Coop d’ Ville

Annie doesn’t believe in mayonnaise. She comes over for lunch, sees me mixing it into tuna salad and says, “Mayo, Dave?” Like I have just put pickles on my peanut butter sandwich or am frying up some baloney, two things I used to do on a daily basis when I was her age, a freshman in high school. Annie shakes her head at my culinary faux pas as she opens the refrigerator door, finds the tall, red can of Reddi-Wip, and squirts it directly into her mouth.

“Yum,” she says, wiping the stray white cream off the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand. She takes a swallow of root beer, squirts the whipped cream in her mouth again.

This, for Annie, is lunch. She’ll skip the tuna sandwich, thank you.

Annie likes to say she is a purist. When she has a turkey sandwich, she wants nothing on it. No mayo, no lettuce, no mustard. Just bread and turkey. She’ll eat hot dogs but only if they are kosher Hebrew National. And only if you don’t put anything on them. Keep it simple, that’s Annie’s creed.

It is Sunday morning and I am having brunch with my daughter, Paige, and three of her best friends at Zubie’s Chicken Coop. Paige and Alex got up early and went surfing down at Blackie’s. But there were no waves. Just a large salty pond of smooth water. So I retrieved them early and offered to take them to breakfast. Along with Annie and Jenna, whom we picked up along the way.

These girls are mermaids. Swimmers, surfers, water polo players. Girls whose hair is always wet, who always have cap tans on their foreheads or raccoon eyes from their goggles. Chlorine-scented mermaids.

When the hostess saw me walk in with the mermaids, she said, in something like a German accent, “I tink you need a boot, ya?” She meant a booth, of course, but I was looking at all of the girl’s feet to make sure they hadn’t come in barefoot, since that’s often the way they walk around. Bare-footed mermaids.

So we get our booth, across from the TV silently showing an auto race. There is sawdust on the floor, which seems a bit incongruous with the French country decor of what was once a swank restaurant called Le Biarritz, but certainly befitting a chicken coop. Zubie’s has been around forever, just not in this location. John Zubie ran a no-nonsense pizzeria for 30 years in Costa Mesa before relocating the Chicken Coop along Old Newport Boulevard when Le Biarritz went belly-up a few years ago.

John no longer runs Zubie’s, but nothing about the place has changed. They still don’t accept any credit cards, and they don’t make substitutions on menu items. You can have your eggs any way you want them, for instance, just as long as they’re scrambled. An older guy sitting by the window orders the steak and eggs, asking for his eggs fried. The waiter sighs and says, “We’ll see what we can do.” When he brings the plate out, the eggs are scrambled.

“I asked for my eggs fried,” says the perplexed man. The waiter smiles, shrugs, walks away. That’s the way it is at Zubie’s.

The four mermaids are a bit stumped by the brunch menu. It lists five “Country style” items and five “South of the Border” plates. No waffles, no French toast, no granola and fresh fruit. You can get pancakes and eggs (scrambled, of course) today, but only because it is the breakfast special. Imagine. Pancakes as a breakfast special.

“What’s machaca?” one of the mermaids asks me. A dried beef, I explain. Like Mexican jerky. The mermaid looks at me like I’m crazy. “They put beef jerky in scrambled eggs?”

“It’s good,” Annie says. “Try it.”

Annie, however, is not going for any of the South of the Border specialties. Instead, this 14-year-old, with purest culinary tastes, goes for the chicken-friend steak with biscuits and gravy. And eggs (scrambled). And a Pepsi. Bon appetit.

One of the other mermaids, Alex, who won’t eat meat--well, OK, except hot dogs and a hamburger once in awhile if you don’t have a turkey burger available--gets the huevos rancheros and an order of biscuits and gravy--with the gravy on the side. When it comes, she ignores the little plastic cup of gravy and just eats the biscuits. Plain. Like Annie, she is also a food purist.

Annie continues to eye Alex’s cup of gravy and would probably steal it if it weren’t for the fact that everything on her giant platter is already drowning in so much of the gray gelatinous sauce that the only way she can differentiate between the chicken-fried steak and the muffin-sized biscuits is to cut into them.

“Want my olives?” Alex asks Annie. Annie picks out all of Alex’s olives, hands her back the plate.

The mermaids ask for more pineapple juice, more Pepsi. They stick forks out across the table and steal bites from each other’s plates, grabbing at blocks of home fries, spearing shards of machaca. Annie offers bites from her chicken-fried steak, but only Paige takes her up on it. “Not bad,” she says. Then she stuffs a warm tortilla with rice and scrambled eggs.

Jenna gives up on her machaca. “I’m going to explode,” she says, swirling her refried beans around in a circle. Then she reaches over with her fork and steals some of Annie’s home fries. “I thought you said you were full,” Annie says.

“I am,” Jenna says. “But if we keep sitting here, I’ll keep eating.”

Annie wants a container to take home the rest of her biscuits and gravy, the remaining chunk of chicken-fried steak. She scoops up the gravy with a spoon.

“Now you girls won’t have to eat again until dinner,” I say.

The mermaids laugh. “I’ll be hungry in an hour,” Jenna says. Annie pats her to-go box. “This is my little snack when I watch the Laker game today,” she says.

I drop Annie off first. As she runs up her walkway, I see her mother looking out the window, peering quizzically at the white box her daughter is carrying. No doubt she is thinking, “Who brings back a doggie bag from brunch?”

“Wait until her mother sees what’s in there,” I murmur under my breath to the remaining mermaids. They all snicker. Annie, smiling like a madwoman, opens up the container to show her mom. But I don’t see her reaction. By then I’ve already stomped my foot on the gas, high-tailing it out of there.

Lunch 11:30-2:30 Monday-Saturday; dinner 5-10 p.m. daily; Sunday brunch 9 a.m.-1 p.m.

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