Owner Puts Brakes on Plans for New Speedway Restaurant

Speedway has hit a roadblock. First announced about a year ago, it sounded like a great idea for a restaurant: family-style Italian food, reasonable if not exactly low prices, small menu, even smaller wine list, open Wednesday through Sunday only, and only for dinner. Also, it was to be practically on the beach in Venice. But the project’s mastermind, Bruce Marder (West Beach Cafe, Rebecca’s, DC-3), says it isn’t going to happen. “The space just wasn’t big enough for the kind of place I wanted to do,” Marder said. “We can’t get permits to use the upstairs for dining, or for a patio, which would have helped.” Besides, he adds, he’s too busy opening his long-awaited Broadway Deli (in partnership with Michel Richard and Marvin Zeidler) in Santa Monica to concentrate on yet another restaurant just now.

Meanwhile, a former Marder employee--Francois Petit, ex-manager of both the West Beach Cafe and Rebecca’s and now proprietor of his own Venice restaurant/jazz club, St. Mark’s--has plans of his own for the proposed Speedway site. “I’m going to change a lot of things from the original design,” he said. “There will be a big waterfall outside, because it gets so noisy around here on the weekends, and I’d rather hear the water than the cars and people. I’m going to build a terra-cotta wall around the place, like they have in the south of Spain or Italy, and have a beautiful private Italian garden. There will be a patio, and on the second floor, I’m going to put a gorgeous wine room with accommodations for private parties of up to 20 people. St. Mark’s is very close, and we’ll continue exactly as we have been--but our chef, Gil Saulnier, will supervise the kitchen at the new restaurant too. The food will be French/Italian, and I will hire either a French or an Italian chef to work under Gil.”

Marder, incidentally, says that Petit’s plans are news to him. But he adds, “Whatever Francois thinks he’s going to do, he’s probably not. The city’s coming down very hard on people right now, and it’s a long way from here to there.”

THE WORLD TURNS: Victoria Granof, executive chef at the Atlas Bar & Grill, has left the fledgling restaurant. “She got the kitchen started, and I liked her food,” Atlas owner Mario Tamayo said, “but it just wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I didn’t renew her contract.”

The high-style decor of Atlas, located in the restored Art Deco-designed Wiltern Building in the Mid-Wilshire district, drew much attention when it first opened, but received mixed reviews.

In Granof’s place, Tamayo has hired two brothers, Juventino and Tino Gomez, 14-year veterans of the kitchen at the now-defunct Perino’s, and most recently chefs at the Columbia Bar & Grill. “We’ve still got a global, eclectic menu,” says Tamayo, “but we’ve brought some of the original dishes up to par and added a whole bunch of new things.”

Granof herself stresses that the decision not to renew her contract was a mutual one. “Mario was taking the food in different direction from what we had discussed,” she says, “and it wasn’t a direction I wanted to go.” She is developing a breakfast-and-lunch-only restaurant near Atlas, she adds.

RESTAURANT PEOPLE: Michel Maupuy, longtime second chef at the original Ma Maison (and underrated by local critics in that capacity), is now executive chef at the Ocean Club in Mequon, Wis. . . . Susan Spicer, former chef at the Bistro at Maison de Ville in New Orleans, has just opened her own 110-seat restaurant in that city, called Bayona. (One of dishes on her menu, incidentally, is something called “ paella risotto “--which is curious because the cooking techniques for paella and risotto are exactly opposite ( paella is never stirred, risotto is stirred continually). . . . And the restaurant community mourns Leslee Reis, executive chef and co-owner, with her husband Andy, of the acclaimed Cafe Provencal in Evanston, Ill. The 47-year-old Reis died of a heart attack earlier this month while visiting New Orleans. Andy Reis will continue to run the restaurant.

SALT AND PEPPER: Chapo on Melrose Avenue offers a multi-course garlic-accented menu tonight for $30 per person. . . . La Bon Vie in Arcadia hosts its first Cajun Crawfish Festival Monday, May 7, from 3 to 9 p.m. For $25 a person there will be a crawfish feast plus dancing to a Cajun band.