Party Atmosphere

Andrew Lewis may be executive chef and owner of Drew’s Caribbean Cafe, but he still manages to answer the phone Saturday night when I call to see if my wife and I can get a table in half an hour. Drew sucks in his breath. “I don’t know,” he says, hesitating. Then he laughs. “Oh, sure, come on in,” he says. “We’ll take care of you.”

When we show up, Eva--Drew’s best friend and the restaurant’s hostess/waitress/bartender/chef’s assistant--flashes us a smile and welcomes us as if we come here every week when, in fact, it is our first visit.

That’s the way it is at this casual, comfy little beach-side cafe housed inside a narrow, whitewashed building decorated with colorful Mardi Gras beads and Carnival masks. Bob Marley is jammin’ in the background, hoping that we like jammin’ too, as Eva hands us menus and excitedly says that Drew has just gotten a liquor license the day before.

“Our special drink tonight is a Caribbean rum punch made with fresh guava, pineapple, passion fruit, mango, and papaya juice.” She laughs at herself reciting this litany. “And rum, of course!” she says. “Don’t forget the rum!”

We order two of them, as well as Drew’s crab and corn cakes and spicy Cajun prawns as appetizers.

“She’s beautiful,” Jan says when Eva leaves us with our drinks, which come complete with chunks of pineapple and maraschino cherries and little paper umbrellas. Eva is beautiful, with dark eyes and a thousand-watt smile that never seems to leave her face.

She returns several minutes later to check on our drinks. “Did I make them OK?” she wants to know. “Not too strong?” They are fine, we tell her, and she smiles before rushing off to welcome an older woman in a muumuu who has arrived late to join two other women who anxiously have been watching the front of the restaurant awaiting her arrival. “She found us!” Eva says triumphantly, leading the older woman over to her friends’ table. There are hugs all around as Eva pats everyone on the back, beaming.

Eva and Drew work together like young newlyweds hosting their first big dinner party. They are slightly frenzied, undermanned as they are, but so ebullient and energetic that you can’t help but feel like you have somehow stumbled into a great little private party where the music is perfect, the hosts charismatic and the food divine, if a tad slow to arrive. Your first reaction is to think, “How wonderful to meet two such incredibly interesting people,” and your second reaction is, “I wonder what I can do to help?”

And obviously we are not the only diners to feel this way. One young woman sitting at the table next to us gets up and goes to the wait station across from where Drew is searing tiger shrimp in lime, garlic and chili, and grabs a water pitcher to refill her glass, stopping at another table along the way to refill theirs as well. A middle-aged man in a green silk T-shirt dining alone offers to stuff new menus into the plastic sleeves while waiting for his dinner and Eva tells him that would be wonderful.

Drew’s is not a restaurant so much as it is a setting for friends and family. A place where people come not just to eat but to visit. As we wait for Drew to cook our appetizers, Roger, a Laguna surgeon who happens to be Drew’s business partner and life partner, comes in the back door, says hello to everyone, and buses tables for a few minutes while discussing the cafe’s upcoming remodel with Drew. Soon, Eva says, the storage space running alongside the dining room will become an outdoor bar, and a live steel-drum band will play on the patio out front. “It’s going to be really nice, with a little fireplace and everything,” she says.

Drew, dressed in denim overalls and a red T-shirt rolled up at the sleeves so that he looks more like a GQ model than a chef, says he’s running out of something and Roger volunteers to run to the store.

Dining here is like being invited to someone else’s home for a big family reunion and finding that not only does everyone seem to honestly like each other, but they’re eager to help out. When someone orders a Bloody Mary and Eva admits to having no idea how to make one, the white-haired Lagunatic who asked for it gives her explicit instructions, which someone else at the table tries to correct, and you half expect both gentlemen to decide the issue by going to the makeshift bar, where a row of liquor bottles with their plastic neck bands still unbroken sit waiting, and make drinks for everyone and ask them who makes the better Bloody Mary--which would probably be just fine with Drew and Eva.

There are conch fritters on the menu and jerk chicken and plantains--typical Caribbean fare, though Drew seems to enjoy putting his signature touch on dishes by serving a black-bean humus with jerk-chicken quesadilla, for instance, or saffron mashed potatoes with his Creole stewed fish. Jan settles on one of the specials, pan-roasted escolar--a sweet, buttery white fish--intrigued by its side dish of mashed African yams. I’m drawn to the pineapple-glazed pork loin, marinated in dark Puerto Rican rum, passion fruit and mango chutney.

The dishes take forever to arrive. It doesn’t matter. The evening is beautiful, the music cheerful and everyone seems to be having a good time at the party, I mean, the restaurant. Eva continually stops by to chat or to bring us cold Red Stripe beers to wash down the spicy prawns, whose flavorful sauce we mop up with chunks of sourdough bread. We ask her how she and Drew met, and she giggles and rolls her eyes, says she used to come in to eat here all the time and then a waitress left about five months ago and Drew asked her to help out, even though she has a full-time job doing marketing work for an educational foundation. “We’re both from British Guyana,” she says, “and living in Laguna, it didn’t take us long to find each other.”

Which seems to be a very good thing, for both of them.

Drew rings a bell and calls Eva’s name and she hurries off, promising to return with our meals. She places our dinners, impeccably presented, in front of us and guarantees that we will love everything, “and if you don’t,” she says, “I’ll take it right back and get you something else.”

But there’s no need for that. She is right. The food tastes as luscious as it looks, the flaky escolar practically melting in your mouth, the pork tenderloin juicy and sweet. Though neither of us are even thinking about dessert, Eva convinces us to try the banana passion flambe with vanilla bean ice cream which, she says, she and Drew turn by hand twice a week. “I don’t need to work out,” she jokes, “I just make ice cream.”

We also order the chocolate bread pudding because Eva tells us it’s another of Drew’s specialties and she hasn’t misled us yet.

Both dishes are excellent, and when we tell Eva how spectacular the whole meal was, she encourages us to go back in the kitchen and tell Drew.

“He’d appreciate it,” she says, smiling. But the evening is late and Drew is nowhere to be found. After a few minutes, we pay the bill and get up to leave. “He’s in his office,” Eva says, “but he should be back in a few minutes if you want to wait.”

I tell her we’ll come back and see him again. But as we stroll out of the restaurant, there is Drew, looking tired but very happy, slumped in a plastic green chair and staring up at the night sky. “Thanks very much for coming in,” he says as we pass by. “I sure hope you’ll come in and see us again.”

The next day, we are back. Eva greets us by name and gives us a hug. As if we were truly old friends.

Tuesday-Thursday and Sunday, 5-9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 5-10 p.m.; brunch Sunday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.