Robaire’s Forsakes Old-Style French for Rustic Italian

A Los Angeles restaurant landmark, the 38-year-old Robaire’s on La Brea near Wilshire, has been sold. It will soon be transformed from an old-style French place into a rustic Italian eatery by the proprietors of the popular Locanda Veneta, Jean-Louis De Mori and Antonio Tomasi.

Robaire’s remains open for business as usual until approximately mid-August, and then will be closed for about a month before assuming its new identity. (The name for the new place has not yet been chosen.) “We have to restore the restaurant,” says Tomasi, “but we don’t want to spend a fortune, because we want to keep our prices low.” He predicts that appetizers will be priced around $5, pasta around $7 to $8, and main dishes from $9 to $13. The food, he adds, will be “very simple, with lots of country flavors.”

Locanda Veneta will remain open at its original location, adds Tomasi. “But it is so small,” he continues, “about 1,000 square feet for everything, including the kitchen and bathrooms. The new place will be much bigger, seating about 100, with two small party rooms upstairs. Also, we’ll have room to make everything on the premises.”

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Recently this column reported that the posh New York restaurant Metro had closed its doors, and that its respected chef, Patrick Clark, had no definite plans for the future. He got some mighty quickly. In what seems on the face of it an unlikely alliance, Clark (who is French-trained and had earlier cooked superb bistro food at New York’s Odeon and Cafe Luxembourg) has signed a deal with Roberto Ruggiero, president of Bice U.S.A., to work on what the latter calls a new “collection” of restaurants to be called Cafe Med.

Unlike the chic, Euro-style Bice restaurants Ruggiero has opened in New York, Beverly Hills and Chicago (with two more coming, in Paris in August and Washington in November), the Cafe Meds will be casual, inexpensive and not at all exclusively Italian. “It’s going be a place with a nice, young decor, very European,” says Ruggiero, “with food coming from all over the Mediterranean--Italy and France, of course, but also Spain and Morocco. We’ll have lots of pastas, salads, and appetizers, and not many entrees. We’re trying to keep the checks around $10-$12 at lunch and $15-$18 at dinner.” The Santa Monica-based interior design firm of Lee & Rovtar will design the restaurants.

The first Cafe Med is scheduled to open in December in Coconut Grove, Fla., in the new French-owned Coco Walk entertainment mall. Southern California will get the next two Cafe Meds--next year, Ruggiero says--one at Horton Plaza in San Diego and another in the One Colorado complex in Pasadena. “After that,” he adds, “we’re looking to open a couple every year in the best locations we can.”

Clark will be executive chef for the restaurants and, together with general manager Bruce Axler (former general manager of New York’s Tavern on the Green), will run the chain. “I won’t be very much a part of it,” says Ruggiero. “I’ll do a little bit of supervising at first and then help find locations, but Bruce and Patrick will do most of the work.”

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Ruggiero’s Bice Pomodoro remains shuttered. “I’m trying to get all the best ideas together for it,” he says, “so that will make a little more sense than it did before. I’m thinking of putting five or six billiards tables in, redoing the place with a little bit more of a younger look, not so sophisticated, and trying a very, very inexpensive Italian trattoria menu--just pizza and pasta, with a lot of draft beers.” Right now, he continues, he is waiting for new design proposals to come in--and he hopes to reopen in September.

And finally, concludes Ruggiero, “I am preparing a surprise for the Beverly Hills Bice, around Sept. 15.” He won’t be more specific, but does note that he often moves his chefs from one restaurant to another “so that they get new ideas and don’t get bored.”

MORE MOVES: Gerard Pangaud, former two-star Parisian chef and ex-chef at New York City’s Aurora, also in New York, has closed his own short-lived Gerard’s Place. His new post? Chef at the same city’s Trouvaille, which has recently changed its menu from French to French-Creole. Yvonne Dell, of the popular Manhattan soul food restaurant, Lola’s, will serve as consultant, and presumably Pangaud to the pleasures of Creole cookery.

WHAT’S NEW: Uncle Tai’s Mandarin Gourmet has opened in Encino, with a patio facing Ventura Boulevard. . . . The former Paradise Bar & Grill in Century City is now Giorgio’s Paradise Beach Club. Proprietor Giorgio Makhloof, who also owns Giorgio’s Pasta & Pizza in Studio City, plans to introduce an all-Italian menu within the next few weeks. . . . John Chalaye, whose parents ran the now-defunct Le Rhone restaurants in San Francisco and St. Helena, and who himself trained in France and then worked under the late Masa Kobayashi at St. Helena’s Auberge de Soleil, is the new executive chef at Restaurant Lozano in Sierra Madre. . . . Koo Koo Roo, the “original skinless charbroiled chicken” mini-chain, has just grown one link larger with the opening of a new unit in Marina del Rey. Construction is underway for additional ones in Tustin and Las Vegas. . . . Akbar Cuisine of India in Encino has introduced a “summertime lite” menu, featuring tandoori-style dishes low in calories and fat and available in half portions. . . . El Mocambo in Hollywood celebrates its second year in business by offering patrons their second round of drinks free with dinner Sunday through Wednesday nights until the end of August. Restaurant proprietor Perry Santos adds that the restaurant has been redecorated and that he has imported a couple of new cooks from Martinique, “who are doing lots of fun things.” . . . And India’s Cuisine in Tarzana now offers five different picnic baskets featuring assorted Indian delicacies, priced from $7.50 to $10.50 per person--available by advance order only.

NOTES FROM A DRY COUNTRY: “The Santa Barbara Restaurant Guide,” subtitled “The Good, the Bad and the Delicious,” is new from Best Cellar Books. The paperback volume (distributed by Santa Barbara’s Capra Press and priced at $8.95) offers terse but informative reviews of some 31 top area restaurants, detailed listings of nearly 400 more, a series of specialized recommendations (“Best Desserts,” “Most Fun Restaurants,” etc.), and brief notes on Santa Barbara County wines. In sum, it is a useful volume. It is also a vaguely mysterious one, since its author, carrying critical anonymity to an extreme, is pictured on the back cover with a paper bag over his head and signs himself only as “The Unknown Critic.” Said critic lists an impressive curriculum vitae on the back of the book--studied at Cordon Bleu, opened a successful restaurant, produced a TV cooking show, wrote four food and wine books, “has appeared between the pages” (as writer or subject?) of most of our food and wine magazines, plus Time and People, etc. These particulars would seem to rule out a couple of obvious possibilities for the critic’s identity: Santa Barbara-based William Tomicki (who published the Entree travel newsletter) and Gourmet magazine critic Caroline Bates (the paper-bag photo is obviously of a man, but, hey, we are dealing with the unknown here). Maybe we shouldn’t even try to guess the Unknown Critic’s identity, though. Maybe being unknown is a critic’s optimum state--and one towards which more of us ought to strive.