Broccoli Is Out, ‘Boutique’ Vegetables Are In : New Restaurant Banks on Edible Chic

On a recent Wednesday, the slight, actorishly handsome dining-room manager at Lalo and Brothers in Encino conducted roll call before sending his uniformed troops out to serve lunch to those who do lunch.

The eight front waiters, back waiters and runners stood at parade rest with towels thrown over their shoulders as George Sheridan, 29, reminded them that the new restaurant demands service “to a high standard.”

Check the flower pots on the tables and trim away anything that looks unvoguishly dead, he reminded in his list of orders and cautions.

Sheridan then revealed the specials, emphasizing that they must be memorized.

“We have curried duck served over a potato pancake, with apple, topped with slices of goat cheese,” he said. “It’s excellent. Push it. Ladies adore that dish.”

Finally, Sheridan settled the matter of which waiter would be allowed to serve the remaining three orders of scallops.

“Now, let’s go,” he urged, as the waiters sprinted off to their flower pots.

Up-Scale Clientele

Since it opened two months ago, Lalo and Brothers has been testing the hypothesis that the balsamic vinegar set--people who demand raspberries in February and fret about the temperature of their goat cheese--will support a new, up-scale restaurant that isn’t on the Westside.

Status-conscious diners don’t flock to the Valley, and only a few chic restaurants survive. La Serre in Studio City, the most frequently named exception, declined to reveal what goes on behind the scenes. But Lalo and Brothers swung open the door of its kitchen and allowed a look at the personalities, routines and rhythms of a restaurant trying to serve up style on Ventura Boulevard.

While the waiters pushed duck and potato pancakes, co-owner Lalo Durazo sat for a moment in the office, enthusing on the phone with a friend. “We had a great night last night,” the Mexico-born restaurateur reported. “One of the sons of Ronald Reagan came in for the second time. And David Steinberg, the comedian, came in for the third time.”

Like virtually everyone else in the business, Durazo, 29, dreamed of opening his own place all the years he worked for someone else. Encouraged by friends, he was also advised to locate in Beverly Hills or West Hollywood-- anywhere but in the Valley. As he recalled, “When you speak to someone from the Valley about it, they say, ‘Oh, great, we need a restaurant.’ When you speak to someone from the city about it, they say, ‘What are you doing there? There’s nothing happening there. It’s just a bedroom community.’ ”

Took a Gamble

But Durazo and his partner, chef Michel Despras, gambled on Encino, where real estate is more reasonable and where, according to a demographic study the men commissioned, 2 million people, many with money for morels as well as the mortgage, live within five miles of the restaurant. The restaurant doesn’t buy newspaper ads, but it does have a publicist, whose duties include visiting doctors and lawyers in the area and leaving the restaurant’s card. Doctors are important to places like Lalo and Brothers.

“Creating a restaurant is like producing a movie,” the bartender, himself a former restaurant owner, said philosophically. “You have your own vision, and the trick is to get other people to share it with you.” This establishment is clearly a co-production of Durazo and Despras, 31, who worked together at the Westwood Marquis Hotel.

Although they confer on everything, each man has territory where he is in charge.

Durazo’s 6-foot-3 presence is more strongly felt in the public areas, where he greets customers in an environment that once existed only in his head. He thinks, for instance, that most eateries with patios feel like two separate restaurants, so this dining room is integrated with the outside by means of French doors.

View of Art

He said he believes restaurant art should be fun and encourage conversation, so the dining room now contains a wood sculpture of a grotesque, high-kicking nude that makes some people say, “I hate that.” The art, like the menu and the wine list, is regularly changed because, he explained, “I love changing.”

Chef Michel, as he is usually addressed, is king of the kitchen. While the waiters were out hustling the curried duck special, a recipe the chef had dreamed up the day before and test-marketed on a few regular customers, he was in the kitchen conferring with Chuck Novak, a salesman for Northern Produce.

Despras, who was born in Lyons, France, and has been working in kitchens since he was 13, has strong views on vegetables. Broccoli and sliced carrots should be banned. “It’s so plain,” he said disapprovingly. And he is scathing on the subject of baked potatoes. “You could have a bunch of dishwashers baking potatoes,” he said.

Instead of dull, normal side dishes, the chef likes “boutique” vegetables such as tiny white eggplants, because they are the sort of thing people don’t serve at home and because they give patrons the sense that they are getting their money’s worth. Dinner for two at Lalo and Brothers, with a bottle of wine, tax and tip, costs about $85. Amusing new vegetables are one of Despras’ favorite ways of assuring customers that they have invested well. “You have to show the people you are cooking for them,” he said.

Touts Vegetables

Chuck Novak is a vegetable promoter, who goes from restaurant to restaurant demonstrating the latest in edible chic. This is culinary show biz, and Novak looks the part with his hip haircut and the sleeves of his jacket casually pushed up his tanned arms. He carries his artfully arranged wares--tiny golden beets and other bonsai vegetables, horrid-looking rare mushrooms, lacy little rainbow lettuces--in a pricey kudzu basket. Lalo and Brothers buys 80 pounds of baby vegetables a week, including miniaturized zucchinis that are poached and served with the flower still attached to the end.

“These specialty items are what make going out to eat fun,” said Novak, as he tried to interest the chef in a new item, a wood-ear mushroom that must taste better than it looks. “You’re looking for that flavor statement,” Novak said. In California today, it is possible to make some fairly bizarre flavor statements. Lalo and Brothers buys blue corn flour from Northern Produce for tortillas and orders huit la coche, a mold that grows on corn and gives a mushroom-like taste to sauces. As the chef explained of such unusual menu items, “People always know when they go to the restaurant that there’s something new for them.”

Cooks in Running Shoes

Despras wears running shoes and a white painters’ cap instead of the chef’s traditional high white toque. “The hood over the stoves is too low for us to go underneath with a toque,” he said. He has shaped the kitchen to his own strong views--no meat locker because meat should be fresh, windows to allow the staff to look out and the public to look in, a pizza oven instead of a pastry oven because he thinks it makes a better torte. A single bottle of ketchup is in the kitchen for Ismelda Durazo, Lalo’s wife and the restaurant’s bookkeeper. “She loves french fries with ketchup,” Despras said nonjudgmentally.

Despras spends a couple of hours a day developing new recipes, none of which he writes down. When he is thinking of something new to do to with sea bass, for instance--75% of their business is fish--he sometimes turns to the idea file he put into the Osborne computer that sits across from the pastry chef.

As lunch began to peak, the chef joined his assistant, sous chef Mark Webb, 31, on the line. Despras finished the sauce for a portion of duck with bright bits of diced tomato and handed the plate to the expediter, who let the waiter know his order was ready. Webb, a Los Angeles Pierce College graduate in business who petitioned Despras for a job for months, had arrived at 6:30 that morning and begun the culinary day by lighting the stoves and taking inventory of the refrigerators to see what had disappeared during the dinner shift.

Delegates Responsibilities

“I look upon my job primarily as organization,” Webb said. “Whatever the chef wants done, it gets to me and I delegate responsibilities.” On the early shift, there are always 250 jalapeno rolls to bake. Veal stock, which cooks for a day, must be started (unlike fish stock, which takes less than an hour). And the daily menu offerings have to be translated into tasks that will put the right ingredients and equipment in front of the chef or his delegate at the critical moment.

Webb likes the camaraderie of the kitchen--Despras isn’t from the screaming school of French chefs. And working as sous chef at Lalo’s is the step that could qualify him for a $75,000-a-year executive chefdom of his own. Meanwhile, he studies Despras’ untraditional application of traditional techniques and sweats over the stove.

By 3 o’clock, the last portion of curried duck has been sold at $9.75. The dinner sous chef has arrived and begun butchering the evening’s veal.

Durazo and Despras will remain at the restaurant until midnight, but neither is complaining. Having a restaurant of your own is like moving up from an apartment to a house, Despras said.

It’s been two months now, proving wrong the people who told Despras he’d go bankrupt in the Valley in a month.

And since they planned a sofa into their dining room, one of them may be able to catch a nap before dinner gets too crazy.