Chef Parts Company With La Scala and Strikes Out on His Own

When Jean Leon opened his new, informal La Scala in Beverly Hills a few months ago, he left behind more than his old location and his famous wine cellar. He parted company at the same time, amicably, with his chef of almost 30 years, Emilio Nunez--a man who was never as well-known in local gastronomic circles as he deserved to be, but who, under the right circumstances, could be one of the best chefs in town.

Nunez started at La Scala even before Jean Leon. The restaurant was opened in 1956, not by Leon, but by a Galician Spaniard named Joe Amor, who also owned Joe’s Little Hollywood on Cahuenga Boulevard (later to become Martoni’s). Amor is Nunez’s uncle, and Nunez went to work for him at the age of 18. When his uncle retired in 1957, Nunez stayed on to work for the new owner, Leon--under whom, of course, the restaurant earned its legendary status as a haunt of movie stars and presidents alike. (Amor, now in his 80s, lives in Palm Springs, where, says Nunez, he still cooks frequently at home.)

At the age of 24, Nunez became head chef at La Scala. “I must have been one of the youngest chefs in Los Angeles at the time,” he recalls, “and in those days, people didn’t accept the idea of chefs who were so young. I remember one time that Cosmopolitan wanted to do a layout of food from La Scala, and they wanted to photograph the chef behind a table full of antipasto. When they saw me, though, they said I didn’t look like a chef, so they hired an extra--an older fat man with a big mustache, the usual chef cliche. I was so mad, I told them that if the extra was such a good chef, he had better cook the food, too. They ended up canceling the shoot.”

When Leon began opening his casual La Scala Presto trattorias around the Los Angeles area, Nunez eased himself out of daily cooking duties at La Scala itself, and concentrated on supervising the new places. When the main restaurant was forced to move from its original location earlier this year, though, and Leon decided to reopen it as an informal bistro-style place nearby, Nunez felt that it was time for him to leave. “When La Scala ceased to be what it had been,” he says, “I just didn’t find that it was a challenge to me anymore.”

In a way, though, Nunez hasn’t left La Scala Presto totally: Since he owned shares in the restaurants, he and Leon came to an agreement by which he would take over the Encino Presto in return for his interest in the other places. “I had thought of trying to start a new restaurant of my own,” says Nunez, “but I live near the Encino Presto and I know a lot of people in the neighborhood--and, besides, it’s just so difficult to start anything new today.” His deal with Leon calls for him to keep the La Scala name for a year. “Once people get to know me personally,” he says, “I’ll phase it out. Meanwhile, I’m going to start adding more things to the menu, and making it a little more mine. Jean and I remain good friends. It’s difficult to leave a place where you’ve worked for almost 30 years--but sometimes you just have to go your own way.”

WHAT? NO STAR FRUIT? The delis of America have long had a tradition of naming sandwiches after stage and film celebrities--the Jimmy Durante, the Sylvester Stallone, the whomever. Now, though, a new menu at the Beverly Hills Hotel dining room takes the tradition uptown, offering a selection of “Favorites of the Stars”--more or less standard continental-hotel-food dishes with famous monikers attached. Among these are Sophia Loren’s Vitello Tonnato (misspelled “tonato” on the menu), Elizabeth Taylor’s Chili, Johnny Carson’s Whitefish, James Stewart’s Sand Dabs, and of course Charlton Heston’s Strawberries (with yogurt, honey, nutmeg and cinnamon). As one who has, in the past, bemoaned the disappearance of colorful dish names from American menus, I applaud the hotel for this descriptive device, and hope they’ll go further with it, perhaps even introducing a bit of editorial comment into their food/star pairings. Why not, for instance, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Beverly Hills Beef, Sean Penn’s Overdone Ham, or Kitty Kelly’s Steak Sinatra (“Done Your Way”)?

TOUR DE FRANCE: Tulipe in West Hollywood celebrates a “Cotes-du-Rhone Week” from the 20th through the 26th of this month with a $35 Provencal-style menu and selected Rhone wines available by the glass. . . . In a similarly Southern-French vein, Patrick Healy offers $38 fixed-price menus at his Champagne in West Los Angeles, featuring the dishes of Marseille on March 4th and 5th and Avignon on March 11th and 12th. Future regional French menus will honor Burgundy, Southwestern France, and Nice.