At Bistro Gardens, Lunch Can Be a Showdown in the Social Corral : High Noon

If sex and glitz novelist Jackie Collins ever decides to write “Studio City Wives,” at least now she has a setting. The Bistro Garden, a landmark on the Westside live-to-lunch circuit and the inspiration for Collins’ “Hollywood Wives,” has set up shop on Ventura Boulevard.

This is the Beverly Hills restaurant that, although open for dinner, is best known for its garden luncheon setting. It is the restaurant where the ladies who lunch include First Ladies--Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, for instance.

“There’s a story at every table,” Collins said about the Bistro Garden. “It’s almost like Le Cirque in New York: a place to see and be seen, to get dressed up before you go, to wave across the room at your friends when you arrive.”

The Bistro Garden and to some extent the restaurant that spawned it, the Bistro, are almost a sociological phenomenon. Not just a restaurant, but a place where a quick check on social ranking comes with table placement. Part of the scene where women make beauty parlor appointments in the morning in order to arrive perfectly coiffed for lunch. How this social marvel will translate into the Valley’s the-less-glitz-the-better life style is the question.

“I’m looking forward to going there,” said Iris Bovee, membership chairman of the Music Center’s Club 100. “As far as personal parties, I wouldn’t hesitate using it, but for group functions, I don’t know. People have this reaction of ‘Oh, my God, the Valley. ‘ It’s crazy. It’s only 15 minutes from town, but that’s the stigma the Valley has.”

Encino’s Suzanne Marx believes the restaurant will “be the best thing to happen in the Valley since the freeway.”

“There’s going to be a lot of power lunching here,” said the fund-raiser for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. “It’s going to be the kind of place where half the time you’re there to do business and the other half to people-watch.”

For people watchers, the objects of interest will come from Disney, Universal and Warner Bros., when the studio executives and agents bring stars to lunch.

“You always like to have one or two celebrities in a crowd,” said owner Kurt Niklas. “Someone you’d like to rub elbows with. And the people who tell you they don’t care or don’t notice are just kidding themselves.”

And, if all goes according to Niklas and his son Christopher, who will be handling the day-to-day management, watching these celebs and power brokers will be the Valley’s ladies-who-lunch crowd.

“You can’t really call them ladies who lunch anymore, that has the connotation of the idle rich,” said Nancy Marlow-Trump, who covers the social scene for The Tolucan. “But there are a lot of them out there.”

It’s not as though there aren’t tony restaurants already in the Valley--La Serre and Val’s have been going strong for years--but the Bistro Garden is the first of the glamorous Westside eateries to set up a satellite over the hill.

“Spare me all this,” said the wife of a TV producer who lives in the East Valley, of the restaurant’s opening. “Like the Valley needs a place where you wear a hat to lunch?”

Perhaps the Bistro’s opening isn’t as historic an event as it would be if Spago decided to start cooking up feta cheese pizzas in the Galleria, but it’s still precedent-setting.

“Compared to La Serre and Val’s, the Bistro seems a little lighter and brighter,” said Toluca Lake’s Betty Saliba. “La Serre seems more serious, and Val’s is a little more somber.”

“The Bistro isn’t what I’d call an intimate restaurant, like La Serre,” said Nelle Niles, wife of tennis promoter Wendall Niles. “But it’s just gorgeous. Some of my friends say it’s a little noisy for dinner, but I liked it.”

And, although the Lakeside Country Club in North Hollywood does a thriving ladies-who-lunch business, “Lakeside’s comfortable,” said Marlow-Trump. “But it’s not like putting on your best Chanel suit and going to the Bistro.”

And there are a lot of Chanel suits in the Valley waiting to be worn to lunch. “Instead of meeting in Beverly Hills or Brentwood,” said Niles, “we can have our 213 friends come over Coldwater and meet us there.”

This is exactly what the Niklases are hoping to hear. There was early resistance from the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. to the construction of a restaurant in a still-unfinished shopping center. The homeowners felt the restaurant would add to traffic and parking problems, but Niklas said the residents are finding his customers “are not the kind who go around throwing beer cans on their lawns.”

Perhaps not throwing beer cans, but, on at least one occasion, wine.

“I was there for the opening party and then again the first day it opened with 12 friends,” Saliba said. “We spent most of the time talking about the two ladies who threw their wine at each other at the opening.

“There were two ladies at a table, and one of them was smoking,” Saliba said. “A woman at the next table asked her if she’d mind not smoking and the woman said she would mind because this was a smoking-designated area. With that, the nonsmoker said, ‘Well, this will put it out’ and tossed her glass of wine at her. Then the smoker’s friend tossed her wine at the nonsmoker. It was like something out of ‘Dynasty.’ ”

The physical structure of the restaurant is more like something out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

Built at a cost of $3 million, it’s the image of understated elegance and wealth: wood floors by the bar, mirrors inset into tile along the walls and red brick floors in the main dining room, which has a glass ceiling where the light is filtered through wooden latticework. Besides the architectural style that mixes the ambience of the Bistro Garden and the Bistro, the Niklases have developed a menu that mixes the fare of both restaurants as well. It’s a selection so rich in seafood, pastas and meats that it’s hard to imagine how the characters in Collins’ novels keep to their diet of “salad, salad, salad” when they dine there.

To enjoy all this elegant dining the owners are counting on a clientele that will be 20% old customers from the Westside (like Contessa Cohn who held a Valentine’s Day Eve party there for 75 friends) and 80% new customers from the Valley.

“Kurt probably feels there’s a sufficient market to keep it going in the Valley,” said Jimmy Murphy, owner of Jimmy’s, an equally old-style restaurant on the Westside. “He probably doesn’t want people from Beverly Hills going to the Valley taking away from his own business in Beverly Hills.”

Murphy, like Niklas, is a believer in elegant dining. He refers to the more informal nouvelle cuisine restaurants as “those places with track lighting.” Murphy thinks that the stores that will go into the shopping center around the Bistro Garden will have a big effect on who eats there.

“Kurt hasn’t made any mistakes to this point,” Murphy said. “He got all his bases covered; he’s not appealing to a tourist crowd. If he gets a fairly elegant assortment of shops around him, he’s going to get women who are going to make a day of it, first going shopping, then having lunch afterward--the way they do in Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive and at Neiman-Marcus.”

One aspect of the Beverly Hills scene Niklas might have more trouble exporting to the Valley is the dress-for-lunch ethic that imbues the original Bistro with much of its style.

“It does give the Valley a chance to dress up,” Marlow-Trump said. “But the Valley isn’t known for getting out of sweat suits during the day. You’re going to have people going there in slacks and good-looking sweat suits.”

Niklas said it’s a little early to say if Valley residents will go all out to dress for lunch, but claims to hope that the restaurant will be a little more casual than the one in Beverly Hills.

“So far people have taken it seriously and gotten dressed,” Niklas said. “Michael Eisner (the Disney chairman) came in a ski sweater, and I said to him in jest, ‘Who let you in like this?’ I want people to feel at ease.”

One guest dressed to the nines Niklas will be serving is Collins, who’s been commuting to NBC in Burbank for the making of her “Lucky” and “Chances” into miniseries.

“Besides the ladies who lunch, you’re going to see a lot of business ladies who lunch coming here,” Collins said.

But does she expect many of the Beverly Hills types from her novels to dine there?

“No, it’s hard enough to get them to go to the top of Mulholland to Adriano’s,” Collins said. “Never mind go down the other side of the hill.”