Steak ‘n Cheesecake

Anaheim Street in Wilmington is a picture window on what might be the bleakest landscape in Los Angeles--24-hour diners and girlie bars with big-rig parking; great gas flares that shoot up into the night; oil-field stink and, when the wind is right, a blast of fish guts from the Terminal Island canneries. Anaheim Street is the back alley to the working part of the harbor.

On this street, clotted with trucks that are bigger than you can imagine, the Twin Wheels steakhouse sits a smidge into Long Beach, not far from the Longshoremen’s Union hall, not much farther from the docks, a baroquely Western apparition that smells of meat and shrimp and tobacco smoke.

The Twin Wheels is a manly place, with stag heads on the wall and firearms over the bar, miners’ lanterns on high shelves and wrought-iron braces beneath the ceiling, etched glass and wood, an aquarium. The manly sounds of Ray Conniff and Percy Faith drip from overhead speakers. There might be a Lo-Cal section on the menu, but it features things like sliced beef and lightly fried catfish. At lunch, you’d have to look fairly hard to find more than a couple of women customers in the house. But mostly, it’s hard to notice anything but the scores of red-toned oil portraits that seem to occupy practically every square inch of the walls.

The paintings, brightly hued, extravagantly detailed, look a little like the cartoon-realist portraits in the foyer of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, the ones with the eyes that follow you across the room. But these paintings are pretty much limited to western scenes; also, almost all the women are nude.

There may not have been a lot of nude women in the Old West, but the Twin Wheels gallery seems to have documented every one of them: posed languorously outside bawdyhouses, draped over grinning cowboys, downing whiskey shots in bars, and bathing in the style of September Morn. One painting seems to be an homage to the old black-velvet painting of dogs playing poker, with card-wielding nude women in place of the hounds. At the Twin Wheels, every steak comes with a side of cheesecake, so to speak.

The waterfront bars of San Pedro have something of a tradition of restaurant workers in lingerie, and the Twin Wheels has its own small twist. At lunchtime, a woman in a brief teddy flits from table to table, selling raffle tickets, 15 for $5, winner gets souvenir lingerie.

“Whom do the proceeds go to?” a friend asked one afternoon.

The teddied woman flinched and stared hard at the floor.

“The money goes back into the business, I guess,” she told her. “It’s not for charity or anything.” The woman looked sad. Everybody at the table chipped in for raffle tickets. We lost.

There are many varieties of seafood at the Twin Wheels, fried shrimp and Australian lobster tails and fried clams, also something scary-sounding called scallone --”a delicious seafood delicacy,” says the menu--which we decided we could do without. There is a guacamole salad, a giant toss of Fritos, chopped iceberg lettuce, orange cheese and hamburger meat, dressed with something the exact hue of what refrigerator salesmen used to mean when they referred to the color “avocado green.” Sauteed artichoke hearts come in a lake of garlic butter; fried zucchini is thickly battered; a relish tray contains just sliced raw vegetables and a tub of ranch dressing. The thick split pea soup, chunky with bits of pork, isn’t bad.

But essentially, the food at the Twin Wheels--which is mostly besides the point anyway--consists of variations on the theme of meat: giant top sirloins buried beneath brown gravy and mounds of sauteed peppers and onions; beef kebabs served with a small paper cup of what a fancy French restaurant might call teriyaki-sauce gelee; paper-thin T-bones, rather overtenderized, cooked gray.

Two-thirds of the dinner crowd, though, seems to order the Prime rib, thick slabs of beef, rosy if you ask for it that way, served with horseradish whipped cream. The Prime rib isn’t exactly the stuff they serve at Lawry’s, but it’s as good as anything you’ll find on a Las Vegas buffet. Here, the showgirls are on the walls.

* The Twin Wheels

1654 W. Anaheim St., Long Beach, (310) 435-4744. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. All major credit cards accepted. Full bar. Lot parking. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $14 to $38.