Home cooking away from home

As I started digging into my bowl of fragrant gumbo, the guy at the next table asked how it was. “I’ve been eating here for 30 years,” he said, “and I’ve never ordered it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, look at all that,” he said, waving his fork in the direction of my bowl, and he had a point -- the gumbo at Bertha’s Soul Food is a mess in the making, at least if you want to get every last bit of crab and chicken. You can eat the broth and the sausage with a spoon, but for the rest, fingers must come into play.

By the time I was through, there was a ragged pile of bones and shells spilling onto the table, and I’d had to ask for another stack of napkins.

It was worth the mess, anyway. This was a tasty gumbo, a dark, meaty, gravy-like sauce with rice, chicken, crab and mild hot links, seasoned with plenty of gumbo file. And boy, there was a lot of it: two quarts.

Maybe the long-term customer who’s never tried the gumbo is unusual, but the fact that he’s been coming to Bertha’s for 30 years is not. This is the oldest soul food restaurant in town -- this month it celebrates its 40th anniversary. It’s been in business at this location since 1974, though with a nine-month hiatus last year after a disastrous kitchen fire in January 2004. (That’s why some of the waiters wear T-shirts reading “Bertha’s is back.”)

“We have lots of customers who’ve been coming here for decades,” says current owner Rod White, an in-law of the original Bertha. “We have lots of Bertha’s babies. They came here as babies, and now they’re all grown up.”

Why do they come? There must be as many reasons as there are regulars, but it looks to me as if it’s because Bertha’s is the rare neighborhood spot that still serves the kind of home cooking that few people do at home anymore. Bertha’s does have sandwiches and “short orders” (mostly rice and beans with a garnish, such as a pork chop or a ham hock), but the menu is heavy on flavorful cuts of long-braised beef, such as oxtails, short ribs and neck bones (a little less flavorful than oxtails, but easier to eat).

They’re all good, though it’s hard to beat the smothered steak, beefier than the average steak and practically falling apart from braising. Still, the best thing I’ve ever had at Bertha’s was oxtails in a gravy made with a very dark roux, literally mahogany brown -- a truly memorable dish.

Bertha’s gravy, which comes with just about everything, even the snapper or catfish (because every dinner comes with rice topped with a ladleful of gravy), isn’t always that dark. White says, “I give the cooks a little leeway, so some days the gravy has a different roux than others.” But it’s always rich and beefy, and there’s always plenty of it. They bring you more at the drop of a hat.

From the outside, Bertha’s old building looks like a funky roadhouse, but with its spacious “lobby” for takeout customers and the two wood-paneled dining rooms, the interior resembles a cross between a bar and a steakhouse. So it’s a little surprising that the House of Gravy also caters to health-conscious diners.

There are, for example, birds, such as fried chicken (well, maybe that’s not considered health food; still, it’s not red meat). The skin is a bit greasy and gritty, as if breaded with cracker meal, but the flesh is perfectly moist and flavorful. Sundays are a sort of poultry extravaganza, with choices of baked chicken, baked Cornish hen or turkey wings, as well as gumbo (offered from Friday through the weekend).

The vegetable side dishes -- you get a choice of two with every meat main dish -- include excellent tangy sweet potatoes, tender collards, solid pinto beans and black-eyed peas and cabbage that has, for once, not been boiled to death; every time I’ve had it, it seemed to have been merely wilted. You can get a vegetarian plate of any three. And at breakfast, you can get turkey bacon and chicken sausage patties in place of pork, if you want.

But dessert -- surely dessert is not where you look for health food. The wall menu lists only peach cobbler and ice cream, but Bertha’s also has all sorts of cakes: chocolate, German chocolate, red velvet, yellow, sock-it-to-me, 7-Up and banana.

And a sugarless cake, in response to requests from diabetic customers. Maybe such touches are Bertha’s way of ensuring that those customers come back for many more decades.

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Bertha’s Soul Food

Location: 1714 W. Century Blvd., Los Angeles; (323) 777-3373, www.berthassoulfood.com

Price: Breakfasts, $5.50 to $8; short orders, $4.50 to $6; lunch specials, $5.99; sandwiches, $3.95 to $5.99; dinners, $7.75 to $12.25 (half portions, $6.50); desserts,

$1 to $3.25.

Best dishes: Oxtails, gumbo, fried chicken, smothered steak, beef neck bones.

Details: Open for breakfast 7 to 11 a.m. Monday and Wednesday through Friday, 8 a.m. to noon Saturday and Sunday; dinner 11 a.m. to

9 p.m. Monday and Wednesday through Friday, noon to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Specials served

11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday and Wednesday through Friday, noon to 3:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Closed Tuesday. Parking lot. All major credit cards.