Splitsville for Deli Triumvirate? Mais Non

To hear some folks tell it, it’s flashing butcher knives and flying skillets over at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica. Los Angeles magazine goes so far as to say that the partnership of Bruce Marder, Michel Richard and investor Marvin Zeidler has “already soured.” Richard is reported calling the Deli kitchen “sloppy and chaotic,” and has returned to his other establishment, Citrus, full-time--while Marder plans to turn his attention “to his newest project, Speedway Limited.”

But according to Richard and Marder, this is all a potful of nonsense. “I don’t know who created that story,” says Richard. “We don’t have any problem. Everything goes tres bien .” He adds, “You know, in every marriage, at the beginning, you don’t know how it’s going to work, and maybe it takes you a little time to go smoothly. But now we have a great marriage, with no divorce in view.”

Richard also flatly denies ever having called the kitchen “sloppy and chaotic.” “And,” he says, “I don’t like it when people say something bad about Bruce. He’s a very nice man, he knows about food, I have respect for him, and he’s a great partner. I wish every chef in Los Angeles was as ‘bad to work with’ as him.”

As for his returning to Citrus, Richard explains, “In the beginning, I was at the Deli from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day for a month. Then, when it started to get going, I returned to spend more time at my first love, Citrus. You probably won’t see me at lunch or dinner at the Deli--but I go there almost every morning from about 9 a.m. to noon, and sometimes I go back in the afternoons. Bruce and I don’t want to be identified as the personalities of the Deli. That’s Marvin’s job. We just want to make sure the food is good.”

Marder says of the rumors, “They’re just bogus, period. Michel and I really get along well, honestly. We go out to dinner all the time, we cook together. We really like each other. But if everybody thinks we’re fighting, maybe we should put up a big ring somewhere and just go at each other with boxing gloves. We could sell tickets. . . .”

Regarding Marder’s supposed involvement with Speedway Limited, incidentally, he has long ago given up that project--as this column reported in April.

SANDWICH BORED: Celestino Drago, owner-chef of the popular Celestino’s in Beverly Hills, recently gave up his second restaurant--a charming little Italian-style sandwich place called Panino, which he had opened two years ago at the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown. “The original idea,” says Drago, “was to use Panino as the flagship for a whole chain of places. But we’ve had a lot of problems, including the fact that we couldn’t put up any real signage because it would interfere with the design of the museum. I finally decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation, so we sold the space back to the museum, and they’ve subleased it out to a catering company. At this moment, I have no plans to open anything else new--but I do eventually want to do another restaurant. I’m not sure what it will be, but it probably won’t be Panino, and it definitely won’t be another Celestino.”

FAST SERVICE: Writing not long ago about the 1990 Waiters’ and Waitresses’ Race held by Ma Maison in West Hollywood in July, I noted that the first-ever such contest in America was probably the race staged by Patrick Terrail at his original Ma Maison in 1975. According to Terrail, he got the idea in France, where such contests had been known since the 1960s.

Mais non , says veteran publicist Lee Solters of L.A.’s prominent Solters/Roskin/Friedman public relations firm. In the mid-1950s, he reports, while doing publicity for the Restaurant Associates group in New York City, he staged waiters’ races twice yearly for three years. The august Four Seasons, then an R.A. property, did not participate--but servers from a wide range of other restaurants owned by the company, from the Zum Zum sausage emporium to the elegant Forum of the 12 Caesars, did. “It was the same kind of thing they’re doing now,” says Solters, “with waiters carrying trays with drinks or wine on them. But just to get the media interested, we kept instituting all kinds of different rules and regulations. We had one contest for left-handed waiters only, for instance. And we did one with waiters pitted against actors in Broadway shows who had worked as waiters before they got their parts. We dragged the whole thing out as long as possible.”

NEWS AND NOTES: Il Mito, “The Myth,” is new in Studio City, on the site of an old neighborhood hangout called Keith’s. Il Mito is a collaborative effort between designer Bamshad Akhbari and chef Michael Fekr--the latter of whom was most recently chef at Sostanza in West L.A., and before that a protege of chef Antonio Tommasi, working with him at Harry’s Bar, Chianti Cucina and Tommasi’s own Locanda Veneta.

DINING DATEBOOK: The American Institute of Wine & Food hosts its first annual International Beer and Sausage Tasting in the gardens of the Radisson Plaza Hotel in Manhattan Beach next Sunday from 3 to 6 p.m. Sausages will be supplied by Jody Moroni, Bruce Aidells, Andrezj and La Espana, among others, and beers will range from India’s Taj Mahal to West L.A.’s Eureka. . . . And two events celebrating (at least in part) the south of France are scheduled locally for Sept. 24: Magdalena’s in Bellflower offers a six-course meal accompanying wines selected by Kermit Lynch from the Rhone and Provence (with a Pouilly-Fuisse thrown in to confuse things geographically), beginning at 6:30 p.m. The all-inclusive price per person is $65. And Gilliland’s in Santa Monica pours California wines, from Flora Springs, but serves a Provencal-themed menu, beginning at 7 p.m.--for $55 a head.