A Taste of Cafe Ambience From the Past

It’s not yet 9 o’clock on a Thursday night and already a raucous conga line is snaking its way through the narrow straits of the Moonlight Tango Cafe. It is a frenzied, high-decibel display of revelry rarely exhibited by the laid-back hipsters of ‘80s cafe society.

YA-da-da-da DA-da . British pianist Robert Garrett pounds the simple chords of the conga at an ever-accelerating pace as if he’s channeling the spirit of Xavier Cugat.

The conga line is led by Don Lucas, the house band’s “boy crooner,” who’s clad in the band’s trademark white Palm Beach jacket and a Panama hat. A young brunette in an off-the-shoulder gown of emerald green clutches his waist as she follows the simple steps of the Latin dance; she in turn is clutched by a mustachioed man in pleated acid-washed jeans, who’s clutched by a woman in a backless black jumpsuit with a metal-studded leather belt. . . .

The line makes three passes around the crowded dining room, adding members with each trip. Finally, to a rousing cheer from the crowd, the dance ends, and the three members of the Palm Beach Trio segue gracefully into “It Was Just One of Those Things” as the crooner returns to the bandstand and picks up his mike.

“It’s like this every night,” restaurateur Ernie Criezis shouts over the din of his popular new Sherman Oaks supper club. “Monday nights here are like Saturday night--and every night is like New Year’s Eve.”

Since it popped its first champagne cork earlier this summer, the Moonlight Tango Cafe has become so hot that the fire marshal had to shut it down one Saturday evening for overcrowding. “I lost 10 thousand bucks that night,” Criezis claims cheerfully. Since then the cafe has cut reservations 25%, down to 140 guests at a time, and Criezis says he has to turn people away seven nights a week.

Unlike most restaurants, which count on three different crowds, or seatings, an evening, Moonlight Tango counts on its guests to linger longer for the continuous floor show of live music from the 1930s and ‘40s (featuring two solo crooners and a gang of singing waiters and waitresses), professional tango exhibitions and conga lines. (Only the staff dances; a conditional use permit and a dancehall permit are needed before customers may dance.)

Menu items range in price--and style--from taracado, a whipped avocado-caviar roe puree appetizer ($4.25), to Texas gulf crab cakes with spicy red Apache sauce ($6.85), to fettuccine and sauteed scallops and shrimp in a light tomato, basil cream sauce ($15.25), to Adriatic-style grilled rack of baby lamb ($21.25).

But at Moonlight Tango, the food is secondary. The real reason for the cafe’s popularity, says Criezis, is that it recreates the elegant and not-so-elegant supper clubs of yesteryear--or at least the common fantasy of them. From the art deco ceiling decorated with brass and frosted glass light fixtures salvaged from an old movie theater in Houston, to the white baby grand piano, Moonlight Tango looks like the kind of glamorous joint in New York, Paris, Miami Beach or Hollywood where you might run into Nick and Nora, or Fred and Ginger.

Lucas (who also plays a small part as a nightclub waiter on “General Hospital”) says one night Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft dropped by and volunteered to entertain.

“Dom DeLuise walked in, and he was working the door, seating parties,” he recalls. “Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft got up and were singing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ in Polish, just like they did in To Be or Not To Be . I thought I was on the set of a movie. It was incredible, very surrealistic.”

Not a chance. As nine singing waiters finish their rendition of “Java Jive,” the Palm Beach Trio strikes up one of the evening’s five or six repeats of the birthday song for yet another celebrant. At Moonlight Tango, however, one doesn’t get a pedestrian version of “Happy Birthday to You.” Instead, the band glides into the familiar strains of the tango as waiters and diners alike sing along, punctuating each line with hand claps and ending with a deafening Ole!

Moonlight Tango, 13730 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. (818) 788-2000. No cover charge. Open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. for lunch and from 5 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. for dinner.