SNACKING AT SOUTH COAST

A young woman, looking lost in the newly remodeled Bullock’s, sat down in the gleaming white tile eatery where her old tearoom had been. Diffidently, she asked the waitress, “Do you still have popovers?”

The waitress gave a sympathetic look. “No, dear, not any longer.” she said. The young woman looked stricken. The waitress patted her wrist.

That’s how the croissant crumbles. The Moving Finger writes, the Zeitgeist changes, and the old-fashioned tearoom becomes an open structure in stylish tile, surrounded by an impulse-purchase deli and a seductive array of kitchenwares. The popover in its season gives way to fajitas and wine by the glass from an atmospherically sealed dispenser.

At least, that’s how it’s happening in Costa Mesa at South Coast Plaza, where a new addition called the Crystal Court is anchored by a Broadway at one end and a Robinson’s at the other. Both places have put in white-tile snackeries, and Bullock’s, right in the line of fire as the nearest store in the old part of the plaza, has joined the South Coast food wars.

Apparently it had to. The most crowded of these places, JWR Market on the third floor of Robinson’s, is the most emphatically white tile of the lot. The crowds are lining up to order sandwiches from a deli counter dramatically spotted in the middle of the white tile floor under a skylight, with light streaming down as if God were showing approval (there are little spotlights to create the same effect at night). Around the white-tile walls are signs indicating a Craving Bar (wine, beer and espresso), a Sweet Shop (mostly chocolates), and a Hot Table (cafeteria-style hot goods plus pizza and rotisserie chicken).

However, JWR Market has the least interesting food of the lot. The sandwiches and salads are usual lunch-counter fare, and if the chewy lasagna (spelled “lazana” on the menu board) is any measure, the sandwiches may be a better bet. The bakery, though, is fairly spectacular. It sells the European-style Christmas cake shaped like a yule log and makes a luscious chocolate “windmill cake” with layers of cheesecake instead of crumb.

Part of the attraction of JWR Market may perversely be the madhouse seating. You have to find your own table, and in many parts of the floor the chairs are so close only about one in four is accessible without squeezing and apologizing to get to it. But you’re comfortingly immersed in the human herd at this Grand Central of dining, and if the close seating didn’t make that clear, the conversational din resounding from the white tile walls will. Sandwiches at JWR Market run $3.95-$4.95 and hot entrees $3.75-$6.95.

JWR Market, Robinson’s, (714) 432-1800. Open Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. American Express and Robinson’s cards accepted.

The Broadway defies the pattern in detail, but between its two snacking places the whole motif can be found. Its third-floor restaurant, Cafe B, does not have a speck of white tile in it (though white tile leads to it), but it does have the cookwares and delicatessen environment, the patisserie, the wine dispenser and the espresso machine (actually outside in the deli section, but they can fetch espresso for you).

It also has a more fashionable menu of items like buffalo wings (rather good, with an over-the-edge blue cheese dressing to dip them in), pizelle (here a pizza using a large white tortilla as a base), warm duck salad (lukewarm, actually, in sesame vinaigrette on lettuce) and grilled lemon chicken breast (not bad, with an unimpressive shrimp salad on the side).

There’s a display kitchen, and outside the restaurant proper there’s a display bakery. If you feel like it, you can buy snacks from the bakery, the well-stocked deli and the “chocolate dipping bar” (fruits dipped in chocolate on the spot) and eat there--if you can find seating at the four paltry tables. Appetizers run $2.95-$6.95 at Cafe B, salads $4.25-$5.25 and entrees $5.95-$7.50.

Cafe B, Broadway, (714) 540-5211. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sun., noon-4 p.m. American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Broadway cards accepted.

The most distinctive of these dining places is the Broadway’s Cafe on Two (second floor). Located--all but hidden, actually--in the petites section rather than cookwares, it has not only a lot of white tile but a particularly elegant look of mirrors, glass partitions and Oriental vases. The food is a natural that nobody else in the department store world seems to have thought of yet: the fashionable Spanish appetizers called tapas.

For instance, you can get four little meatballs in an oniony sauce full of saffron and black pepper, or a couple of mild veal sausages, or spinach with almonds and pine nuts, or particularly fresh-tasting artichoke hearts in vinaigrette. For those who don’t feel like tapas, there are also American sandwiches (which tend to come with sprouts). Tapas run $1.75-$3.95, and sandwiches are $4.75. A “tapas trio” sampler with a glass of house wine is $4.95.

Cafe on Two, Broadway, (714) 540-5211. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., noon-5 p.m. American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Broadway cards accepted.

Bullock’s and the Broadway have confusingly named their third-floor places almost identically: At Bullock’s, it’s the B Cafe. Here again we are in an extensive cookwares and deli department, looking out upon a multitude of olives, candies, vinegars and condiments, and again we see an espresso machine and a wine dispenser.

Although the young woman who mourned for a popover felt her cozy old-fashioned tearoom was lost in this open white-tiled place, the B Cafe seems the quietest of these floor places. You sit at a marble-topped counter or a a table, calmly lit from ceiling lamps with the profile of a ziggurat, in a fairly peaceful corner of the store. The menu is limited to sandwiches and salads, including three chicken salads--two with mayonnaise and one without. Sandwiches are $5.95 and salads are $4.75-$6.95.

The B Cafe, Bullock’s, (714) 556-0611. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Bullock’s cards accepted.