Restaurateurs Do the Valley Dance

The San Fernando Valley is about to explode with new restaurants. The first to open, in about two months, will be a branch of Cha Cha Cha, which is moving into the Encino site formerly occupied by Hymie’s Fish Market. Chef-owner Toribio Prado recently went to Jamaica and returned with many ideas for the restaurant. “It’s going to have fins, plants, birds, it’s going to move ,” he says.

Prado has other plans for the Valley. “I’m planing to bring back the ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s, and I want to have a place where the movie stars hang out,” he says of the Equator, which he will open in the MCA Citywalk complex in Universal City. “I’m also planning to bring the samba and merengue and cha cha back to Los Angeles.”

Prado shouldn’t have any problem finding help for his projects. “I have seven sisters and six brothers and my dream is to have all of them working for me.”

The Valley will also soon have a second Daily Grill and a new California Pizza Kitchen--both in the Encino Place Center on the corner of Woodley and Ventura. Owner Bob Spivak also has plans for a Studio City Daily Grill at the intersection of Ventura and Laurel Canyon boulevards. Spivak also plans to open a Daily Grill in Pasadena. “Can’t say where, it’s three different spots we are looking at,” he says.

Meanwhile, James Saliba, co-owner of La Loggia and Barsac Brasserie is planning another restaurant in the West Valley. “We are negotiating for the Divino Restaurant in Woodland Hills,” he says. Saliba says the food will be Italian Mediterranean. “A lot of people have the misconception when you say Mediterranean, they tend to think North African cuisine. That’s why I’m saying Mediterranean based on Italian.”

CRUMBS: Are Nobu Matsuhisa and Michel Blanchet planning to buy L’Ermitage and open it as a Franco-Japanese restaurant? “No, not really,” says Blanchet, former chef of L’Ermitage, “it was something we considered but I don’t think it’s going to work. We are waiting for an investor but it looks like we didn’t work fast enough.” But Blanchet says he and his friend Matsuhisa haven’t given up. “I don’t think the mood of people is on a high-class French restaurant. Maybe it would be better to do some kind of French bistro-style restaurant with a touch of Oriental dishes, Japanese style,” he says. Matsuhisa hasn’t given up either. “Michel is best of friends with me and I’d like to help him. We are still talking.”

According to a source, Roger Verge, proprietor of France’s three-star Le Moulin de Mougins, is looking for an L.A. location. Verge, a missionary who spreads the good word about French food, once told The Times that he likes Los Angeles and has many friends here.

And it seems that movie mogul and Carnegie Deli partner Marvin Davis may be ready for a new diet. Eberhard Mueller, long-time chef at Le Bernardin in New York, has signed a lease at the new Santa Monica Water Garden complex; he plans to open a fish restaurant. Davis, whose Miller/Davis Co. is a partner in the Water Garden complex, is rumored to be a personal investor in Mueller’s as-yet-unnamed restaurant. (One of the names reportedly under consideration is Rivoire.) A spokesman for Davis says he can’t, as yet, confirm the rumor.

GOODBY MR. SHIPS: In the early ‘50s, when Emmett Shipman and his father Matt opened their three 24-hour coffee shops, they put a toaster on every table. “It was the only way we could figure to make sure people got hot toast--let them do it themselves,” the younger Shipman once told The Times.

The Shipmans believed firmly in serving the best quality--even if it cost more. One former customer remembers asking Emmett why his hamburgers were so terrific. “He used USDA prime beef and said that you shouldn’t pat it too much, just make a patty as loose as you possibly can,” she says. “The other trick was he never put the ground round back in the refrigerator because that’s when a hard crust forms. He was just as fiendish about toast--that’s why he had those toasters around. He wanted you to have fresh, hot toast.”

Emmett Shipman died July 25, and some of his best customers took the time to reminisce. “When you walked in there, it just felt so streamliney and so familiar,” said Evan Kleiman, the chef-owner of Angeli. She said that when she was a UCLA student, Ships in Westwood was her favorite place to eat. “I used to love their dinner salad with Roquefort dressing. First of all because it was real Roquefort, not blue cheese . . . and they always had a lot of freshly grated carrots on top. I used to order that and a patty melt.”

Ken Frank, chef-owner of La Toque, used to stop at Ships for breakfast every day. He was 21 and working at La Guillotine. “They had freshly squeezed orange juice in one of those machines where they take half an orange and stick it on the thing and pull the handle around a couple of times, and it squeezes it. And it was good, fresh squeezed orange juice, too.”

The Ships in Westwood closed in 1984, but the other two--at Olympic and La Cienega boulevards in Los Angeles, and at Overland Avenue and Washington Boulevard in Culver City--are still in business. Waitress Lee Riling (she is known as the “whistle lady” because she is never without the brass whistle a customer once gave her) has been working at the Culver City Ships for 20 years. “The drunks would come in and we weren’t allowed to touch them, so I’d have the busboys get behind them and I’d get in front and blow my whistle to wake them up,” she said. Riling always unpluged the toasters when the bar crowd came in. “They’d put anything in those toasters--cigarettes butts, meat, sometimes they’d even put in a book of matches. It would flame up and they’d yell fire.”

Riling said things have changed. “I often wonder why there aren’t so many people that go out at night. On Friday and Saturday we’d be packed here. Now we aren’t, but we used to be.”

ROLL OVER ROLEX, BRING ON THE FOOD: When Swatch-tables, the new limited-edition watches that look like peppers, cucumbers or bacon and eggs, were introduced in Switzerland, they sold out in hours. Now the watches, designed by Alfred Hofkunst, the Peter Max of Europe, are coming to Southern California. Will we eat them up? Only time will tell. The Swatch-tables, which sell for about $100, arrive at the Irvine Ranch Farmers Market at the Beverly Center on Aug. 28.

NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT: Emil Unruh, chef at Tavern on the Green in Sun Valley, couldn’t keep up with the demand for his Italian and Spanish chorizo sausages. “Patrons kept asking me where they could buy the sausage, so I decided to offer them for sale,” Unruh says. But sausage isn’t the only thing he’s selling. Guests can also buy the battery-operated pepper mill that Unruh uses on omelets. “The interest in his fascinating gadget was so overwhelming,” he says, “that I began selling it too.”

ENDINGS: Say goodby to the Torrance Ed Debevic’s: It will close its doors Sept. 1. According to Gerard Centioli, president and CEO of Ed Debevic’s, the Torrance restaurant wasn’t generating the level of sales and profits that the other branches were. “What we need is not only a very good lunch and dinner business, which we have in Torrance, but also the midafternoon and late-evening business,” he says. “We get it in Beverly Hills and all our other locations. We do not get it in Torrance.”