BIRTHDAY BASH FOR FOUR

Longevity isn’t necessarily a sign of quality in restaurants, no more than it is in human beings. Sometimes the worst old creatures live on forever out of sheer orneriness; the brave frequently die young.

On the other hand, any restaurant that has managed to endure for a couple of decades or more must be doing something right--must be fulfilling some public need, assuaging some popular hunger. The fact that such restaurants are rarely what anybody would consider the best in town, and are never the trendiest (by definition, a trend is a direction and never stays in one place for very long), says more about the long-term tastes of the dining public than about the restaurant trade.

In any case, four local establishments (or chains of establishments) are celebrating birthdays this month or next, and I think that their identities might well give pause to the next gastronomic entrepreneur who seeks to establish hereabouts an eating place for the ages:

Oldest of all is the Tam O’Shanter Inn on Los Feliz Boulevard, which will be 65 next month. The inn plans to celebrate the occasion with live bagpipe music every Thursday night, live jazz every Friday, and a number of other events that the restaurant will be more than happy to reveal to you. The Tam O’Shanter, which is owned by Lawry’s, brags that it’s Los Angeles’ oldest restaurant in the same location and under the same proprietorship--a claim which only the curmudgeonly would call into question on the grounds that the name of the place was changed to the Great Scot for a number of years before being changed back to its original moniker in 1982.

An establishment of rather a different sort, Art’s Delicatessen in Studio City, turns 30 today and offers customers a free glass of champagne or punch with their meal until 8:30 tonight.

The Bob Burns Restaurant in Santa Monica is 25 this month, though no celebration is planned. The Bob Burns locations in Woodland Hills and Newport Beach are younger.

In contrast, the Red Onion chain--14 restaurants throughout Southern California--is whooping it up in all sorts of ways this month to mark they’ve been around for 20 years. For instance, the chain is offering 1967 prices through Tuesday (which means combination dinners for $2.45) and is holding an anniversary sweepstakes drawing (deadline for entries: Wednesday), with the grand prize a 20-day vacation in Mexico.

TABLE TALK: Luciana Klosterman has opened an Italian restaurant called The Duke where the idiosyncratic Scully’s used to hide, on Santa Monica Boulevard at Doheny Drive. . . . The California Pizza Kitchen, which started out on South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, has opened its fourth unit--a 223-seat place in the Lennox Square Mall in Atlanta . . . . Closer to home, Jean Leon has launched his fourth La Scala Presto Trattoria, this time in Encino. (Other Presto locations are in Toluca Lake, Redondo Beach and Brentwood, the original.) . . . Cafe Katsu in West Los Angeles, which had been closed for five weeks for reorganization of the kitchen, has reopened under the chef-ship of Joseph Miller, a veteran of La Toque, L’Orangerie and Michel Guerard’s place in France. . . .

DATE UPDATE: Last week I reported that Sabroso in Venice would conduct a cooking class in certain basics (chilis, blue corn and cactus, to be precise) on June 24 at noon. I was late by a week, the event having taken place the 17th. To accommodate those who called in about the 24th, though, Sabroso will repeat the class this Wednesday. Fee is $30 and lunch is included.