RESTAURANTS : Making a Go of It in the Outer Limits

It’s sort of an unspoken rule in the restaurant business that if you want to open a big-name restaurant, you’ve got to be where the big names will notice you. West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are where most high-visibility restaurants locate and succeed.

Just as most big-studio film producers are afraid to risk their capital on anything but demographically correct formula pictures and sequels, so are restaurant owners cautious of breaking away from the mainstream. Restaurant failures are high enough, the reasoning goes, why stack the deck against yourself with a lousy location?

There are some, however, who do boldly go where few other high-budget restaurants have dared go before.

When Mario Tamayo (no association with the restaurant Tamayo) opened Cha Cha Cha in what was once a pupuseria called Mr. Cafe on the far east end of Melrose Avenue, a good four miles beyond La Brea--until recently considered the border of the neon zone of trendy Melrose shops and restaurants--people thought he was making a big mistake. “There wasn’t anybody who didn’t tell me I was crazy,” Tamayo says.

Two years later, people are saying Tamayo was sly as a fox. Reservations are still hard to come by at Cha Cha Cha, and last year, the restaurant spun off its own sequel, Cafe Mambo, in a once dying, now thriving shopping area off Melrose that Tamayo now grandly calls, “L.A.’s Upper East Side.”

“It takes foresight to get into a neighborhood that is growing,” says chef John Sedlar, who combined the techniques of nouvelle French cooking and traditional Southwest ingredients to invent “modern Southwest cuisine” at St. Estephe in Manhattan Beach, which is out of the range of restaurants considered hot and trendy. “I think Manhattan Beach will be considered a part of Los Angeles within the next 10 or 15 years.”

“The suburbs are growing up and I think that filling in some of the gaps is the move of the future,” says Stan Kendel, a co-owner of East L.A.’s Tamayo (see adjacent review), and a founding partner of Spago. “Most people look to the Westside because of the very high income averages and the habits people there have of eating out. But I think the Westside has become so saturated with restaurants that it’s actually become risky to open a restaurant there.”

Kendel says that he considers Tamayo a restaurant for the neighborhood, not for the celebrities and foodies that were his clientele at Spago. “My main market is the East L.A. and Monterey Park area,” he says. “I’ve often said that if I get 10 people a night from the Westside, I’d be doing really well.”

The situation is different at St. Estephe. “Surprisingly, only 10% to 20% of our business is local,” Sedlar says. “The rest come from Beverly Hills, West L.A. and Newport Beach, and we take reservations all the time from New York, Chicago, London and Paris.” (The restaurant is, after all, airport close--”Customers come here with their luggage all the time,” he says.) “People will travel that far for something unique. It’s similar to having a country restaurant in France.”

Sedlar does admit to a few problems with the location. “We’re just outside the perimeters of where most suppliers will deliver, so it was difficult to get premium products brought to the restaurant,” Sedlar says. “A lot of times I would have to go pick up the produce and fish myself. But now I can get almost anything delivered.”

And there still are the gentle jibes from customers who’ve made the long drive out for dinner. “We get the occasional comment like, ‘We needed to renew our passports before we came,’ ” Sedlar says.

Cha Cha Cha’s Tamayo also gets minor grumbles from lost customers. “They’ll call me on the car phone in a panic and say, ‘We can’t find you; we’ve been up and down Melrose from Doheny to La Brea, and now we’re at Vermont !’ I tell them to relax, they’ve only got a few more blocks to go.”

Neither Sedlar nor Tamayo ended up where they did by chance. “My partner, Steve Garcia, and I decided from the first that we didn’t want to be one of the ‘mainstream’ restaurants,” Sedlar says.

Tamayo’s first concern was with providing a unique environment for his partner, Toribio Prado’s cooking. “It’s a whole new food,” Tamayo says, “light and young and fun. I think people should go through an ethnic part of town to eat ethnic food. This place gives people a sense of adventure and drama that they can’t get if they eat too close to home.

“And I thought, with the familiarity of Melrose, that it would be funny and fun to put it on Virgil and Melrose.” Tamayo continues. “People would say, ‘Oh Melrose, groovy.’ They wouldn’t realize how far down they had to go. But people are used to going to Trumps and Mortons, now they just head the other way.”