BIRTH <i> of a</i> RESTAURANT : The Idea Was to Serve Simple Food in a Friendly Atmosphere--But Getting to Opening Night Took a Year of Frustrating Setbacks and Small Triumphs : THE$500,000 GAMBLE

THE FIRST ORDER on the first night of business at Trattoria Angeli comes into the kitchen five minutes before the official 6 o’clock opening. The couple at Table 33 want to split the scamorza ala griglia appetizer, and executive chef Evan Kleiman hovers as one of her line cooks arranges the smoked mozzarella on a plate and heats it in the salamander. When it comes out, Kleiman adds the topping of diced tomatoes and oregano and wipes the raised edges of the plate clean. She places it on a larger serving plate, turns it at an angle to see how it will look in front of the customer--and with a decisive shove puts it up on the counter. The runner, whose sole purpose in his working life is to get dishes to diners as soon as they are ready, picks it up and heads across the room.

Riding on that hot plate is more than a half-million dollars, the professional future and personal fulfillment of Kleiman and her partner, John Strobel, and the fates of 35 investors and 55 full- and part-time employees. Opening a restaurant is the most popular and least sensible entrepreneurial gamble in the United States: More than 13,000 restaurants opened or changed hands in 1986, about 1,000 of them in Los Angeles County, according to the California Restaurant Assn. Sixty-five percent will fail within two years.

Despite the odds, the notion of having a place of your own is a seductive one. You get to be your own boss and, essentially, have lots of people over for dinner for a living. But it is hardly that simple. A restaurateur needs abilities that have nothing to do with a saute pan: fund-raising, interior design, brute strength, personnel and public relations savvy and an almost religious perseverance. It also helps to be gracious, consistent and lucky.

Kleiman, 34, and Strobel, 33, aren’t novices. Since December, 1984, they’ve run Angeli Caffe, a hip hole-in-the-wall in West Hollywood. But Trattoria Angeli is bigger, fancier, with a more ambitious menu. Success is a steep climb. They need to gross $1.8 million annually to break even, which translates into 220 dinners and 75 lunches sold every day, six days a week, from now on.

The runner sets down the appetizer, and the couple pick up their forks. After a year and a half of effort, it all comes down to whether these strangers like their food.

THE BEGINNING: BEYOND PIZZA

EVAN KLEIMAN AND JOHN STROBELwere hardly a matched set when they met in the summer of 1983. She had little interest in what happened outside the kitchen, while he thrived on a restaurant’s bustling front room; she was a happy anachronism, with her waist-length wavy auburn hair, grape-cluster earrings and love of rustic Italian food, but he preferred up-to-date dress shirts, pleated pants and fine wines poured at power tables.

They had one crucial thing in common, though--they were fed up with working for other people and shared the dream of having their own restaurant. Kleiman, who had been the night chef at Mangia and executive chef at Verdi, was catering free-lance. Strobel had maneuvered the tricky front room as the night manager at Morton’s, the West Hollywood eatery where the contents of one’s plate were arguably less important than the location of one’s table, as well as the Rangoon Racquet Club and the Seventh Street Bistro. He was prepared to “sell pencils in the street” and lean on his wife’s paycheck to maintain his autonomy.

In December of 1984, on a meager $72,500, most of which came from their families, they opened Angeli Caffe and Pizzeria--”My floor plan and her food,” said Strobel--a 17-foot Melrose Avenue storefront with 12 tables and a kitchen so narrow that two people could not stand in it side by side.

It was a quick hit. They expanded, and still had people standing in line. At the end of 1985, only a year after they opened, the question arose: Why not another one? Thanks to Wolfgang Puck’s move from Ma Maison to his own Spago, L.A. chefs were no longer anonymous drones. Los Angeles, long known as a city of back-yard barbecues, was becoming restaurant-obsessed--from Chinese palaces in Monterey Park, to trendy grills in Pasadena, to French bistros in the San Fernando Valley. People with money started looking for a promising restaurateur to subsidize. Now, Kleiman and Strobel could likely find backers for the place they couldn’t afford the first time. Strobel figured they’d need $500,000 to do it right.

A one-time aspiring actor who had become “frustrated” handling the small front room on Melrose, Strobel liked the idea of a bigger stage. “If I were a painter, I’d paint. If I were a sculptor, I’d sculpt. I’m a restaurateur,” he said. “I open restaurants.” Kleiman was tempted by the chance to create a more varied menu--and they didn’t mind the opportunity to increase their incomes, which ran about $35,000 annually, each, for an over-60-hour week. Still, on a practical level, it was daunting--a half-million dollars in other people’s money bet on their ability to spread themselves twice as thin.

Kleiman’s fantasy, if she were left to her own devices, would be to have “one small place, and I’d do other things with my spare time--maybe live in the country, have 10 kids, write.” But she emphatically did have a partner, one who imagined that someday he might have a much more public future as the owner of a classy hotel. They depended on each other for balance; Strobel charmed Kleiman out of her hesitancy, and she helped keep his feet on the ground. So they agreed to start out--but slowly.

As a hedge between desire and doubt, Strobel composed a detailed memo in March, 1986, explaining how an investor could become a limited partner in a new restaurant--minimum investment $20,000, with a total estimated budget of between $400,000 and $500,000--sent it to 10 people and then “didn’t follow up at all.” He and Kleiman, and her companion, architect Michele Saee, started driving around town to look at sites. At Morphosis, a firm known for its dramatic restaurant designs, Saee had worked on Angeli Caffe and Kate Mantilini, but this was his first independent project. They were a demanding trio.

All spring and into the summer they looked. It was as if this were an extended, existential test of the idea: If the second restaurant were meant to be, the perfect place would appear.

IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT TEMPLE

THE FORMER Shane Carpet showroom, at 11651 Santa Monica Blvd., was 2,760 square feet of vacant, dingy, poorly lit potential on a half-empty commercial block in West Los Angeles. It took a strong visual imagination, which Kleiman lacked, to see the building as a temple to Italian food.

The location made her nervous, too, because she felt like an outsider. Kleiman had a Silver Lake native’s skepticism about the trend-setting Westside, where restaurants such as Michael’s and the West Beach Cafe dished up expensive, edible designs. For Kleiman, good food was always tangled up with affection and independence--it nourished both body and soul--and what she cooked had to do with family, not fashion. The 8-year-old girl who had cooked simple dinners for herself and her working mother grew up to care more about moderate-priced authenticity than she did about artistic presentation, and worried that jaded diners might feel somehow cheated if she transplanted dishes such as the Caffe’s simple $9.50 roast chicken.

“We got such an incredible compliment the other night that I had to run back into the kitchen and cry,” she said. “(Cookbook author) Marcella Hazan was in the Caffe. It was like cooking for an icon. And she said, ‘This is the first time since I’ve been to America that I’ve felt I was eating in my own home.’ ” Kleiman had a rapturous look on her face. “And that’s it. Simple, friendly food in a great environment.” Not $24 designer chicken with a side order of celebrities.

But Strobel was ready to take the space. The area was full of new office buildings and shy of places to eat, and the streets within a two-mile home-delivery radius were dense with prospective customers. Besides, they were all tired of looking. And there was a financial mandate: Strobel’s wife, Carla, had taken to the telephone to do some fund-raising. She already had $100,000 pledged and promises of more. Her favorite sentence had become, “Why don’t I just send a messenger over to pick up the check?”

So the partners made their offer and started to work out the terms of the lease, Carla Strobel hit $200,000 and kept making phone calls, and Michele Saee started dropping by the carpet showroom to see what he could do.

A PERMIT FOR THE PALACE

SAEE HAD $225,000 to spend and was determined to design a building that looked as though it cost twice as much. At the end of October he invited Strobel and Kleiman to his studio and, with some fanfare, unrolled a set of tissue drawings of what they all called Angeli Two. It seemed palatial--from the kitchen, 990 square feet of efficient luxury (the Caffe kitchen was 112 square feet), to a front room that seated 94 people in steel-and-glass splendor, with a refrigerated wine wall and olive trees growing in elevated containers.

But it was not to be--at least, not in the form it was drawn. Saee lost his wine wall within 10 minutes (“It’s beautiful,” said Strobel. “We can’t afford it”), and then sat back as the partners engaged in a dizzying logistical conversation about whether the pasta would be cold by the time it got from the kitchen to a corner table. Once he’d absorbed their suggestions, Saee had to navigate the city planning bureaucracy to get a building permit. It was an exercise in compromise--his, artful; the city’s, by the code book--that dragged on for months. As Christmas approached, Strobel, whose target dates tended to represent a challenge as much as an estimate, announced that demolition would begin in January and the restaurant, he hoped, would open in May or June.

Kleiman took refuge in the kitchen at Angeli Caffe, which was so cramped that she could stand in one place and kick the oven door shut, reach under the counter for a bowl and send a dirty skillet skidding into the dishwasher sink. It seemed just right to her. She did not like change, and as demolition neared she got nervous. “I look at the new design and think, ‘This is ridiculous,’ ” she said. “I always liked that this kitchen wasn’t luxurious. This is loving-hands-at-home. The new place is much more industrial. It seems so huge . It’s intimidating. It makes me crazy.”

She knew that she ought to be thrilled, not unsettled, at the prospect of the perfect kitchen. But Kleiman used worry as Strobel used impatience, to keep from becoming complacent. “I’m one of those people who’s never happy,” she said, with a shrug. “That’s why I do well. I strive.”

In early March, a humbling set of delays had reduced Strobel’s hope of a June opening to a wistful joke. He and Saee approached the planning department office for the sixth, and what they prayed would be the last, time. Waiting was agony. They sat, and sat some more, hoping someone would review their revisions and finally issue the building permit. At one point Strobel had to go stand in the hallway to collect himself. When he came back, his frustration distilled into paranoia, he whispered to Saee, “I don’t get it. They just don’t like us.” It was almost the end of the working day when they were beckoned up to the counter.

That night one of the Caffe’s pizza cooks twirled a circle of dough, tossed it a foot in the air, caught it, twirled some more--and then, with a lateral pass even the Lakers would envy, flipped the dough to his co-worker, who caught it on the fly, tossed it, and finished the job. A waitress applauded and a customer whistled in awe. Everyone was ebullient. The building permit had been issued. Tomorrow Angeli Two would start to go up.

AN INSATIABLE MONEY-EATING MACHINE

A WEEK LATER, Strobel was on his hands and knees at the site, poking around for a nail. He ceremoniously announced that his usual clothing had been banished to the back of the closet in favor of his construction garb--an array of generic polo shirts, well-worn jeans and Reeboks--so that he could be part of the construction process on a daily basis. It wasn’t necessary, since he’d hired a general contractor, but Strobel loved construction. He could be happy watching the crew pour new concrete floors in the kitchen areas.

He stood, nail in hand, for a long moment. Then he walked over to the drying concrete beneath the wine storage room and carved his initials, JS, in the floor.

“The finished product will be whatever it is,” he said. “But it’s done. It’s static. The process is what I love. No matter how much people have invested, nobody’s involved as much as me. Not even Evan. She was involved in the design, but she isn’t that involved in the construction.

“It’ll be our restaurant, but it’s my building.” When he passed the space where the kitchen would be Strobel kicked the code-required metal grease trap (“Seven hundred dollars. Can you imagine that?”)--but he kicked it with the smile of someone who believed he could sell enough bottles of wine to cover the cost.

Once construction started, the partners saw less of each other than usual, but they were beyond needing long discussions about intent or approach. Kleiman and Strobel were the entrepreneurial equivalent of the old married couple, capable of reading each other’s minds and finishing each other’s sentences. She dropped by the site for a “meeting” at the little Mexican restaurant up the block, where they expounded happily, and in complete agreement, on what the new restaurant would be like.

“We want Angeli Two to be a place to eat--” began Kleiman.

“Not a place”--and Strobel’s face took on the demeanor of a maitre d’ about to snub a customer--”where you dine.”

It was their motto: The restaurant was to be a place where people had a good time, not where they worried about disturbing the sauce pattern on the plate.

“We will not be seduced,” said Kleiman. “I don’t want to create chichi food.”

But the pressing question was when, not what, they would serve. The landlord had given Kleiman and Strobel a grace period, but it ran out on April 1, and they wrote their first $7,000 rent check--$5,700 for the main room, and $1,300 on a space next door that they might annex for a bar. Strobel’s schedule was buried under stacks of plywood, plumbing pipes and coiled electrical wiring. For now, 11651 Santa Monica Blvd. was nothing but a money-eating machine.

THE CALM: A MAGIC TIME

KLEIMAN KEPT WORRY at bay by hanging around the Caffe when she didn’t have to. Her favorite time was around 4 in the afternoon, when the rooms were mostly empty except for the smells of yeast dough, cheeses and espresso, punctuated occasionally by chocolate when a cake came out of the oven. She’d sit at a corner table and chat with the waitresses, or her mother, or a regular customer who appreciated the quiet of the odd hour, and issues of expenditures and deadlines seemed very far away. She knew that her life would get crazy in another couple of months--when there was a kitchen to stock, a staff to train, a menu to invent--but this, she said, was “a magic time.”

The new restaurant had a name, now--Trattoria Angeli, designed both to cash in on name recognition and to suggest a rustic cuisine--and the framing proceeded at a constant pace, which cheered Strobel. With a combination of high spirits and fatalism, the partners decided to take what would clearly be their last vacations for more than a year. The Strobels left for Maui in early May, and Kleiman and Saee took a trip to Mexico. On their return, the roller-coaster ride would begin.

THE STORM: EVERYONE GETS WET

AS EXECUTIVE CHEF, Kleiman was all too used to tossing a chef’s jacket over her good clothes at the last minute when someone didn’t show up for work--and in June, having lost two cooks, she found herself putting in time as a substitute chef. She couldn’t work double shifts once the Trattoria opened, though, because she intended to be at the new restaurant nightly for the first few months. Although administrative responsibilities were among her least favorite tasks, she had to get her staffs organized now, or face a crisis later.

Pizza chef and Trattoria partner Pasquale Morra and his wife, Anna, day chef at the Caffe, would provide stability once both restaurants were open--but they hadn’t had a vacation since the Caffe opened. Kleiman told them to visit family in Naples, replaced Anna with chef Kathy Ternay, just hired from the restaurant 385 North, and let the word out that she was looking for kitchen staff. It would not be an easy search--Kleiman had found that a highly trained chef sometimes became bored with her recipes, and a less skilled cook often saw Angeli as just a rung on the culinary career ladder.

In between a few fruitless meetings with potential cooks, she jotted down menu ideas for the Trattoria, but she had little time to concoct sample dishes. What she was supposed to do--cook--was hardly a priority at the moment.

And Strobel’s initial enthusiasm for construction was waning. He had shopped for bids on several jobs and beat his contractor’s prices, only to lose valuable days between crews. He found that he couldn’t stay away from the site even when he wanted to. To add to the pressure, a couple of investors called, or made unannounced site visits, to ask why things were taking so long--a question that nicked Strobel’s pride.

Time was playing a nasty joke: It seemed that the faster the partners worked, the slower their progress. They were at that terrible point in any construction project when the beginning is a vague memory and the end an equally amorphous promise. By mid-June, demoralized, they’d developed a mass of stress-related symptoms. A pinched nerve in Strobel’s back rendered his left arm numb and sent him to the chiropractor. Kleiman nibbled her fingernails while she fought off the flu. They felt trapped in an endless process that had little to do with running a restaurant.

To Kleiman, it was more exhausting than 12-hour cooking stints. She considered the stacks of employee work-schedule printouts that littered her desk, and rolled her eyes. “I guess,” she said, “it’s too late to say we’re kidding.”

THE 800-POUND SIGN OF PROGRESS

THE FLATBED TRUCK rolled away from McCoy Manufacturing in Southgate before 7 on a July morning, heading for the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Barry Avenue, where Strobel, Saee and the construction crew waited. On it was the first half of Saee’s $34,000 custom steel order--including a 40-foot perforated catwalk, a 20-x-6-foot facade and a 20-x-4-foot block-letter sign that read: ANGELI.

Undoubtedly someone else at the site could drive the forklift--but it was clear that Strobel intended to hoist ANGELI into place himself. He’d driven a forklift, summers, at his father’s grocery warehouse in Michigan, and despite the memory of rivers of spilled juice from broken pickle jars, he was going to drive today. Kleiman showed up, too, even though she had errands to run. They both wanted to see that sign in place: It was the first thing that identified the building as a restaurant, as theirs.

The letters sat sulkily at the curb, as if daring someone to try to pick them up, while Strobel lifted other pieces into place. Finally, at 2:30, he stubbed out one of the cigarettes he recently had started smoking (“Nerves”) and climbed into the driver’s seat. He picked up the 800-pound sign, raised it 10 feet and nudged the lift forward to position it.

He had a problem. A 10-foot extension stuck out beyond the letters on one side--and had to be placed behind a support column at the corner of the building. Strobel couldn’t thread the sign into the small space.

“Michele,” he said, lowering the lift, “the end’s got to come off.” They could re-weld it later.

“No no no,” pleaded Saee. “Please. It’s almost there.” The sign came down, the sign went back up, the debate continued, and suddenly Saee walked directly under the sign to help direct Strobel. The architect prevailed, and after an hour the mammoth sign was in place. Saee ran across the street to see how it looked and leaned against a parking sign for a moment, arms crossed, beaming.

For that afternoon, no one cared that it was July and that any guess at an opening date was just that--a guess. This space was now officially Trattoria Angeli. Strobel, victorious and exhausted, considered the letters from various vantage points. Kleiman went over and patted him on the back, and then she joined Saee in the shadowed recesses of the dining room. He held out his arms to her, and they danced a two-step across the dusty concrete floor.

‘WE’LL OPEN WHEN WE’RE DONE!’

BY THE END OF JULY, only three weeks after the sign went up, Strobel was as miserable as he’d ever been, plagued by a high fever and an obsessive need to be at the site every day. He framed space for glass panes that hadn’t arrived. He swabbed tile floors with sealer. His affection for the custom steel work was cut, now, with regret: The welding on the finished pieces wasn’t done, and the remaining items--including the door handle and maitre d’s stations--were taking too long for his taste. The stucco wall work that should have been finished hadn’t been started.

“We’re totally stalled,” he said, bitterly.

One morning, in exasperation, Strobel played hooky and got in a round of golf, but he had to rush back to the site to meet a welder. He sat in his car in the parking lot of the Riviera Country Club and squirmed out of his regulation-length golf shorts into his construction jeans. By the time he got to the site he was full of self-pity--and when the welder didn’t show, it descended into rage.

Someone from the landlord’s bank stuck his head in the back door and said, “Looks good. When will you be open?”

“When we’re done,” Strobel growled.

A few days later he slinked into the Caffe and confessed to Kleiman that he’d had it. “I can’t take this anymore,” he said. “I can’t do this.” He’d fallen victim to the curse of self-employment: The freedom it offered was accompanied by what seemed, right now, like overwhelming responsibility. To Strobel’s weary eye, no one else at the site worked as fast or hard as he did. He understood the discrepancy--after all, it wasn’t their restaurant, so why should they be as devoted to it as he was?--but he was too tired to be rational.

Fortunately, Kleiman was back in the kitchen, auditioning dishes for the menu, and she was in a good mood. She was also an experienced crisis counselor for her brood of waiters, bus people and kitchen help. “Owning a restaurant is like being a parent to a million kids,” she said. “And they don’t grow up. The next shift just comes on.” So she sat Strobel down at an empty table and listened to him complain until he felt better. Then they both went back to work.

Kleiman was spending a lot of time at her apartment, where she did her recipe-testing with Kathy Ternay. It was a crowded shrine to food: The fireplace mantel was lined with miniature food sculptures; the bedroom was her office and cookbook library, and the undersize kitchen bulged with food and equipment.

Ternay attempted to stick to the business of selecting dishes for the menu, but it was hopeless. Each recipe evoked a memory for Kleiman, who pulled out souvenir menus and cookbooks, reminiscing about a good meal like a 16-year-old recounting a wonderful date. She liked places in Italy that no foodie had every heard of, like La Latteria in Milan, a dairy store with a couple of tables that served traditional dishes. One friend, a middle-age Milanese restaurant-supply executive, had pronounced her a throwback to an era that many Italians had forgotten. “He told me to call him the next time I was in Italy and he’d get me a job with Gualtiero Marchese,” said Kleiman, referring to the darling of nuova cucina . “I said, ‘I’d rather cook with your grandmother if she’s still alive.’

“He said, ‘Evan, you’re fighting a losing battle.’ ”

She stared at the pile of menus and books on her office floor and was quiet for a moment. For all the distraction of the new building, the nagging question remained: Would an obstinate passion for rustic cuisine translate into a howling Westside success? While Strobel battled exhaustion, Kleiman’s enemy was the anxiety that came with waiting.

“OK,” she said. “Let’s stop playing.”

That afternoon she and Ternay prepared three pastas-- spaghetti al tonno fresco , fettuccine con prosciutto e piselli and fettuccine con asparagi-- and that process, as usual, restored Kleiman’s equilibrium. They sampled the dishes at the kitchen table, while Kleiman’s three fat cats eyed the tuna and hoped for leftovers.

‘WE’RE TURNING THE CORNER’

IN EARLY AUGUST, Strobel surveyed the half-dozen people scurrying around the building site and announced, “We’re turning the corner.” Three men fit a 1,000-pound piece of plate glass at the front of the room, while $100,000 of gleaming stainless-steel equipment was guided into place--all of it irrefutable evidence that the restaurant was edging, however slowly, toward opening day.

“Next week,” Strobel said, eager to resume his rightful role as owner-host, “the jeans go back in the closet.” He put the word out on the restaurant grapevine that he was hiring, got more than 100 applicants for 30 waiter and bus jobs, and began to assemble the front-room staff.

Kleiman was more worried about her side of the hiring process than Strobel was about his. She had managed to find a pastry chef, Susan Inahara from Colette restaurant, but trained line chefs that she could afford--people to prepare hot food at the grill, saute and pasta stations--still eluded her. If she had to go too far over her budget of $10 to $12 an hour to start, it would be reflected in menu prices. As weeks passed without a candidate she took to muttering, “If I have to charge $24 for roast chicken, what’s the point?”

It wasn’t exactly a prayer, but it was answered: In a felicitous double-fluke, two cooks suddenly appeared--Jim Coats, who had just returned from a year in France after working at Ernie’s and Greens restaurants in San Francisco, and Paul Lawrence, whom Kleiman dubbed “the mad Australian” and who’d been cooking since he was 15.

The partners had a staff and a finished menu that incorporated Caffe favorites with new items (a signature soup with angel-shaped pasta), seasonal dishes and weekly specials. Kleiman remained faithful to her menu-pricing formula of five times the cost of ingredients. Prices were higher than the Caffe, but not high-end: She kept the roast chicken down to $11.50, just $2 over the Caffe’s price.

The only remaining obstacles were some electrical work and the city inspections, so, tentatively, Kleiman and Strobel allowed themselves to be a little bit excited. There was one piece of bad news: They hadn’t met city parking regulations and had been denied permission to turn the adjacent space into a bar. But Strobel refused to be depressed. “Maybe next year,” he said. “We can always expand.”

EVERYTHING’S READY; NOTHING WORKS

IT WAS TIME TO CONFRONT REALITY,in the form of the city inspectors. Strobel scheduled the preliminary health department inspection for mid-September, to get a sense of just how much trouble they might be in. The inspector could ask only for minor changes--or he could demand structural work and start a whole new series of delays.

On the day of the inspection, everyone tried to drown their anxiety in busywork. Edie Kleiman, Evan’s mother, cleaned the toilets. Evan wanted to discuss changes in the way the menu was put together. Strobel drew table settings on pieces of paper towel, as if success depended on whether the wineglass sat above the knife or to its right. They brought in Mexican food for lunch and waited. Inspector Ray Casillas showed up a nerve-racking hour and a half late--and seemed too good to be true. His wife often ate at Angeli Caffe, and he immediately recognized the Morphosis architectural echoes. He made half a dozen minor recommendations, told the partners they could bring in wine and dry food, and left. Before Casillas was halfway around the building, Strobel started jumping gleefully up and down, amazed at their good fortune, while Kleiman whispered, “Stop it. Stop it. He can see you.”

Within a week Strobel had rented a truck and moved his $50,000 wine inventory into the specially cooled and humidified room on the second floor. Kleiman mustered her staff and marched $2,000 in Italian delicacies and another $2,000 in staples into the airy upstairs storeroom. When all the food was in place, she surveyed her domain. “The true purpose of this place comes out,” she said, as if divulging a long-kept secret. “It’s to make and sell food. Pretty neat.”

The kitchen staff was eager to try out the new digs with a quartet of pre-opening parties--one for investors, two “guinea-pig dinners” (so dubbed by Kleiman) for friends who would be fed free to give the staff a chance to practice, and one public-relations bash, which Strobel calmly referred to as a “huge, insane champagne party” for hundreds of well-wishers. But they were slowed down, again, by cruel minutiae. The front-door handle still wasn’t finished, there was a sudden decision to install carpeting, and Strobel and Saee sparred over whether to paint the raw steel.

For all the new activity in the kitchen, Strobel kept a worried eye on the calendar. “We’re at a dangerous point,” he said, having picked up the phone one too many times to find a would-be customer who wanted to make a reservation. “People start to think: ‘Oh yeah, they’ve been about to open now for four to six years.’ It’s so frustrating.”

And then, as if he’d uttered a jinx, Trattoria Angeli screeched to a halt. The food sat, unopened, untouched, while October disappeared in a sea of electrical inspections, corrections, new inspections by different inspectors and new corrections. Strobel, determined to project the illusion of forward motion, wore his good clothes to slop still more sealer on the entryway tiles. Kleiman announced that she now believed the restaurant was never going to open. Everyone made grim jokes about getting lapel buttons that read, “I Don’t Know” or “When It’s Open,” in answer to their least favorite, and most often asked, question.

They were paralyzed without electrical power, and worse, there was nothing they could do to expedite the process. Their electricity was hooked to the rest of the shopping strip, and work on it proceeded at a slower pace; once it was done, the Department of Water & Power didn’t schedule their hookup. They couldn’t try out the lights, computer system or telephones; they couldn’t refrigerate a single slice of scamorza ; they couldn’t test the air conditioning or the sound system. Most crucial, since it would take three days of preparation to be ready to open, they couldn’t cook.

In the middle of the room someone set up one table with its red cloth, white butcher paper and table setting, a forlorn reminder of their elusive goal. They decided to delay what Strobel called the “hoi polloi” cocktail bash, because they didn’t want to waste time mailing invitations. The guinea-pig dinners were essential, but the high-profile party would wait. Cash flow was more important than public relations.

Then Strobel had an inspiration: If the DWP would not bring power to Angeli, Angeli would bring power to itself. At the end of the October, he rented a $40,000 generator that would sit on a flatbed truck behind the restaurant until the real thing came along. It cost $1,000 per week, but they lost some $5,000 every day they weren’t open. At least he and Kleiman could get things done while they waited.

FRIDAY THE 13TH

WITHIN A WEEK, they’d passed all the remaining inspections--even the final building inspection, pending the power hookup and the paving of a driveway and parking spaces behind the restaurant--which meant that Kleiman could start to cook. Strobel directed his now considerable frustration at the landlord, who was responsible for the driveway. With grim determination, he and Kleiman consulted the calendar to schedule their opening. They had trouble believing what they saw: Allowing for the DWP’s schedule and the opening parties, the logical day to open was November 13. Friday the 13th. Strobel decided to sacrifice a weekend’s profits just to open on a more felicitous date--Monday, November 16.

The partners felt like zombies by now, between exhaustion and the onset of performance anxiety. They scheduled the two trial dinners for the second week in November--and on Saturday, November 7, for the first time, the smell of food overpowered the smells of construction. There were soup stocks to make, cheeses to slice, Pasquale Morra’s pizza dough (enough for 1,000 pizzas and breads) to mix, and oven-dried tomatoes that would continue to bake, slowly, all through that night. Anyone who entered the kitchen saw the message on the blackboard. “REMEMBER,” it said, in big block letters, “GOOD ENOUGH--ISN’T.”

Late that afternoon Saee delivered the last two pieces of custom-made steel. He was reluctant to be finished, to give up his building to the customers, but he’d run out of time. He handed over the maitre d’s stand--and more to the point, he surrendered the door handle.

“I cared more about every part of this place than anything I ever worked on,” Saee said. “It was mine. Now it’s over.”

A KEYSTONE KOPS RUN-THROUGH

ON TUESDAY, November 10, the day of the first family-and-friends dinner, Strobel hid out in the men’s room and rested his head against the wall. “I own a nice house, I have a beautiful wife, a wonderful child. I have a new car. I drink great wine and I eat well,” he said to himself. “What the hell am I doing this for?”

That evening’s effort did not quite provide the answer: The consensus was that it was a “disaster,” according to Kleiman, dinner for 80 as choreographed by the Keystone Kops. Everyone had opening-night nerves. The kitchen staff was overwhelmed by the new, bigger menu and hobbled by the fact that one of the suppliers had failed to drop off essential steel storage containers; the front room was full of faltering waiters. Kleiman and Strobel postponed their Wednesday dinner to Thursday and used the extra day to “get our act together,” according to Strobel.

By Thursday, calm had been restored, both on the floor and in the minds of the partners, who reminded themselves that this was a process, and that their performance would improve with every day. Kleiman and Strobel judged the second trial dinner “good.” The next night they fed their investors and rated the effort “very good”--enhanced, perhaps, by the fact that the driveway had been paved that morning. The people to whom they owed more than a half-million dollars had gone home happy. Now all Kleiman and Strobel had to do was to convince the paying public.

Finally, when it mattered the most, the outside world went their way. On Monday, November 16, the day they intended to open, the DWP truck was parked outside, the parking lot was ready to have its stripes painted, and night manager Robert Schwan arrived for work clutching a temporary certificate of occupancy from the city. In the kitchen, the staff barely broke stride long enough to congratulate him.

The pace had shifted. Kleiman’s real work was just starting. She checked everyone’s efforts, stepped in when anyone needed help, and worked the line. But a large part of Strobel’s job, in a strange way, was over. The construction was finished, and he’d hired people to run the front room. He had time on his hands. In the late afternoon he went upstairs to the office, turned on his computer and composed a grateful letter to the investors who had provided the money Kleiman and Strobel had needed to get to opening day. In the middle of it he began to cry.

At 5:30 Strobel put the finishing touch on the Trattoria: He cleaned the fingerprints from around the door handle and wiped the handle clean. The room was perfect. Congratulatory flowers sat on the pizza counter, the carpet was vacuumed to velvet perfection, and salt-and-pepper shakers that looked like miniature Chianti bottles sat, smugly, at the center of each table. The air was full of Motown, tomatoes and garlic. Trattoria Angeli was ready--eager, nervous and decked out, like a child dressed in her best, impatient to greet the guests.

DINNER IS SERVED

THE SCAMORZA ALA GRIGLIA at Table 33 is accompanied by a bottle of Barbaresco and followed by a couple of pastas and a vegetable plate, all happily devoured by Bob Belichick and Paula Nordhoff, who are here tonight, ironically, because Belichick had been out of town for a week and was sure that the Trattoria must have opened in his absence. There are 94 other customers on the first night, who spend $2,195.94 on food, drink and tips.

An ebullient Strobel, his spirits restored by a room full of customers, predicts that they will serve 200 dinners on Friday, and maybe 220 on Saturday night. “I think,” he says, “that we may have a hit on our hands.”

Kleiman agrees. “It went well,” she says, even though her enthusiasm is tempered by her concern over getting the kitchen staff to move a little faster. At 11 p.m., with only two tables of people left, she cozies up to the pizza bar and allows herself a comforting plate of fettuccine with escarole, radicchio and cream, while her partner continues to work the room. They both announce, more than once, that they are about to go home, but they don’t go.

Near midnight, they settle into a side table to chat. Then they sit back, silent, and look at their room. Waiters change into their street clothes and filter out, and the line cooks dish up leftovers for the famished staff members who remain. Kleiman and Strobel are oblivious. The truth is, they can go back to their houses, but they already are at home here: This is Trattoria Angeli, after all this time, and they are loath to leave it.

Finally, Kleiman gets up and stares, with glazed eyes, at the empty dining room. “It’s just the beginning,” she says, quietly. She nudges Strobel and tells him to go home and get some sleep, and then she gets in her car and heads east on the Santa Monica Freeway, a quick trip home this late at night. Strobel lights a cigarette, walks out onto the darkened street and lets out a long yell that has in it triumph, relief and giddy delight.

THE EARLY RETURNS

T HE FIRST MONTH exceeds all their expectations--good and bad. They average 100 lunches and 250 dinners daily, and could do more business if they had room; they have to turn people away. The response is thrilling, but the partners, says Kleiman, are too “numb” to appreciate it. There are problem eaters--”Westsiders who are used to having their food fussed over more,” as Kleiman feared, people who find the dishes too simple or too bland, and “people who expect us to be exactly the same at both locations.” The early figures are deceptive. Some customers will not be back.

Feeding so many, so fast, takes a toll. On one crowded evening, everything that can go wrong, does: People wait two hours for their food, Kleiman is “afraid to come out of the kitchen because they’ll spit on me,” and Strobel considers walking to the center of the room to say, “Hi, everybody. Dinner was on us. Now please go home.” Instead they have a three-hour meeting, fire five waiters and bus people, increase the seasonings and hire Yoko Sato, a one-time Caffe line cook, for the day staff.

Now, says Kleiman, they “dig in for the long haul.” It will be six months before they know how many people will become regular customers--and it will take that long to fine-tune the operation. After a month, “you don’t say it’s fabulous yet,” says Kleiman. “You say, ‘At least tonight wasn’t like pushing a rock uphill.’ And sometimes there’s a real balletic joy to getting the work done.” Like any new parents, they are a bit worried, bone tired, and very proud.