FULLERTON’S MELODY INN OFFERS TASTE OF THE PAST

Something’s going on in Fullerton.

It’s a little like the restaurant flurry that’s going on in Balboa, and there’s even a pretty close parallel to Bubbles in Balboa and Tony’s Melody Inn in Fullerton. Both are period restaurants in buildings from the ‘20s or ‘30s. The Melody Inn even advertises itself (legitimately) as “Fullerton’s Oldest Restaurant.”

It’s fancier now than it ever has been, say old-timers. From having been a bar for many years it has been revamped in high Contempo Deco style: bare brick walls, etched glass panels, bleached palms, lots of rounded modern shapes in pink and once in a while turquoise. Like Bubbles it has music, to a degree. One night I swore I heard a piano playing “Stormy Weather” over the hubbub. All that brick and glass makes for a noisy room when the place is full, and it does get full--they like to reconfirm your reservations on weekends.

In keeping with this back-to-Futurism in the setting, the menu is modern (fresh herbs and pasta, and yes, kiwi) but with some old-fashioned touches. Braised cucumber, for one. Nineteenth-Century cooks looked on the cucumber not as a salad vegetable but as a sweet, delicate sort of squash with translucent flesh. It makes an excellent side dish.

Or parsnips. I think the last time I had a parsnip in a restaurant was during a brief fad for pureed parsnip a few years back when everybody was buying food processors. Parsnip is excellent by itself, though, and sometimes the Melody Inn makes a lovely cream of parsnip soup, rather lemony and full of the perfume of this neglected vegetable.

The Melody Inn is shrewd about the ingredients it uses too--local strawberries, wonderfully fresh mushrooms. Altogether this is a very interesting restaurant, a real addition. In fact, considering the beauty of the place and its unexpected location, one is tempted to make it out to be a little better than it is, so it really should be said that for all its attractions the Melody Inn does not have greatness stamped on it. The cookery is attractive but somehow scaled-down, unaspiring. There’s a sort of vagueness about it, partly due to use of the same demiglaze sauce in too many dishes, and you can see the seams in some of the invented recipes. There are service flaws too, like boiled vegetables sweating away into the neighboring meat sauce.

But hey, do you want everything? (Don’t answer that.)

The soups are a strong point. The menu always offers Bavarian lentil, medium thick with a strong smoky ham flavor. I’ve also had a lobster bisque that was very simple and light but lobstery, with a couple of quenelles, or seafood meatballs, floating in it. This chef likes quenelles. There’s a regular appetizer of salmon quenelles in chive cream sauce.

You can choose entrees or light dinners, the latter running to dishes like chicken salad made with both smoked chicken and smoked sesame oil (the pine nuts, rice vinegar and red cabbage are unsmoked). “Light,” you should know, doesn’t necessarily mean light . “Fettuccine alla cream” is a big bowl of pasta--wonderful pasta, rolled so thin it’s almost fluffy in the bowl--with bay shrimp, mushrooms and a pretty rich tomato cream sauce.

The entrees are likable things such as crisp roast duck with lime sauce, shrimp in lobster sauce and lobster tail stew in tomato cream sauce with a definite though unannounced dose of cognac. There’s a tasty, though somewhat skimpy, dish of veal and beef medallions, one of each, the beef being topped with bearnaise and the veal with whole seed mustard (which ought to be carefully spread around on the meat, which is otherwise tender but excessively mild).

Some dishes are far too mild for my tastes. Baked salmon in Sancerre wine sauce left no impression, and chicken breast with apples, almonds and applejack sauce is a snooze, apart from the almonds. I remain unconvinced that the chicken longs to be paired with the apple.

Roasted rabbit is far from bland--it’s positively daring. Though the menu speaks of “natural sauce and vegetables,” as I got it the sauce was the universal demiglaze and some tiny bitter European olives, a surprisingly forceful dish that seemed rather Provencal. The assertive little (unpitted) olives may be a problem for some people, though. Lunch emphasizes soups and salads, light entrees and a few sandwiches. I ordered the Melody Inn Chopped Beefsteak, which I took to be a premium class burger and got instead a different dish that was really pretty good, the peculiarly named Chopped Beefsteak, Sonora Style: not beef but chopped veal mixed with onion, fried like a burger and topped with a homey-tasting stew of tomatoes, onions and olives (California olives), a meaty sauce the menu described as chili and some Cheddar cheese. I didn’t complain.

Desserts are American, fresh fruits, mocha cake, blackout cake, a cheesecake of the tangy persuasion and so on. At dinner, appetizers are $3 to $5.50, entrees $7 to $17.50; at lunch prices run $4.25 to $9.50.

TONY’S MELODY INN 110 S. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton

(714) 879-7570

Open for lunch Monday through Friday, for dinner Monday through Saturday. MasterCard and Vista accepted.