WHAT TO DO WHEN FOOD POISONING STRIKES

“I am curious about what is considered proper protocol,” writes Margaret Sokolik of Los Angeles, “if one suspects that one has contracted food poisoning in a restaurant.”

She and her brother-in-law, she goes on to say, had lunch together at “a very well-known place here in town” not long ago and within 24 hours of their repast--having shared no other food or drink with each other in the meantime--both became similarly ill. Later, she continues, both parties having recovered, she wrote to the restaurant in question to inform them of her experience.

“I received what I considered a very unsatisfactory letter in return,” she says, “basically stating that there was no way that we could have gotten the malady from their restaurant.” She then asks what I would have done in her place. Should she, for example, “have just kept my mouth shut and assumed that it couldn’t possibly have been this high-priced popular spot and must have been my breakfast cereal?”

Well, now. First of all, protocol be damned. If you exhibit the symptoms of food poisoning (which commonly include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, flushing, etc., individually or in horrid concert) and if you have any reason at all to believe that you’ve got a serious case of it (or if you are very young or very old or already ill in other ways), call a medic pronto. Worry about the restaurant later. Once you’ve been taken care of, and if you have valid reason to believe that a particular restaurant’s meal was indeed the cause of your distress, you might consider registering an official complaint with your local county health center or, in Los Angeles County, with the Morbidity Section of the County Health Services Department’s Food and Milk Program (call (213) 974-7821). You will then be interviewed by a county health official and, if your complaint seems to have merit, the putatively responsible restaurant will be investigated.

And as for the establishment that replied to Miss Sokolik (which she does not name), incidentally, it has no way of knowing whether or not its food was responsible for the resultant food poisoning and has no business pretending that it does. There are scores of ways in which food poisoning can be spread and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with hygiene or proper cooking practices. There are plenty of variables and there is not a restaurant (or a home kitchen) in the universe that can make itself permanently, unequivocally immune from the occasional ravages of dangerous bacteria.

WHERE YOU BEEN SO LONG?: One of the best little neighborhood restaurants of the 1970s hereabouts was Ben’s Place in Santa Monica, where veteran captain/maitre d’hotel Ben Jorgensen served up simply-cooked Eastern seafood and the hearty specialties of his native Denmark, modestly priced, with his own brand of corny good will. After some years of low-key success, he moved his operation to a larger venue in a shopping center in Canoga Park--where, far from his faithful Westside clientele, he failed rather quickly. After that, Jorgensen dropped out of sight.

“Whatever happened to old Ben?” people used to ask me now and then. I never knew what to tell them. Now I do. The man himself called me the other day. He is now assistant maitre d’hotel at the Hollywood Roosevelt’s newly reanimated dining room, working breakfast and lunch Thursday through Saturday and dinner Sunday and Monday. His old humor and charm are intact, as is his earnest, old-school concern for the diner’s well-being.

NEW YORK CIAO: Cuisine is spelled cucina in Manhattan these days; Italian restaurants seem to be the hottest thing in town. Recently opened little places like Remi on the Upper East Side and Arqua in TriBeCa (both of which happen to specialize in the cooking of the Veneto region) are among the city’s most popular places (and justly so).

Toscana, which used to be a suave little trattoria on 54th and Second, has moved into high-tone, high-design quarters a block away in Philip Johnson’s hate-it-or-don’t-like-it “Lipstick Building” at 54th and Third, where it is dispensing sophisticated Tuscan fare to sophisticated locals. Harry Cipriani’s, the Manhattan spinoff of Harry’s Bar in Venice, has spawned a West Side offspring called Bellini on 51st and Eighth. A New York branch of the classic Milanese restaurant Bice is scheduled to open any day now on 54th and Fifth, with an interior designed by Adam Tihany, who is also co-owner of the aforementioned Remi. And Italy’s highly rated San Domenico in Imola, near Bologna, is said to be dickering seriously for a site in Gotham, most probably on Central Park South.

In other New York news, the fabled (and fabulously expensive) Quilted Giraffe is moving from its longtime little home on Second Avenue to the premises now occupied by its ill-defined sibling, the Casual Quilted Giraffe, in the (yet again Philip Johnson) AT&T; Building on Madison. The Casual will fold its tent.

TABLE TALK: Chef Berty Siegels, late of the Trident Room in West Los Angeles, who had at one point planned to open a restaurant on the site of the West End Garden on Wilshire near Barrington, has found a new location and a new partner and is about to start his own place--in the shell of the former Donatello’s on San Vicente in Brentwood, in concert with Chef Alain Cuny, owner of Le Sanglier in Tarzana and the Wine Bistro in Studio City. While on hiatus as a chef, incidentally, Siegels worked as a waiter at the Bistro in Beverly Hills to get some feeling for that all-important aspect of the restaurant game that the trade calls “the front of the house.”

VEGGING OUT: Last year an ovo-lactarian (i.e., a vegetarian who eats eggs and milk products but no meat, fish or fowl) wrote to me complaining that she couldn’t find good, interesting food to fulfill her dietary wishes in most of the restaurants she went to. I told her what I thought of her problem, and then plenty of vegetarian readers told me what they thought of me (and of meat).

What I probably should have done, if I had remembered it at the time, was simply to refer her back to the Nov. 4, 1984, issue of this very publication, wherein one Baba S. Khalsa, a longtime vegetarian and member of a Houston restaurant family, offered an article about how easy it was to find good, interesting vegetarian food in many of our area’s finest restaurants. As Khalsa himself has reminded me, these establishments--staffed, he wrote at the time, by a “growing band of fine young chefs (who) do not need meat to make a meal”--include Michael’s, Valentino, Spago, 385 North, Trumps, Orlando-Orsini, St. Estephe, La Toque, the West Beach Cafe, the City Restaurant, Hugo’s and Marrakesh as well as the strictly vegetarian Golden Temple, Fragrant Vegetable, Paru’s and Meyera. These are not places where special ordering is required, Khalsa noted at the time, but restaurants whose regular menus are practically rife with all-vegetable dishes.

TIDBITS: Langan’s Brasserie (as in flamboyant London restaurateur Peter Langan--not “Langdon,” as Patrick Terrail’s “Les Nouvelles Gourmandes” newsletter recently called him), an outpost of New York’s famous Stage Deli and a dim sum restaurant called Yin Yang are the first three eating places to sign leases at the new Century City Shopping Center Marketplace, to open this fall. . . . Pizza chef (an oxymoron?) Ed Ladou, formerly of Spago, will demonstrate his new technique for barbecuing pizza next Sunday for members of the Westside Cooking Club, with guests admitted for a $35 fee. Call (213) 657-6160 for details. . . . . . . The Siamese Princess in Hollywood has introduced a new menu, offering such uncommon fare as duck and snail dumplings, Bangkok fisherman’s soup, prawns in spicy orange sauce and three-flavor panang curry. Chef Victor Sodsook now also sells his peanut butter sauce and creamy salad dressing to take home. . . . And Le Montage, in the Filmland Center Building in Culver City, offers daily garlic-based luncheon specials from July 13-17 in observance of L.A.’s annual Garlic Festival.