Are You Ready for the New Ma Maison? : Patrick Terrail: He has $50 million behind him and high hopes for what’s ahead

“Stand out there . . . in the middle,” Patrick Terrail shouts from one corner of the soon-to-open Ma Maison restaurant. It is part of the new 10-story Ma Maison Sofitel, more than two years and $50 million in the making.

“OK, now watch this,” he says. There’s a thud, then the steady hum of an expensive machine at work; slowly, the glass and steel beams of a giant skylight peel back to reveal sky.

“Pretty neat, huh?” Terrail says.

But how much did it cost?

“Oh, I don’t know,” he shrugs. “But it’s worth it, don’t you think?”

For the first time in a long time, Patrick Terrail doesn’t have to worry about money . . . at least not his own money.

Terrail’s identity in this town, for more than 15 years, has been that of restaurateur--first at Ma Maison and then at the Hollywood Diner, both restaurants he owned and ran. Today, he has a title--food and beverage director of the French-based Accor Corp.’s Ma Maison Sofitel--which brings more responsibility (two restaurants, the banquet facilities, even the employee cafeteria are his to run), but less ultimate control.

“I am just an employee here,” he says. “And I’ve got a big commitment to the people who hired me. I’m on the stake here, and if they set fire to it, I burn.”

No bull about me. I am just a maitre d’, that’s it, period, paragraph.

--Patrick Terrail,

quoted in American Film, June, 1987

A part of Patrick (as everyone calls him) really would love to be just a maitre d’. But another side of Terrail tugs at his ego, pulling him into the glow of what he calls the “collective celebrity aura” of this town. As the owner and near-constant presence of Ma Maison--the restaurant that made Astroturf chic and “California casual” a cliche--Terrail was, for a time, L.A.’s most famous restaurateur.

But as the ‘80s wind down, it becomes clear that this has not been Patrick’s decade. Ma Maison has been closed for three years, and Terrail, now 46, has been overshadowed for five years by a former employee named Wolfgang Puck.

He also experienced the breakup of a longtime romance (with restaurateur Kathy Gallagher), the death of his good friend Pierre Groleau, and a major surgery (sugar, caffeine and cigarettes are out of his life these days).

And then there were the accusations that followed the murder of actress Dominique Dunne, committed by John Sweeney, Dunne’s estranged boyfriend and a chef at Ma Maison; contrary to rumor, Terrail says he did not hire a lawyer for Sweeney, who was subsequently convicted.

Bad reviews of his short-lived Hollywood Diner (1986 to 1987) didn’t help, either.

Next month’s opening of the new Ma Maison is Terrail’s way of escaping the ‘80s early and jumping into the ‘90s. He hopes to start a new era.

And the ‘70s? Well, that was Patrick’s kind of decade. He is an icon of the Me Generation elite, and Ma Maison was the Patrick shrine. Through its shower-curtain-like entryway passed nearly every sort of ‘70s cliche--gold chains, designer jeans, Cat Stevens. Doing Lunch was the sacred ritual, and the list of its recognizable celebrants now reads like a “Love Boat” guest star roster. (The stars of “Kojak,” “Columbo” and “Three’s Company” also figured prominently.)

Dignitaries and studio power brokers made the scene too: among them, Lillian Carter, Henry Kissinger, Moshe Dayan, Elizabeth Taylor.

Most awe-inspiring of the crowd was, of course, Orson Welles. “Ma Maison, it was Orson’s home,” Terrail told a writer not long after Welles’ death in 1985. “I never told him we were closing. (The restaurant shut its doors five weeks after Welles died.) He never knew.”

They are not . . . looking at me. They are looking at my table. . . . I gradually realize it is the most important table in the room . . . (and everyone) wonders for whom Table No. 1 has been reserved.

--A pre-TV Roger Ebert waiting

to interview Michael Caine

at Ma Maison, 1979.

“There was no such thing as Table No. 1,” Terrail is saying.

But then it’s mentioned that the sweater-wearing film critic sat at the table in the very center of the room.

“Aha!” Patrick insists with a smirk, “then, he was not sitting at Table No. 1.”

Terrail likes to talk about how everybody was treated equally at Ma Maison, or M.M. as it was called in the gossip columns. “There was no segregation with people there, never,” he says. And, it’s true, the restaurant was so small that (unlike Spago, which is more spread out) you really could sit within snooping range of Michael York or Jacqueline Bisset. But, though Terrail will deny this, there were what were considered bad tables.

The dining room was Siberia for everyone but Orson Welles, who regularly sat just inside with a good view of the patio. And Table 77 was a bummer, mostly because of its proximity to the restaurant’s dumpster. As one Ma Maison alumnus reveals, “You were separated from the trash bins by a wood fence, and some days, well, it could get pretty bad.”

The garbage bins will be far, far away from Ma Maison’s dining room this time around, but there still promises to be plenty of shuffling for position. “I don’t know which tables people will prefer,” Terrail admits. “That I can’t control.”

Yet even without furniture in the nearly completed space, a hierarchy is already evident. Besides an indoor area and the skylight-covered “patio”, there is a smaller dining room with French doors that can be shut for privacy. Behind that, is a smaller, more elite private room, with its own separate back entrance and an exclusive view into the inner workings of the kitchen. Most exclusive of all will be the table right inside the kitchen for very special guests.

And though Terrail knows he cannot recreate the old Ma Maison (“that was another era, he says) he’s given the new Ma Maison the best good luck charm he could think of: the same unlisted phone number as Ma Maison I, 655-1991.

There are actually two Patrick Terrails. One has the propriety of hosting Ma Maison; the other is just Patrick Terrail. But you have to separate the two Patricks to understand.

--Patrick Terrail, from his forthcoming book, “Ma Maison: From a Restaurant to a Hotel”

A flat, wooden Patrick Terrail stands next to a jukebox (with songs by the likes of Chubby Checker and Pat Boone). The signature red carnation adorns the lapel of his expensive-looking suit, and this Terrail holds a cigarette in his carefully manicured hands. No, this is not the haughty maitre d’ who once intimidated a status-conscious clientele into buying fancy cars--a Rolls got you a parking spot in front of the restaurant, a Buick went in back--but rather, a lifesize artwork by Steve Verona.

The 3-D Patrick Terrail is casually dressed (jeans, sweatshirt, polo underneath with the collar turned up just so), puttering around outside his house while the reporter flips through a draft of the book he has written. From the racket that floats through the back door, it seems that this is the Patrick Terrail who doesn’t mind menial labor. Suddenly, there’s a sound of splashing water . . . he’s washing my car!

“I couldn’t help myself,” he explains when he walks in the door. “That’s just how I am.”

The one time I ever saw Patrick unsure of himself was when his uncle Claude came to the restaurant. He didn’t even know what to do with his hands--he was like a kid.

--A former Ma Maison chef

“He loved Ma Maison--he’d love anyplace that had pretty women,” Terrail says of his uncle.

Many say Terrail resembles his uncle, the proprietor of the three-star, 404-year-old Parisian landmark restaurant, La Tour d’Argent. Claude Terrail, described as extremely intelligent but “very formal and starched,” is also, according to several longtime Patrick watchers, the man he most wants to please.

Nearly every member of the Terrail family is involved in the restaurant/hotel business. “Restaurants are in my blood,” says the L.A. Terrail. His Parisian culinary bloodline goes far back: His great-grandfather supervised the proceedings at the legendary Cafe Anglais, which opened in 1850 and lasted until 1913. VIPs--Czar Alexander II and Kaiser Wilhelm--dined in the Great Sixteen room there. “Separating themselves from the fray,” Terrail writes in his book, “they could dine, ponder, debate or cavort with beautiful women who had accompanied them.” Sound familiar?

His grandfather, Andre Terrail, took over the wines of Cafe Anglais, reputed to be the world’s largest collection, when it closed, and he became the proprietor of La Tour d’Argent in 1910. In the 1930s, Andre Terrail decided to move the dining room upstairs to the present location with its famous view of the Seine.

“I enjoyed quality food at a properly set table,” Terrail says of his childhood. And he spoke only when spoken to.

“I used to get upset if someone picked up the wrong fork because I didn’t understand why a person would ,” he says. “But I’ve mellowed. I once found ketchup totally uncivilized; now, my feeling is, if people want to ruin my food with their ketchup, it’s their problem and not mine. But I’ll serve that ketchup in a silver dish.”

Despite his adherence to family tradition, many claim that for several years Claude Terrail was not optimistic about the potential of his nephew. As one source put it, Claude “barely acknowledged Patrick’s existence.”

These days Patrick seems to be solidly in his uncle’s good graces. Patrick Terrail talks of a recent Paris visit in which he and Uncle Claude clandestinely drank beer in La Tour’s kitchen (they hid it under the table).

One family disappointment during the Ma Maison years was Patrick Terrail’s rejection by Tradition et Qualite, the restaurant society his uncle founded. “He always tried to get me in with Ma Maison,” Terrail says, “but they refused me three years in a row because we didn’t use silver, only stainless.

“We’ll use silver at the new place,” he insists.

A restaurant is like a beautiful woman. And it can’t last forever. Besides, I only expect to run one great restaurant in my lifetime.

--Patrick Terrail, February, 1982

Terrail boldly makes his way through the kitchen of the Italian restaurant Tuttobene and strides into the dining room where a luncheon is in progress. He acts as if he owns the place. “Well, I do own the building,” he says.

He spots Citrus chef Michel Richard with Tuttobene’s Silvio Di Mori and seats himself at the table.

Tuttobene is the restaurant that replaced Terrail’s Hollywood Diner, the restaurant that he says was ahead of its time but that critics called out of tune with American tastes. “It got worse press than Geraldo Rivera,” wrote restaurant critic Jonathan Gold in California magazine.

“What are you worried about?” Richard asks midway between the veal roll and coffee. “If the food’s good, the critics will be nice.”

Richard, Terrail and Di Mori are in the middle of a gripe session of sorts. “Of course, I can’t really complain,” Richard says, “they’ve been very kind to me.”

There was a time when Terrail wouldn’t have complained either. It was the press, after all, that made Ma Maison the hot place to be.

Today, Terrail is playing coy. “I’m not in it for fame; I already got my 15 minutes of fame,” he says. “I just want to run a restaurant.”

But few believe Terrail. They remember the old Patrick, the one who was supposed to have seated customers according to the labels in their overcoats (he’d offer to take a woman’s coat and then sneak a peek). “Myths, all myths,” he says now, “Do you think I really had time to go looking through coats?”

But he does admit he was a snob.

“I’m sure I have a lot of enemies. I gave them a bad table, I didn’t pay enough attention to them. But I think I was cocky because of insecurity,” he says. “Now I’m more afraid--I realize that I am not immortal.”