Au Revoir, Gustave Anders

Gustav Anders, which started life as a sort of new-style continental-Swedish restaurant and evolved into a first-rate exponent of contemporary European-derived California cooking, put La Jolla on the gastronomic map. Now it’s off that map. Dec. 11 was the establishment’s last day in its attractive bungalow-style home near the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club.

There have been rumors that the restaurant lost its berth over a rent dispute. Bill (Gustav) Magnuson, proprietor of the place with chef Ulf (Anders) Strandberg, says, “I don’t want to talk about that”--but adds that he and his partner had been feeling that it was time to try something “new and different” for some time.

In fact, he adds, they have received a very good offer from investors who want to install them in Orange County’s South Coast Plaza Village shopping center--”a little closer to civilization,” says Magnuson--and they will reopen there in February or March.

The new Gustav Anders, he promises, will serve the same sort of food as the old one for both lunch and dinner, with a bar menu for between meals. But the new spot will have a slightly more casual atmosphere than before. “Think of Stars,” Magnuson offers, referring to Jeremiah Tower’s popular San Francisco bistro of that name.

The Gustav Anders retail bakery will remain at its current location in La Jolla, Magnuson adds, a few miles from the old restaurant--and Magnuson will perhaps open another similar bakery in Orange County.

SMILE WHEN YOU SERVE THAT: “Greeting regular customers by name does as much to boost their patronage as discounting the price of their meals does,” writes Peter J. Romeo in a recent issue of Nation’s Restaurant News. His statement is based on a new poll conducted by SRI Research Center of Lincoln, Neb. When about 1,000 respondents were asked what factors would encourage them to patronize familiar restaurants more frequently, 14% named discounts, coupons, specials and gifts--and 14% named friendlier service and being recognized by staff. The same survey also found that friendly service was considered more than twice as important as fast service. Are all you nose-in-the-air, God’s-gift-to-gastronomy restaurants and managers out there (you know who you are) listening?

JUMPING THE MIDNIGHT GUN: In case you just can’t wait to get started celebrating New Year’s Eve next Saturday, you might want to drop by Ye Olde King’s Head in Santa Monica, where the coming of the New Year is toasted at 4 p.m.--midnight in the U.K., you know.

NEWS AND NOTES: Patrick Jamon, last seen heading for Hawaii after leaving his post as executive chef at the now-defunct Les Anges in Santa Monica, is back in L.A. He has spent the past year, he reports, opening a Les Anges-style dining room at the Naniloa Hotel on the island of Hawaii but is now back in town as executive chef at the Regency Club in Westwood. “I always said that if somebody was serious about wanting me back in L.A., I’d return in a minute,” he says. Joachim Splichal continues his duties as consultant at the Regency. . . . One of the most talented American chefs in New York, Brendan Walsh of Arizona 206, has left that establishment to develop his own restaurant elsewhere in the city. . . . The California Pizza Kitchen has opened its eighth unit, at Fashion Island in Newport Beach. More CPKs are in the works, including one each in Washington, D.C., Paris, Tokyo, and, closer to home, downtown L.A.’s Wells Fargo Center. . . . New restaurants in town include the Red Rooster Grill, serving authentic Yugoslav food in Sherman Oaks; Collage, a French-Californian place opened in Long Beach by Guy Gabriele of Cafe Pierre in Manhattan Beach, on the site of the former Station Restaurant; and a West Los Angeles version of Giuseppe Bellisario’s Baci, the first of which was in West Hollywood. . . . And Swiss-born and -trained Werner Rothen has joined the Fine Affair in Brentwood as executive chef.