A N.Y.-STYLE DELI BRINGS THE BIG APPLE TO ORANGE

Acertain sort of ex-New Yorker likes to pretend that somebody put a gun to his head and forced him to move here. He can’t open his mouth without ranting about the awfulness of California and how miserable he is, living where he can own a house and a car and never have to shovel a sidewalk.

Sooner or later he gets to egg creams. The really damning thing about California, it turns out, is that you can’t get a good egg cream. I’ve heard so much of this talk that I always make a point of ordering an egg cream whenever I’m in New York, always expecting . . . oh, I don’t know, something like a combination of truffles and seeing God. But it’s always just a sort of soda, which incidentally contains neither egg nor cream.

Now, after all these years, I learn the truth. Culinary sociologists have decided what’s really going on in the egg cream cult is New Yorkers’ nostalgia for the teen-age camaraderie of the soda fountain, masquerading as food criticism. They’re really bemoaning their lost youth, not the lack of egg creams.

However, I can at least report that there actually is such a thing as a good chocolate egg cream, and you can get it at a restaurant in Orange with the silly name New York, New York. In its way it is a treat, light (evidently the secret is to use seltzer instead of soda water) and rich-tasting at the same time, just what you’d want when you didn’t feel up to a milkshake--though of course not really in the same league as truffles or seeing God.

New York, New York, as you might guess, is a terrific deli. All the sandwich meats are flown in from New York, notably a snappy, garlicky pastrami. The bread is good, too--nice, fresh corn rye, an unusual crusty sourdough and great bagels: onion, garlic, poppy seed, sesame. Of course you can buy anything from the deli case and take it home as well as eating here.

What really makes it a terrific deli, though, is the sandwiches are not made in the usual shoddy delicatessen manner. That is, the meat is not formed into a ball so the sandwich looks mile-high when it’s cut but slides apart as you try to eat it and leaves you with nothing but bread after two bites. The meat goes all the way to the edge of the bread here, and I give big points for that.

These things alone would be reason enough to come to New York, New York, but in proper Manhattan food tradition it has a pianist. Consequently, I suppose, it seems to feel the need for a serious dinner menu blending all New York’s cuisines and then some, though at the cost of a little blurring of the image. There’s even an English pub menu with steak and kidney pie and so on, probably to go with the English pub dart board ominously mounted beside the piano.

So we have Rhode Island clam cakes, a little bit chewy (they grow on you), and swimmer crab cakes, which are not quite so good--burger-sized, doughy and bland. We have very good fried Camembert, again in a burger shape with a nice crust; a memorable homemade oxtail soup that is virtually a rich beef stew; a salad generously topped with rare roast beef; an odd shrimp cocktail with peeled grapefruit segments in a mustardy mayonnaise sauce; a dairy salad that is essentially a Jewish antipasto: lox, whitefish, herring in sour cream, a rich potato salad and one of those great bagels.

Mostly we have a lot of Italian dishes. Calamari in a fresh, bright red marinara sauce. Entrees in puff pastry such as the Milanese torte: layers of ham, spinach and mozzarella, like a giant croissant sandwich. One of the pastas advertised is pastisio, a Greek pasta dish that comes out rather Italian at New York, New York. In Greece it’s usually macaroni with a layer of lamb baked in a bechamel sauce, but here it’s mostaccioli with beef in tomato sauce with a Parmesan topping.

In short, it’s a curious but reliable menu--with a few exceptions. The hot meat loaf sandwich comes in a thin, sweetish and altogether hideous onion gravy that tastes as if it came out of a packet, and the chicken oregano manages not to taste of oregano or even the visible minced garlic.

Two unexpected treats are a decent wine list and an amazing beer list, which specializes in California boutique breweries like Anchor and Sierra Nevada, as well as small Eastern breweries such as Rolling Rock, Schnell and New Amsterdam. Among the desserts, there is a reliable Lindy’s cheesecake, a homey bread pudding with an apple filling and a passable Chocolate Devastation with a chocolate sauce filling. I would avoid the drab chocolate candies like a Times Square panhandler, though.

Soups, salads and appetizers range from $3.95 to $7.95. Sandwiches are $3.50 to $5.95 and entrees $6.95 to $8.95. Bagel sandwiches are $1.50 to $5.60 and fountain items 85 cents to $2.75.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 2710 E. Chapman Ave., Orange

(714) 639-1329

Open for dinner daily, for lunch Monday through Friday. MasterCard and Visa accepted.