I’m fussy about my favorite Cobb salad – it must be served with ingredients lined up in rows, it must be tossed at the table, as they did at The Brown Derby in L.A., and do at Red Eye Grill here in town. But this free form pre-tossed one is quite satisfying (except for the unripe avocado they didn’t bother to chop), and the “BBQ meatloaf” is full of flavor under its smother of gravy. Our table is soon full of tiny tin buckets, big and small - toting paprika onions (not bad if you like Michelin tire-type onion rings), first-rate fries and a generous portion of marvelous fried chicken with spicy cole slaw, although the jalapeño biscuits are a tad tough.

        A 2lst century pastrami on rye -- chunks of meat stuffed into a sensational rye roll -- doesn’t really improve on the classic sliced version. Not that I don’t love that roll. It’s a nice try. If you didn’t grow up with pastrami when the Carnegie Deli was at its greatest, you might not mind at all. The only real flub: tiny mussels not worth serving.

        As often happens when I’m reviewing, we’ve eaten much too much and I’m feeling too fragile to handle dessert.  But it’s impossible to resist our waitress’s enthusiasm for the night’s special black and white sundae. Chocolate and vanilla ice cream with chocolate and white cookies, fudgey sauce and pieces of ice cream cone dipped into white chocolate. Sweet, sweet, sweet.
 
        It starts to rain and the hostess walks around lowering the retractable doors. The sardine-packed room grows small. What’s good for the ecology is bad for Miley’s grandma’s claustrophobia.