Your mission: Find Mesa's front door
RESTAURANT REVIEW
This new Costa Mesa restaurant makes a virtue of being low profile. Very low profile.
Iheard about it from an O.C. friend: a new restaurant and lounge just opened in Costa Mesa. It's one of those clandestine deals, he told me. No listed phone number, no sign, no address out front. A friend of a friend who knows the sommelier told him about it, and despite appearances (or lack of them), this was no hipster martini lounge, but a real restaurant headed by the former chef de cuisine at AOC.
He graciously slipped me what passes for the restaurant's business card: a 714 phone number printed crookedly on recycled brown paper. No address. No details. Not even the name. It's called Mesa, by the way. Google it and nothing comes up -- no reviews, no website, nothing.
Mesa is meant to be Orange County's Hyde or Green Door, those L.A. hot spots where everything about it is kept secret to keep the hoi polloi out and the cool kids in. Mesa's owners, it turns out, have experience creating buzz: They also own Firefly in Studio City. With Mesa they have the Hollywood-style restaurant/lounge thing down.
I rounded up some friends and gave the number a call. After all the intrigue, you'd think it would be hard to book dinner, but not really. At least not at 8 or 8:30 on a weeknight.
My friend had told me that it's next to the Camp, a so-called alternative mall not far from South Coast Plaza. Look for a big white bunker-like building, he said. Well, we drove in one entrance to the Camp and out the other, came around a corner and were about to head back when I spotted the valet station and two blonds stepping out of a BMW, both in shiny black boots with 4-inch heels.
This must be the place.
We followed them down a covered walkway to a drafty entrance, controlled by three hostesses wrapped in winter coats. OK, our name is down, we're in. And we can't help feeling smug about it. I don't know how everybody else found out about Mesa -- Facebook or friends of friends of friends, like me -- but they're here.
In fact, the lounge is thronged: Women commandeer the long communal table, dangling long legs from the high stools, sipping cocktails and getting silly and loud. Smokers light up -- a retractable roof makes it OK -- between bites of frites or shrimp. Cellphone cameras snap pix. Laughter ricochets off the walls. Fortunately, the roar is mostly on that side of the room.
