarity of its decor: the concrete floor painted a deep red, the seashell necklaces and Mexican blouses hanging from the iron chandeliers, the dozens of gold-framed photos, most taken more than 25 years ago, hanging on the walls of the Nixons--Dick, Pat, Tricia, Julie--from when the Western White House was just a few miles down the road. The Nixons are gone, but not forgotten: The pollo a la Vercruzana is remembered as a favorite dish.

While I am cutting into a delicate chile relleno, Raquel chats from the kitchen with a tall, young man from a local auto-repair shop who has stopped by hoping to speak with Jorge Sr. about an upcoming trip to Oaxaca. She tells him her father is not in today. “But maybe I can help you,” she says, and listens patiently to his questions though it is the middle of the lunch hour on a busy weekday.

She tells him to sit down, orders some food for him and spreads a map of Mexico across the yellow tablecloth. She offers advice on taking buses from Mexico City, inexpensive hotels in Oaxaca, restaurants to visit. When the young man tells Raquel he is thinking of backpacking to Chiapas, she says, “You know about the trouble in the area, don’t you? The Zapatistas?”

The young mechanic has heard a little about this. “You need to be careful down there,” Raquel tells him. And then she offers to put together a travel packet for him, full of information on Mexico City, Oaxaca and Chiapas. “Come back around 6 tonight,” she says, “and I will have it ready for you.” And because he has sat at her table, as her guest, Raquel refuses his offer to pay for lunch. “No,” she says, smiling. “It is my pleasure.”

My lunch over, I walk out the door with the young mechanic who seems a little stunned by the restaurant’s graciousness. “I can’t believe Raquel is doing all this for me,” he says. “I didn’t mean to take up so much of her time.”

I’m sure it’s all right, I tell him. “That’s the way hospitable people are.”

Open Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday, 11:30-9:30; Friday, 11:30-10. Closed Monday.

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

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