RESTAURANT REVIEW : Take a Stroll Down Memory Lane at Club 41

Journey back with us 40 years, maybe even 60 or 70. At Club 41 the high wooden booths have carved armrests and brass coat-hooks shaped like ten-pointed deer antlers. The gargantuan back bar is full of panels and Corinthian columns--it could be the front door of a city hall in logging country. The lamps have the distinctive look of converted gaslights.

Of course, this is all spurious antiquity. If you want something genuinely old, go to Europe; if you want easy freeway access and a building that meets the earthquake codes, you want a place like Delacey’s Club 41, even though it was just recently fashioned in a corner of a multistory parking structure.

With its slogans “Booths for Ladies” and “Air Conditioned,” Club 41 may seem a little ambiguous about the era it wants to represent, but judging from the menu, it’s aiming at a kind of cross between The Grill and Musso’s.

Scarcely anything served would have been out of place even 70 years ago. Steaks, chops, sandwiches, some roast meats, some occasionally Italianate chicken or pasta dishes, that’s about it.

On the whole, Club 41 does this all quite well. The shrimp in the shrimp cocktail actually have some flavor and the cocktail sauce comes with extra horseradish on the side. The Boston clam chowder is sweet and creamy and full of clams, with broccoli in place of the usual celery. There’s a sweet, musty anise flavor in the spinach topping of the oysters Rockefeller.

One specialty of the place, no kidding, is Caesar salad. There’s a self-confessed “Caesar fanatic” among the waiters who spends a good 3 minutes mashing garlic and anchovy for the dressing and tosses the Parmesan-rich salad with the blissful air of a surfer catching a big one. However, I’ve also had it made rather hurriedly by another waiter who was nowhere near as good. Insist on the fanatic.

As for the steaks and chops, they seem to be tender, though not always the most flavorful around (the veal chop, the most expensive item on the menu, is definitely disappointing in this regard). Some come with bordelaise sauce of the dark mahogany color and pleasantly vague flavor of the old days. If that seems too fancy, the table is already crowded with plenty of bottled sauces: A-1, 57, Worcestershire, Pickapeppa--one loses count.

The hot plates are scrupulous about using different gravies for different meats; the roast turkey, for instance, comes with yellow old-fashioned chicken gravy (rather salty) and a paper cup of cranberry jelly. There are two burgers, the Famous Club 41 Burger being a large sweet patty served on a bun open-face with bordelaise sauce. The other burger comes wrapped in paper--technically you could quaff Maison Deutz Champagne while eating a sandwich wrapped in paper as if you had ordered it from a sidewalk burger stand. Something about this seems very Pasadena.

There aren’t many duds on this vast menu, but my calf’s liver was served, of all things, blood rare (you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to cut badly underdone liver). And I must say the dessert list is not very impressive. The cheesecake is pleasantly tart, the chocolate cake strictly from Duncan Hines, and the apple pie perfectly awful, with a crust and filling that taste exactly like the little hermetically sealed pies you can buy from dispensing machines at gas stations.

Club 41 is a solid, comfortable place serving solid, comfortable food of another age. In the old-time way the menu includes a list of cocktails, and if you order a Highball or a Sour or a Side Car, and ignore all the Fuzzy Navels and Dirty White Mothers being served, you’re in a time machine.

Delacey’s Club 41, 41 Delacey St., Pasadena. (818) 795-4141 (SYcamore 5-4141). Open for lunch and dinner daily (dinner only Labor Day weekend). Full bar. Street or non-validated lot parking. American Express, MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $18 to $57.