Hollywood Athletic Club Will Offer Bistro, Billiards

In its heyday, the Hollywood Athletic Club (opened in 1924) was a movietown hot spot. It had a celebrity clientele, a popular dining room and a well-equipped pre-Sports Connection exercise facility. Now, after a recent stint as a Russian restaurant-nightclub, the old Athletic Club facility is taking its original name back--but the only exercise its new customers will get is lifting their forks or chalking their cues.

Scheduled to debut in mid-October, the revamped Hollywood Athletic Club--which will be open to the public--will offer some 42 billiards tables (plus three antique snooker tables, in case anybody still remembers how to play snooker) and a 92-seat restaurant called Drones Bar & Grill. The principal investor in the project--the renovation alone is said to have cost at least $1 million--is David Harrison Gilmore, founder of Drones club in London (which is otherwise related to Drones Bar & Grill in name only). Entrepreneur Tom Salter is managing director and co-owner, and Peter De Lucca--former sous-chef at 72 Market Street in Venice and chef at the now-closed Darwin in Santa Monica--is executive chef and restaurant owner, as well as a partner in the entire operation. (De Lucca’s plans to open the Edgemar Bar & Grill in Santa Monica, announced in this column last year, fell through.)

“We’ve capitalized on a lot of the traditional design and architecture of the old club,” De Lucca says. “We’re sort of playing with the whole club thing, but not in an elitist kind of way. We’re creating a comfortable atmosphere.” He promises a reasonably priced American-bistro-style menu, with main courses in the $10 to $16 range. Sample offerings include Caesar salad, crawfish bisque, sweet corn chowder, hamburgers, shrimp and crab on toast with guacamole, penne with lamb ragout and fresh peas, steamed Norwegian salmon, grilled sausage with polenta, and a grilled 18-oz. porterhouse steak with fried onion rings. There will also be a full wine list and bar, with particular attention paid to ports, brandies, and other after-dinner drinks. “I think we’ll do a cigar-and-brandy night once a month in part of the restaurant,” De Lucca adds. Restaurant manager will be Adrian Walker, who has performed similar duties at the Darwin and, more recently, at Bob Burns, also in Santa Monica.

“The law says we can’t serve alcohol or food in the billiards room, at least for now,” notes De Lucca, “but we’re going to have a cappuccino-gourmet water bar, with virgin drinks available.”

SPICE LIMITATIONS: The Palace Cafe in Santa Barbara has gotten a hard-liquor license--which reportedly costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000--in order to serve just one drink: the Cajun martini. Not only will this cocktail, made according to a recipe developed by Paul Prudhomme, be the only alcohol offered at the Palace, but service will be limited to one martini per customer. Why the limit? “Because our main focus is food,” owner Steven Sponder says, “and too much alcohol can dull the taste buds.” This, I might add, is a distinctly un-Cajun notion.

NEWS AND NOTES: The proprietors of Trattoria Toscana in Brentwood will open a take-home facility, featuring rotisserie-cooked meat and fowl, pizzas and pastas, desserts, etc., on Barrington Avenue, also in Brentwood, in early November. The new place will be called Rosti--which, curiously enough, means nothing in Italian but is the German/Swiss word for hashed-brown potatoes . . . . Premieres of Hollywood Restaurant and Bar, er, premieres shortly at the site of the old Hollywood Brown Derby on Vine Street, just off Hollywood Boulevard. Comfort lovers will be happy to hear that the original Brown Derby booths are still in place. . . . The Sakana Club, offering Franco-Japanese cuisine, is new in Brentwood . . . . The San Francisco branch of the Palm, located in the Juliana Hotel on the above-the-tunnel portion of Bush Street, has closed after four years. The property’s owner, Kimco Hotel Management, which already runs such hotel-restaurants as Kuleto’s at the Villa Florence and Masa’s at the Vintage Court, will develop a new restaurant of its own in the space . . . . And Jerry Kretchmer, proprietor of New York’s Gotham Bar & Grill, is plotting a new restaurant, as yet unnamed, on the site now occupied by Cafe Rakel--itself recently installed after the more serious, upscale Rakel was closed. Chef at Kretchmer’s new place will reportedly be Bobby Flay, former sous-chef at the now-defunct Jams and more recently executive chef at the Southwestern-themed Miracle Grill.

WHAT’S COOKING: The fifth annual Eat for Art event is scheduled for Monday, Oct. 1, at 6:30 p.m., at the carousel on Santa Monica Pier. More than a dozen Santa Monica and Venice restaurants will be dishing up their specialties--among them 72 Market Street, Trattoria Angeli, Camelions, I Cugini, Michael’s, Rebecca’s and Rockenwagner’s. Tickets for the benefit, with proceeds going to help fund Santa Monica art education for both children and adults, are $125 apiece--and advance reservations are imperative. Call (213) 458-8350.