How to Build an Empire : L. A.’s Bruce Marder, who gave us West Beach Cafe and Rebecca’s, hopes DC 3 will also take off

Eleven years ago Bruce Marder was sleeping on a banquette at a restaurant called Cafe California. At night he went to a friend’s house to shower. In the daytime he was the restaurant’s chef. He was also the waiter. And the dishwasher.

“After the first week my partner and I pooled our tips and hired a dishwasher,” he says. “We just kept moving up.”

Way up. Today Marder has built a $500 investment in a funky Santa Monica restaurant into an empire. Marder’s third restaurant, the $2.5-million DC 3, opened this week. Next year he will open another big-deal restaurant (with Citrus’ Michel Richard).

At the rate he is going, it is not inconceivable that in the decade to come, Bruce Marder will emerge as the city’s most successful restaurateur.

But Bruce Marder is hardly a household name. He hasn’t been inducted into Cook’s Magazine’s Who’s Who. Food and Wine magazine never named him one of its best new chefs. You don’t read profiles of him in Gourmet or Bon Appetit either. And when people talk about California cuisine, the name Marder does not spring to anybody’s lips.

Yet he was cooking California cuisine (although he certainly didn’t call it that) at his West Beach Cafe before Michael’s, before Spago, before Trumps. Marder had duck tacos on his menu before the term Southwestern cuisine was coined. Before there was a City Cafe to build a tandoori oven, Marder was playing around with Indian food. He streamlined French cooking and reinterpreted American food. And in a time when food and art were not considered much of a mix, Bruce Marder was hanging really good art on the walls of his restaurant.

“At first it was hard to get anybody to take me seriously,” he admits. “The darling boys were Ken Frank and Jonathan Waxman. . . . We were successful, but we didn’t have a name. It took at least six years for people to recognize what an establishment we were.”

Says one friend baldly: “That’s probably because Bruce has absolutely no personality.”

Marder may be L.A.’s most handsome chef. He is certainly among its most talented. He is bright. He is well-dressed. He is successful. But he is, by his own admission, “not a people person.” Small talk is foreign to his nature. The word charm is not in his vocabulary. “I’m not the sort of person who goes up to every table and schmoozes,” he says.

In normal conversation his voice is so low it’s hard to hear, and when you ask for anecdotes about him, none come to mind. In a world where chefs are celebrities who write books, make television appearances and are as famous for their personalities as they are for their food, Marder is an anomaly. Unlike the amiable Wolfgang Puck, the quotable Michael McCarty, the outspoken Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, the suave Piero Selvaggio and the lovable Michel Richard, Marder has been easy to overlook.

But if Marder lacks charm, he owns a double dose of an equally important quality: Determination.

“Bruce is a funny kind of guy,” says artist Charles Arnoldi, who found himself designing DC 3’s interior despite the fact that he had never done any design work and didn’t intend to start. “He’s very sure about what he wants. He can block the whole world out. When he decides on something, he’s committed to it and he doesn’t let anybody change it.”

Marder remembers the exact moment when he became committed to the idea of cooking. He was studying to be a dentist at UCLA. “I quit school and went to Europe for a year. I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it as a dentist.” Now he was camping on a beach in Morocco. “It was Christmas, 1972, and I was out of it in a big way in the back of a van. All of a sudden it came to me that I wanted to be a chef.” Marder never looked back.

He ended up back in the United States, trying to make enough money to go to France and learn to cook. “I read about the Dumas Pere School of French Cuisine in Chicago.” Marder talked the owner, John Snowden, into taking him on as an apprentice.

“John trained butlers to cook for rich people, catered food and wine dinners, did magazine layouts. We had our own garden, made our own jams . . . we did everything.”

Marder stayed about a year. “I was learning a lot,” he says, “but I couldn’t stand being with John. He was an awful person.” So Marder came home to Los Angeles and tried to get a job in a French restaurant. And tried. “In 1975 no French restaurant would hire Americans.” Marder finally got a job flipping omelets at Cafe Figaro.

He eventually ended up working at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “It wasn’t quite as high a cuisine as I was used to, but I worked my way through the kitchen and learned all the stations.” Marder stayed at the hotel a year and a half. “I worked hard. I was really into it.”

He worked so hard that he was finally able to talk his way into a job at L’Ermitage, the new restaurant of the legendary chef Jean Bertranou. His co-workers weren’t thrilled when he appeared. “The first night I worked on the line I didn’t have enough warm plates in the oven. So the next night I grabbed a lot of plates and put them in the oven and went to dinner. When I came back, somebody had turned the oven up real high. Ten plates broke and Michel Blanchet (who is still the chef at L’Ermitage) canned me.” His first job in a French restaurant had lasted a week.

Marder then went to work as day chef at Cafe California. “The night chef was charging $10 for dinner. This was 1977, and people in the neighborhood weren’t going to go for it. No way. So the restaurant went out of business.”

One of the partners asked Marder to help keep the restaurant going. “So I took $500 of my own money, and we became partners. I made quiche and soup and salad and the lady who’d put up the money heated up the quiche and mixed the salads. I waited on the tables and washed dishes and talked to people and said, ‘If you want dinner, just give me a day’s notice and I’ll make you anything you want.’ ”

It is typical of the aloof Marder that he never refers to his partner, Carol Lorenz, as anything but “the lady.” He lived at the restaurant and took showers at her house, but the two apparently didn’t get along. “It was my restaurant, my idea and she wanted to have some input,” he says. “She wanted to put yellow checkered tablecloths and place mats on the table. . . . She always wore muumuus, homemade dresses, things like that. It wasn’t working for me. So she bought me out in six months for $35,000. It hurt a lot to leave.”

But it hurt good. For Marder had an opportunity to take over a Venice restaurant called Casablanca. The down payment was $30,000.

Marder named his new restaurant West Beach Cafe; he envisioned it as a community gathering place. He hung the work of neighborhood artists on his walls; the artists, in turn, hung out in his restaurant.

Today Marder’s food would be called California cuisine (Marder himself calls it “saute reduction cooking”), but in 1978 it defied classification. The menu was constantly changing, but at one time it might offer slices of rare duck breast in Cabernet vinegar sauce, basil linguine with morels in walnut oil, stuffed calamari and steak with French fries.

The people who came to eat Marder’s food ate it unself-consciously. Unlike the trendies who packed Michael’s when it opened later that year, they did not think of themselves as sitting on the cutting edge of the kitchen table. They knew one thing about the food Marder made: They liked it. For the Cafe California experience had taught Marder the first rule of the restaurant business: Give the people what they want. He has never forgotten it.

Marder, for instance, loved Mexican food. He saw nothing incongruous about making tacos out of filet mignon--and serving them with Chateau Lafite. So he started what he called “Mexican Mondays.” But, he says, “people didn’t understand it too well. They thought guacamole was a sauce squeezed out of a bottle onto taquitos.” Marder didn’t think twice; he 86’d Mexican Mondays and simply put the dishes onto his regular menu. If you didn’t like Mexican food, you could order something else. “There was always a choice,” he says.

Marder may have given his customers a choice--but those who worked with him rarely had that option. Marder’s wife Rebecca discovered that for herself soon after the two were married and she sold her Main Street Dance Studio. “Bruce said we’d be partners at the restaurant, but I had to become his student. Bruce is quite the autocratic businessman; He really takes over.”

Asked how much input his wife has had into the business, Marder replies curtly: “Ask her. I’m a tough cookie. I hate to relinquish control.”

The Marders met nine years ago at the wedding of a mutual friend. “We were standing in the buffet line together,” Rebecca Marder recalls, “and we talked for a while. He asked me out on a date. I said, ‘I can’t, I’m married.’ ” Marder’s reply was blunt: “You’re not happily married and you know it.”

It would surprise nobody who knew Marder to learn that two years later the two were married. Bruce Marder is clearly a man who knows how to get what he wants.

What he did not want, he says, was to open a second restaurant when he was running the West Beach Cafe. But “the landlord wanted to put a restaurant in on the corner, and he came to me.”

And Marder went to his wife’s close friend, architect Frank Gehry, and asked him to design the new restaurant, Rebecca’s.

Asked if bringing in Gehry was her idea, Rebecca Marder replies, “Let’s put it this way--if I wanted Frank Gehry and Bruce didn’t, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Gehry’s design proved to be so startlingly original that it threatens to overshadow the excellent modern Mexican food. Marder is not totally gracious about this. “I hate to have some trendy situation get the best of me,” he says. “I’m thrilled about what we put on a plate at Rebecca’s. People would receive the food a lot better, and put it on a higher plane in their minds if the architecture weren’t there.”

For his part, Gehry hasn’t always been gracious about the relationship either. He calls Marder a “very tough businessman,” and after Rebecca’s opened he told a reporter that he hadn’t set foot in the restaurant for months and didn’t like the owner. Later he called to apologize to Marder for what he had said. Now, he says, everything is fine between them. Today he goes so far as to call Marder “an artist in his own right.” He adds, “The client’s input is important and Bruce is an ideal client in terms of aesthetics. You need someone who knows who they are and what they want to be.”

When it came to his latest venture, Marder also knew exactly what he wanted the interior of his restaurant to be. And the architects of the new building at the Santa Monica Airport did not seem to be coming up with it. “I tried three times to get them to give me a drawing that I liked,” he says. When they couldn’t, he didn’t hesitate; he called up his old friend, Charles Arnoldi, and asked the artist if he’d like to design the restaurant.

Arnoldi was hardly enthusiastic. “I’m not an architect,” he says, “I didn’t want to do it. Bruce wanted me to do it. He said, ‘You can do it in your spare time.’ I did it.” Of course.

The resulting restaurant is a knockout. Arnoldi has taken the huge space (14,000 square feet), divided it and turned it into an elegant work of sculpture. You walk in, turn around and discover that you have come through an enormous ball. Everywhere you look are surfaces demanding to be touched, examined, paid attention to. Outside on the airport’s runway planes are constantly taking off or coming down, but the real action is in the restaurant with its wood and its polished stucco and its marble. Marder may have hung local art on his walls at West Beach, but with Rebecca’s and DC 3, he has turned the restaurants themselves into works of art.

But where Rebecca’s is overwhelming, DC 3 has a quiet elegance. Says Marder, “You’ve got the warmth of the wood. . . . It’s nice to take the idea of old wood restaurants, like Musso and Frank’s, which feels so good to be in, and translating it into a lighter, more fun interior.”

Arnoldi has dealt with the very vastness of the space by dividing it up. The restaurant seats 180 people--but that is only the beginning. There is also a private dining room (30 seats), an enormous banquet room (up to 300 seats), even a table in the kitchen. For his part, Marder seems unconcerned about the size. “Seating that many people is not that big a deal,” he says confidently. “The important thing is to try and figure out what people in the area want to eat.”

He has settled on simplicity. “There’s not going to be two names on the food,” says Marder. “It’s not Tex-Mex or Chinese-French.” It is not, in fact, anything but updated American grill food. There are two kinds of steaks (both prime and choice), veal chops, lots of potatoes, salads and sandwiches. The bar will make different kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches, open oysters, serve smoked salmon on freshly made blinis. It’s the kind of food you can easily imagine eating every day.

How will Marder manage to run this restaurant-- and keep up with the other two? “I can’t,” he says. “That’s why I took chef Bill Hufferd and manager August Spier in as partners.” Hufferd worked at West Beach and was the chef at Rebecca’s; Spier is an old friend who also worked at West Beach. They may all be in this together, but stand for a couple of minutes in the virgin kitchen at DC 3 while contractors, purveyors and people planning banquets clamor for Marder’s attention and it’s clear that everybody knows who’s sitting in the pilot’s seat.

And he seems comfortable there. Millions are riding on this venture, but Marder seems remarkably calm. He has learned a lot in the last 11 years.

Perhaps he can’t charm you, but now he knows he doesn’t have to; his restaurants will. He looks happily around his new domain and says: “I started with nothing. I don’t take it for granted.”