Three's Company

My friend Bob isn't a superstitious soul, but he does think it's a bad sign if he walks into a restaurant and there's nobody in the dining room. It's an omen, he says, that there's something terribly wrong with the restaurant. I told him that I have experienced the flip side of that theory. After waiting for a table in the always-crowded and soulless chain restaurants in this town, I've sometimes felt the same "omen" while looking at the second-rate menu or sitting forever before a server finally appears. A dining room doesn't have to be empty to generate that uncanny sixth sense that the dining experience is going to rank high on the freak-o-meter.

But the cold night that Bob, Shelby and I walked into the empty dining room at Café Expresso III — a few minutes after 6:30 p.m. on a Friday — we gave one another the same quizzical look: "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

The dining room looked inviting enough. The mismatched tables were tidily set with napkins, woven place mats and shiny flatware. Candles flickered, and a recording of Latin jazz was audible. But there didn't seem to be a soul in the place. Not a customer, not a waiter, not a cook. We stood there for a moment, wondering what to do next, when suddenly a grinning face poked out from behind a potted palm. "Here for dinner?"

I had to do a double take before I realized that I knew that face. "Chuck Tackett?" I asked. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Tackett, a columnist for a local gay weekly newspaper and host of a late-night disco radio show, frequently pops up in unlikely places. But I'd never seen him working in a restaurant. "I'm a volunteer here," he explained. "The owners are friends of mine." Then he waved his arms and announced, "Take whatever table you like."

It wasn't a difficult choice; there are less than a dozen tables in the joint. We shuffled over to a glass-topped table and sat down on cast-iron chairs (the kind you might find on a sunny patio in Palm Springs). Chuck passed out plastic-covered menus and explained the night's dinner special.

"It's Guatemalan pork," he said. "One of the owners is Pedro. He's from Guatemala. The pork is cooked in a spicy red sauce. It's real good. But I wish you could come back tomorrow, because that's when Pedro is making Guatemalan enchiladas. They're really delicious."

"Is this a Guatemalan restaurant?" Shelby asked.

Well, not unless one feels that a single daily Guatemalan-inspired entrée is the extent of the culinary trip south of the border. A Guatemalan restaurant would make sense in this neighborhood, which boasts plenty of good Latin American restaurants. But the menu at Café Expresso III leans more toward Italiano cuisine. There are nine entrées listed on Café Expresso III's dinner menu, and more than half are pasta dishes. There's also grilled salmon, steak, pork and a hamburger.

When Chuck vanished into an unseen kitchen to bring us some nonalcoholic beverages — the two-year-old venue still doesn't have a liquor license — we took inventory of the cluttered dining room, which was bedecked and bauble-covered for the holidays to its very last inch. Even without the holiday drag, it would be an eyeful: The concrete floor is painted acid-green, the exposed ductwork is mustard-yellow, and much of the wall space is covered with vibrantly colored original paintings by the restaurant's other owner, Luke Heckbart.

The dining area is tiny (the building was once a gas station), so the busy décor is slightly overpowering. Dining there is like eating in a dollhouse. "A gay dollhouse," Shelby said.

There were no appetizers on the menu, but I was starving, so we all ordered soup. Chuck brought out some warm bread and butter — but no bread plates.

"You know, I've driven by this place a million times," Shelby whispered. "I thought it was a taco stand."

I'm equally guilty of having passed by this oddball building at the corner of Southwest Boulevard and Summit without giving it a second glance. I suppose the name of the place led me to assume it was a coffeehouse. And it is, serving up lattes and macchiatos in the morning. Shelby wondered: If this was Café Expresso III, what had happened to I and II?

Pedro followed Chuck out of the kitchen with three steaming bowls of soup — black bean for Bob and an excellent version of Italian wedding soup for Shelby and me — and explained that the first two Café Expresso operations had been small coffee stands at the Indian Springs and Mission Center malls. The third venture is more of a full-service operation, with Pedro and Luke trading server, cook, manager and dishwasher duties.

That's a lot of juggling, and I'm not sure how they'll pull it off if this dining room ever gets busy. But to their credit, the food in this flamboyantly decorated coffee shack was surprisingly good. The soups were terrific; the Cuban-style black bean was thick and comforting, and the Italian wedding zuppa came loaded with tiny meatballs, onion, carrots and cabbage.