If He Can Sell You a Jaguar, Then Why Not a Burger?

Lee West sells cars--Jaguars, Ferraris, Aston-Martins, Lotuses, Range Rovers--and hamburgers.

“I sell cars for up to $200,000,” he says. Each.

Mr. West doesn’t know what his hamburgers go for. He’d have to look at a menu, which would be downstairs, in the diner.

We are sitting on upholstered chairs in Mr. West’s office at Newport Imports, which overlooks the marble showroom floor on which polished Jaguars rest. The diner--chrome, marble, tasteful muted gray--is just off the showroom, through the side doors, across the breezeway from the Jaguar boutique.

“We did the diner just like this place,” Mr. West says with an expansive wave over his auto empire. “You see how this office is. It’s done first-class.”

About 20 years ago, Mr. West says, proffering hamburgers, let alone Jaguars, was just a dream. He had been a metallurgist, working for General Motors, when he sensed the excitement of sales.

“I used to call on dealerships, trying to sell them RVs,” Mr. West says.

One of those trips took him to Galpin Ford, in Van Nuys, home of the nation’s first car dealership-restaurant. Mr. West liked the idea--”If you think about it, it makes sense”--but back then, he did not have the means to do much about it.

That was before Mr. West built this nice office on Coast Highway, or acquired his two diamond rings, his thick gold bracelet, his diamond-studded Rolex and his gold jaguar cuff links, possessions of which he is justifiably proud.

“I am somewhat of a self-made individual,” he says. “Whatever I have, I worked for.”

But on the day that I visited Mr. West, he was in no mood to rest on his laurels--not that he seems the type of person to do much resting.

“For $300, a guy can stop my whole process,” Mr. West says, disgusted.

Dr. Jan Dr. Vandersloot, a dermatologist who lives in Newport Beach, is the guy to whom Mr. West refers. Actually, it was $331 that Dr. Vandersloot spent on an appeal to the Newport City Council to overturn the Planning Commission’s approval of Mr. West’s diner.

This approval has been rather fickle. Two years ago, when Mr. West submitted plans for a new dealership and employee cafeteria, the city approved. But then Mr. West says he changed his mind about the employee cafeteria part.

“As I started building the dealership, and you looked at the thing, how nice it was, I said, ‘How are you going to keep the public out of here?’ ” he says.

But when word leaked out about the Jaguar Diner, the city said no go, citing increased traffic among other concerns. Nonetheless he opened the illegal diner in May. The city filed a lawsuit, but never pursued it.

Then Mr. West commissioned his own traffic study, which turned out to be favorable to his cause, and the city approved the diner last month.

Now Dr. Vandersloot hopes, but doesn’t really expect, that the city will commission yet another traffic study at a council meeting Monday night and close the diner in the meantime.

“The city is letting him get away with all this,” Dr. Vandersloot says. “I am rankled because what he is doing is illegal. It is not right and the city is sweeping it under the rug. This is an in-the-face-type challenge to the city of Newport Beach.”

Mr. West, of course, does not see it in quite the same way. He is a businessman, a dreamer, a man with plans.

“There was no place around here where you could get a hamburger,” Mr. West says, “a cheap and decent meal. . . .

“You see that eyesore over there?” he says as he motions through his office window toward a building he is buying next door. “I can’t clean any of that up. I’m still waiting.”

Mr. West hopes to demolish the building and put up a parking lot, which would be extremely convenient for the Jaguar Diner, which, incidentally, was originally designed with the help of Ruby’s Diner, the restaurant chain based in Newport Beach.

Ruby’s owners say their company has since pulled out of the Jaguar Diner, at least until all this permit business is straightened out. (If they do become involved again, however, they say they might replace the diner’s life-size, rotating gold jaguar--the animal, not the automobile--with a bumper car.)

But all that is just talk, of which, quite frankly, Mr. West is tired. He wants to get on with things. For starters, although the diner is still open, he is losing money on it. He hasn’t advertised so as not to make things any messier.

Bert Boeckmann, for one, knows about those kind of people. When Mr. Boeckmann, owner of Galpin Ford, opened his Horseless Carriage restaurant in 1966, he heard from his share of naysayers as well.

“The problem we had was people really didn’t have any place nice to go when their car was being repaired or when they wanted to think about things,” Mr. Boeckmann says. “This way, when they say, ‘Oh, gee, give me a little time to think about it,’ we can say, ‘Have lunch and dinner right with us. We’re here to serve you. We’ll be here after dinner too.’ ”

Mr. Boeckmann, voicing a concern similar to Mr. West’s, says that when he opened the Horseless Carriage, the only other nearby restaurant was a Howard Johnson’s down the street.

“And they weren’t doing half the business we were. I know that because I bought it and turned it into a Hyundai dealership!”

The experience of Mr. Boeckmann, who says he has never heard of Mr. West, will undoubtably do little to assuage the fears of people such as Dr. Vandersloot. Had he to do it over, Mr. Boeckmann says he would have made the Horseless Carriage much bigger, with lots more parking.

“People come from all over to come to the restaurant,” he says. “We’re open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. We’re fully staffed. We do catering. . . . Why, two weeks ago, I stopped by on a Sunday after church and I met a man who’s been coming here for 23 years.”

And all Mr. West asks for is a place to get a hamburger. For the time being, he can still find it right downstairs.