Kuleto Goes Fishing for Bay Area Site

Bay Area restaurant designer Pat Kuleto recently announced plans to take over the site of the now-defunct Maxwell’s Plum at San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. “I think Maxwell’s didn’t fly because it was simply everything San Franciscans didn’t want,” Kuleto says. “It was East Coast, pretentious, and overpriced. There was certainly nothing wrong with the location, because it’s got to be one of the best waterfront locations in the city.”

Kuleto’s restaurant interiors include San Francisco’s Fog City Diner, Postrio, Splendido’s and the eponymous Kuleto’s, plus our own Carnegie Deli and forthcoming Red Car Grill. For Maxwell’s 15,000-square-foot space, he wants to, as he says, give San Franciscans the kind of restaurant they’ve always wanted: “a traditional, classic seafood restaurant of the kind they used to have at Fisherman’s Wharf before the city abandoned it to the tourists.” Kuleto’s partner in the enterprise is Bill McCormick, co-owner (with partner Doug Schmick) of a number of top seafood restaurants in the Pacific Northwest--among them McCormick’s Fishhouse in Seattle and the legendary Jake’s Famous Crawfish in Portland--and also a leading seafood distributor in the area.

McCormick and Kuleto go back a long way, says the designer. “I got my start in restaurant design as contractor for McCormick’s old Refectory steakhouse chain,” he says. “And I worked with him on a lot of projects in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.” Kuleto became a partner in the Refectory chain, in fact, “and owned bits and pieces of maybe 20 or 30 restaurants over the years.” His new restaurant, he adds, will mark his return to active restaurant operation.

Kuleto says he’s halfway through designing the restaurant. It’s tentatively scheduled to open in summer, 1991, and will probably be called McCormick and Kuleto’s . . . “depending,” Kuleto says, “on how badly the people who own most of Kuleto’s scream.”

DESIGNER DINING: Maxfield’s at the Marina del Rey Marriott Hotel offers diners who register for its monthly drawing a chance to win a complimentary “personally designed” dinner for two. That means that the restaurant’s executive chef, Scott Sibley, calls winners and consults with them on the menu he is to prepare exclusively for them. The contest’s first winners are said to have enjoyed, among other dishes, a main course described as “twin filet mignon topped with Maine lobster and roasted filet mignon wrapped in bacon and fresh rosemary with spaghetti squash, sweet red onions, and sauteed mushrooms with potatoes au gratin”--a dish, it must be said, which sounds silly and overdone enough to have been conceived by a professional, and not a couple of just plain folk.

RESTAURANT MISCELLANY: Margaret Irene Fischlin, formerly of Campanile, has been named executive chef at the soon-to-open Stringfellows in Beverly Hills. . . . It’s enough to make a California-cuisine hound feel old, but I must report that Trump’s in West Hollywood celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. . . . And L.A. chefs Ken Frank (La Toque), Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger (City Restaurant, Border Grill), and Tommy Tang (Tommy Tang’s) are among the chefs posing for the 1991 “Great Chefs of America” calendar published by Share Our Strength, a nationwide network of food industry professionals united to fight hunger. The calendar will include recipes from the chefs. Other participants in the project this year include Frank Stitt of Highlands in Birmingham, Ala., Zarela Martinez of Zarela’s in New York, and Georges Perrier of Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia. The calendar is available by mail for $12.50 (including postage and handling) from SOS, 1511 K Street, NW, Suite 623, Washington, D.C. 20005.

WHAT’S COOKING: La Toque, Cha Cha Cha, Trumps, Restaurant Lozano and the Panda Inn are among the restaurants participating in next Sunday’s Fall Food & Wine Festival, from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Parkway Grill in Pasadena. Tickets are $65 at the door, with proceeds benefiting the community’s Huntington Memorial Hospital. . . . On Thursday and Friday, Mark Greenberg’s Stroozette Restaurant in Culver City will celebrate its fourth anniversary by serving a full meat loaf dinner for $3.95.