FROM ARTICHOKES TO ARCHITECTS

Noted Westside restaurateur Michael McCarty (of Michael’s) has big plans for his community.

“My No. 1 project right now,” he said recently, “is a 300-room world-class luxury hotel in downtown Santa Monica, hopefully on the beach. I want to get 24 top international architects--people like Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi and Michael Graves--to do bungalows, including the furniture and the landscaping. I’d even love to get a last piece out of (ailing, aging Mexican architect) Luis Baragan.”

There would also be at least one restaurant on the premises, of course, potential designer as yet unspecified. No site has yet been found for the hotel, but McCarty says he’s shooting for an opening date of summer, 1987. (The pace at which top international architects work may perhaps surprise him.)

Meanwhile, McCarty is working with Colorado restaurateur Bevan Branham on a new place, to be called Bevan’s, currently under construction in Denver. Branham and McCarty were partners once before, in a restaurant called My Friends, which they opened in 1975 in the town of Evergreen, west of Denver. McCarty promises that Bevan’s will be “somewhere between a Spago and a Michael’s,” and adds that “It won’t be too hard to be the best restaurant in Denver.”

BIG APPLE FREEZE-OUT: And in case you’re wondering what Michael McCarty has been up to lately, he and fellow Santa Monica restaurant owner Piero Selvaggio (of Valentino) have decided, independently, to give up their respective plans to open establishments in New York City. McCarty’s problem was simply that he couldn’t find the right location--or, rather, couldn’t get it once he found it.

“It had to be midtown,” he says. “It had to be a place where I could do 185 lunches a day at $65 per, and still have room for offices, wine storage and a garden. In fact, it had to be the old Italian Pavilion on 55th and 5th.” McCarty dickered for the space for almost three years, but was never able to consummate the sale. “After a while,” he says, “I realized that the fun had gone out of the idea.”

Selvaggio had planned to open his place with Rinaldo Krcivoj, a talented young chef/restaurateur from Italy’s Friuli region, at the helm. He had even sent Krcivoj to New York to get acclimatized. But the young man’s family called him back to their own restaurant/hotel near Udine (where Krcivoj, incidentally, had earlier helped develop some of Italy’s most imaginative nuova cucine ). Selvaggio subsequently tried to put another deal together, temporarily involving high-profile restaurant consultant George Lang.

But for Selvaggio, too, some of the fun had gone out of the thing. “I realized,” he says, “that there was no such thing as being bicoastal. I would have had to move to New York to do things right--and leaving Valentino like that would have been like giving up my wife of 13 years because I was tempted by a new mistress. It didn’t make sense. Anyway, I think we can do much more exciting things in L.A. . . .”

CITY DELIGHTS: The charmingly idiosyncratic (and very good) City Cafe on Melrose is moving to larger quarters--after a fashion, that is. City co-chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger (the latter also a co-owner) are currently hard at work on a projected new 120-seat place at 180 S. La Brea Ave. at 2nd Street, to be called--what else?--the City Restaurant. The kitchen will be bigger, of course (the cafe’s kitchen is the size of most restaurant kitchens’ walk-in coolers), and will include two oversized woks and a custom-made, wood-burning tandoor oven from India--”the one luxury we’ve allowed ourselves,” says Milliken. Projected opening date is “somewhere between May 1 and May 15.”

Meanwhile, though, the City Cafe has closed for remodeling, to reopen March 1--under the same owners, and with Feniger and Milliken still involved, but with an entirely new format. The particulars are a surprise, says Milliken, “though we started giving our customers little hints on our menus just before we closed.”

In a related development, another West Hollywood restaurant, the newly opened Marix on Las Flores at Santa Monica, closed last Sunday for its own remodeling. It will reopen Friday with a Tex-Mex theme.