Il Giardino Demise Rumors Premature

I first heard about the small, popular Beverly Hills Italian restaurant called Il Giardino a few months before it opened in 1983, not through the usual restaurant channels but from an Italian-speaking friend of mine who was giving private English lessons to a couple of the restaurant’s principals.

“These guys sure don’t know much English,” she told me at the time. “They sound like they’re right off the boat.” In fact, they were right off the boat, at least figuratively, and that was part of the secret of the restaurant’s success. They didn’t know how Italian restaurants in America were supposed to operate, so they operated Il Giardino as they would have operated a restaurant in their Tuscan homeland. As a result, for me it felt (and tasted) more like Italy than any other restaurant in America.

The proprietors of Il Giardino have subsequently acquired the Pane Caldo Bistrot nearby and, more recently, 1000 Wilshire in Santa Monica--which they have renamed Mille Wilshire Ristorante ( mille is 1000 in Italian). But there have been rumors that the original restaurant was going to close, with chefs and management transferring to the latter. Not so.

The true story is this: Earlier this year, entertainment industry mogul David Geffen bought the property where Il Giardino stands, with plans to raze existing buildings on the site and construct a large office complex in their place. Il Giardino will of course be forced to close while construction is in progress--but, according to Alberto Liani, general manager of the restaurant (and of Pane Caldo and Mille Wilshire), it will relocate temporarily during construction and then reopen in the Geffen building when it is completed.

“This way,” Liani says, “we hope to stay open without missing a night, in one location or another.” But even this change is not exactly imminent, he adds. The site’s residential neighbors have been able to delay the start of construction on the project, he reports--and Geffen is required to give the restaurants six months’ notice from the time he obtains all the necessary permits. It will be business as usual at Il Giardino, then, for at least six months more--and probably longer than that.

In the meantime, Liani makes daily rounds of all three establishments, supervising Pane Caldo during the day and the other two at night. “The timing works out very nicely,” he says, “because at Mille Wilshire we have a typical American clientele, which starts eating by 6:30 in the evening, but at Il Giardino it is much more in the Italian style where nobody comes before 8.”

FOOD ON THE FLY: Did you ever wonder how much those little plastic trays of airline food--the chewy “ragout of beef” with chewier noodles, the wilted lettuce and brown-edged carrots waiting for their anointment of chem-lab salad dressing, the sawdust brownies with sugar-and-margarine frosting--actually cost the airlines? According to figures recently published in the New York Daily News, the answer (for prominent American-based carriers, anyway) is not very much. The big spender in the airline meal game is Pan Am, whose average cost is $5.50 a serving. Below them, are American ($5.36), Northwest ($4.96), TWA ($4.40), Delta ($4.37), United ($4.37), Continental ($3.36), Eastern ($3.17) and Piedmont ($2.60).

RESTAURANT MISCELLANY: Rick and Deann Bayliss, proprietors of the acclaimed Frontera Grill in Chicago (and menu consultants for our own recently opened El Paso Mexican Grill) have just opened a new, upscale Mexican restaurant in the Windy City, called Topolobampo. Among the unusual dishes offered are minced tongue empanadas , braised sturgeon loin in a cactus and onion escabeche , and wild turkey mole. . . . Claude Dhubert, a veteran of Chambord in Beverly Hills, Le St. Michel in Santa Monica, and the Biltmore Hotel downtown, is the new executive chef at the Westwood Marquis Hotel in Westwood. . . . John Makin, former executive chef at the Remington on Post Oak Park in Houston and then briefly the co-proprietor of the short-lived Duckworth in St. Helena, has been hired as executive chef at the Arizona Biltmore Resort in Phoenix. . . .

Barnabey’s Hotel in Manhattan Beach is giving away wine: Guests who spend the night and dine in the hotel dining room will be given a card good for a complimentary bottle of wine with the meal--or, if you’re in a generous mood, for a bottle of champagne to be sent anywhere in the U.S. in your name. . . . Gilliland’s in Santa Monica mates wines from Washington’s Hogue Cellars with foods from the Pacific Northwest--steamed Skookum clams, corn pudding with Dungeness crab, etc.--at a five-course, $55-a-head banquet Tuesday, December 2 at 6 p.m.