Informal, Inexpensive and In Fashion

While sophisticated upscale restaurants (you know: the kind with $28 entrees and $50 Chardonnays) are languishing all over town, more and more informal, inexpensive restaurants are opening--and, for now at least, doing very well.

Owners of the 8-month-old Daily Grill in Brentwood, for instance, report that they’ve been serving between 600 and 800 meals a day--in a 90-seat restaurant--and expect to take in roughly $3 million in receipts this year! They’re so pleased with business, in fact, that they are now working on a second Daily Grill--in the new Beverly Connection complex. The new place, scheduled to open before Christmas, will be larger than the Brentwood original, with 120 seats and a 30-seat private dining room--but will otherwise remain true to the formula (good, honest grill Americana at reasonable prices; no reservations; coffee-shop decor) that seems to be working so well.

Meanwhile, Silvio DeMori, proprietor of Tuttobene in Hollywood and Tuttopasta downtown, is plotting a second version of the latter--which frequently has people lined up outside waiting for a table, despite what he considers a terrible location in the Subway Terminal Building on Hill Street. The new Tuttopasta, which will open in about two months, is located across the street from the aforementioned Daily Grill in Brentwood.

“It will definitely be another Tuttopasta,” says DeMori, “but it will be more of a trattoria, and it will be more comfortable than the downtown one.”

The new Tuttopasta will be open only for dinner--though, says DeMori, he does a good lunchtime delivery business from the downtown location. “We put in a fax machine for orders, as a joke,” he adds, “and now we have to buy a second one.”

WHAT’S NUA?: When I spoke with Kenji Seki (ex-manager of Chinois on Main and co-creator of New York’s China Grill) last October about the restaurant he was planning to open in Beverly Hills, he said that it would be called Noa Noa, and that it “must open by March, 1989.” March has come and gone with no Noa Noa. But, says Seki, construction has finally started on the place, and he does plan to be in business by early August.

Meanwhile, he has changed the restaurant’s name to Nua Nua, in order to avoid a possible conflict with the Noa jazz club in Santa Monica, and has announced that his chef will be none other than Masayuki Ishikawa--whose Ishi’s Grill was one of the first restaurants in the country to successfully blend Japanese and contemporary American cooking.

SPAM, SPAM, SUSHI AND SPAM: Bento Xpress in San Jose has added Spam sushi--marinated Spam on rice wrapped in seaweed--to its otherwise conventional Japanese menu. The creation, which has reportedly been a success with local diners, is said to be a popular dish in Hawaii--a place whose most famous dish, it might be noted, is a paste made from taro root.