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I'm sitting under a painting of seven smiling cowgirls at the bar at Casa Orinda, and I feel like I'm one of them. It's the end of a long work week, and I'm hanging with my friends Julie and Lisa, sipping on a gin and tonic and munching on what has long been known as the best fried chicken in the Bay Area.
The bar, hand-carved wood decorated with bull horns and vintage rodeo photography, is two-deep, as multiple generations of Lamorindans welcome the weekend with bartender Rocco Coppolo's stiff cocktails. Casa Orinda has been open for 75 years, so if you go there, it's possible that your father did, and so did his father.
Before the Casa, Coppolo spent 15 years behind the slab at the Bit of England, a Burlingame pub open since 1919. They have the second-oldest post-Prohibition liquor license in the state. So Coppolo knows how to please repeat generational customers. Four nights a week, he serves a couple in their 90s who've been coming to the Casa, it's safe to say, longer than Coppolo has been alive.
The space is a clean, deliberate and classy homage to the West, a sort of cowboy couture, with oxen-yoke light fixtures, branding irons and wall-sized oil paintings of stagecoaches and chuck wagons. One of four intimate and dimly-lit dining rooms houses an impressive gun collection, neatly displayed in glass cases with the reverence of a collector.
To me, Casa Orinda isn't just the oldest operating restaurant
Everyone has a Casa story. Couples have fallen in love with their elbows on that slab. Elderly customers have enjoyed their final meals there. Some people even claim a connection to that fried chicken recipe. Legend has it that a pre-Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel Sanders sold the restaurant secret seasonings and deep-fryers back in the 1960s, the decade of traveling salesmen.
But tonight, we're just three thirtysomethings gushing over the attractive and polished wait staff, vintage cowboy place mats and tableware — think Denny's with spurs and spunk — and the affordability of a large margarita ($7.50). Like so many restaurants in the East Bay, the bar has its own verve, its own pace and energy, and we find ourselves enjoying small talk with the staff, who are all warm and accommodating.
Drinking is almost an afterthought in a place like this, where novelty and fudge-swimming mud pie take center stage. Still, we enjoyed our classic cocktails, and admired the Casa's efforts to keep its offerings fresh. Julie had a smooth lemon drop ($7.50) that she assumes got its finesse from powdered sugar.
Still, we probably won't order it next time. The Casa gives me a hankering for something aged and rich, like single malt whiskey, the kind that's smooth like chocolate. That way, in 50 years, when our kids hit the Casa, they'll have a good story of their own.
Reach Jessica Yadegaran at 925-943-8155 or jyadegaran@bayareanewsgroup.com.
n ADDRESS: 20 Bryant Way, Orinda.
n HOURS: Open 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; until 10 p.m. Sundays.
n CONTACT: 925-254-2981.
n VIBE: Saloon with soul.
n CROWD: Local, multigenerational devotees, 40 to 90.
n ORDER: The legendary fried chicken.
