Taxi Driving Is No Piece of Cake--Except Near LAX : Party: Free lunches and windshield washes for cabbies build goodwill for airport-area hotel.

His meter was running, but his stomach was growling.

So it’s a good thing that the passenger in Gary Melkonyn’s cab let him take a detour Thursday so he could get a free lunch and a complimentary window-wash at a “taxi appreciation party” near Los Angeles International Airport.

Long lines of cabbies clogged the front of the Los Angeles Renaissance Hotel to get turkey croissant sandwiches, pasta salads and dessert. Hotel executives wearing suits and dresses used buckets and squeegees to wash windshields.

“This is great,” said Melkonyn, who lives in Hollywood.

Said passenger Lena McRae, a Los Angeles businesswoman returning from a San Francisco meeting: “Who says L.A. isn’t a friendly place?”

Taxi drivers say it isn’t always all that friendly.

Besides the usual traffic jams that every motorist suffers through, the city’s 5,500 registered cabbies often encounter hostile passengers, rival unlicensed “bandit” taxis that steal riders and, occasionally, armed robbers.

They also face municipal regulations that prohibit them from refusing short trips or leaving their cabs to solicit business. And at the airport, the city’s nine cab companies have set up their own dispatching procedure that sometimes requires drivers to sit two hours between trips.

That’s where cabbie Igor Chermyavsky of West Hollywood was at noontime Thursday--parked in the taxi holding lot near 96th Street and Sepulveda Boulevard. “I missed the lunch because of that,” he shrugged.

Chermyavsky crossed his fingers that his wait wouldn’t end with a passenger asking to go just a few blocks--say to the Renaissance Hotel. “Sometimes you wait an hour and a half or so and then get a $5 fare to a close-by hotel,” he grumbled.

Renaissance manager Greg Lehman acknowledged that the goal of the taxi appreciation party was to make drivers appreciate the hotel.

“These guys are our life bread, you know what I’m saying?” Lehman said as he watched two lines of taxis snake past banquet tables covered with box lunches in the center of the hotel driveway.

He jumped as one cab lurched to a stop in front of a huge sheet cake decorated to look like a Yellow cab. “Whoa, fella. I think you’re ready for a brake job,” he shouted.

The cabbies beamed as hotel executives thanked them for coming, handed them commuter coffee mugs with the hotel’s name on them and tended to windshields.

“Maybe I should have worn jeans,” said catering manager Alane Millar, whose long skirt and black, long-sleeved blouse were smudged by dust when she reached over cabbie Arkady Fayngold’s hood to reach his windshield.

Hotel sales director Eric Dahlerbruch stood in Airport Boulevard with a bullhorn, urging passing cabbies to pull in. Several made tire-screeching U-turns on the spot. Driver David Johnson had five passengers in his cab when he stopped, jumped out and grabbed a box lunch; a passenger in the back seat took a picture of the taxi cake.

Hotel guests were surprised by the spectacle. Victor Celso from Brazil was laughing as he aimed his camcorder at the scene and narrated in Portuguese. Sean Lange of Philadelphia was scratching his head.

That’s because hotel doorman Adrian Montes picked up a telephone and called a taxi company when Lange told him he needed a cab.

“I guess these cabs are all off duty or at lunch or something,” Lange said as he studied the line of taxis moving slowly past the tables. “This is a unique place. You don’t see this sort of thing in Philly.”

You don’t see it most places, according to Alan Willis, the senior transportation engineer who is in charge of taxi regulation in Los Angeles.

“Boston hotels have almost weekly deals and freebies for drivers. And in Las Vegas they’re always invited when a new show or buffet opens. The hotels want drivers there to remember them,” Willis said. “You don’t see it here.”

After two hours, the 250 box lunches prepared by the hotel kitchen had run out and the executives were handing slices of the taxi cake to cabbies still flocking into the driveway.

Driver Filipp Morozov was pleased nonetheless. The 20-year-old, Russian-born cabbie lives in Hollywood and attends Santa Monica College. He hopes to become a doctor.

“A lot of times this is a degrading job,” he said.

“This is wonderful.”