Nighthawks

At first glance, Paul’s Cafe seems as if it’s come straight out of a gloomy corner of some Edward Dmytryk flick, but the place is almost too corny to be real noir , more like a hermetic stage set from an Alan Rudolph movie than someplace Marlowe might shake down a counterman. Wet streets at dawn; glowing diner window; exhausted men inside slumped over steaming, crummy cups of joe; Asian cooks whose skinny arms stick out of white tank-tops--too Hollywood by half. Paul’s sells a lot of doughnuts for a Chinese-American joint, even for one whose hours are basically middle-of-the-night to noon.

Around 6 a.m. outside the City Market across the street, much of the day’s work already done, giant parked trucks line the curbs along San Julian, chugging in idle. An empty handcart rattles in the distance. Somebody far away shouts in Spanish. The pleasant stink of diesel fumes and bruised fruit is sharp in the early morning air.

Push open the door, and you see a dozen produce-company calendars on the wall, a long counter of Formica, avocado-green, flanked by a row of orange vinyl stools, supplemented by a few tables that are all but buried under rumpled sections of the morning paper. A bottle of Firey hot sauce is set neatly at each place. Over the cash register, a shelf holds stacks of receipt books, each one marked with the name of a market wholesale company on its spine, and arrayed behind the counter are chaotic displays of cigarettes, lighter flints and Roi Tan cigars. Signboard menus, which hardly anybody bothers to consult, lie high on the wall.

At one end of the counter, a thin man fidgets, waiting for doughnuts and hot coffee to take back to his crew. At the other end, gray-haired Asian men gather, forking up tomato-sauce pigs feet and conducting a round-table seminar on horses and baseball and lettuce prices that seems to have been going on pretty much continuously since 1963.

Up to the counter comes a regular, but one not part of the crowd. The guys shoot him a few questions, which he shrugs off, and a waitress tentatively approaches.

“You eat kimchi? “ she asks, trying to establish some common ground.

“Well . . .” the guy says, shifting uncomfortably back and forth on the stool, “sometimes, I guess. Not very often.”

“I’ve got some right here,” she says. “Want some? A customer brings it in.”

“Er, not really,”

“What’s the matter, don’t trust the kimchi? “

“Ma’am,” he says. “It’s 6:30 in the morning.”

6:30 is too early for most people to contemplate anything more complicated than Wheat Chex, but at Paul’s Cafe, where most of the customers have been working in the produce market since midnight, it’s time for a heap of ribs or an enormous plate of lamb curry.

This is what people have to eat at Paul’s Cafe, when they’re not tasting kimchi: fried-egg-and- chashu sandwiches on white; chashu foo yung; two-egg chashu scrambles; chashu and rice. Paul’s Cafe cuisine seems to be based around the house chashu , which is sweet, lean, crusty, caramelized to a blackened crisp at the edges, and bound to turn up just about anywhere.

There are soft noodles in a thin broth, garnished with a few slivers of green-onion top and an ounce or two of sliced chashu . Sometimes chashu is braised with tofu, black beans and ginger, which seems just right for breakfast. Best of all is the fried rice--bits of burnt garlic and shreds of burnt omelet, bitter snips of scallion and coal-black nubs of chashu , all mixed into a greasy mound of rice dyed dark brown with scorched soy sauce and fried until it’s almost crunchy.

This is not Lake Spring or Empress Pavilion, you understand, just the Chinese-American version of a great greasy spoon. Entrees come with bread and butter. Steamed rice comes with gravy on it, just as it does in Georgia. The coffee is awful. The waitress calls you hon. You can buy a pack of Luckies for the road.

The fried rice is delicious.

Paul’s Cafe, 1015 San Julian St. (between Olympic and 11th Street), Los Angeles, (213) 748-3826. Open Monday-Saturday, 3 a.m. (or thereabouts) to 1 p.m. Take-out. No alcohol. Cash only. Lunch for two, food only, $4-$9.