Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Latest Role: Restaurateur

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fans may be wondering if he still has time to make movies. The ex-body-building champ turned box-office heavyweight has turned his attentions to the restaurant biz.

There’s his role as pitchman for the soon-to-open restaurant Planet Hollywood, a film-theme version of the Hard Rock Cafe set to open in New York this month. Over the past few months, Schwarzenegger--along with fellow investors Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and director John Hughes--has mugged for the camera in various Planet Hollywood fashions; the photos have turned up everywhere from Esquire to Spy.

Now there’s word that he and Planet Hollywood co-owner Robert Earl are about to co-star in another project--an as-yet-unnamed cafe on Santa Monica’s Main Street, scheduled to open by mid-November. Designer Adam Tihany (he designed Bice in Beverly Hills and is designer and co-owner of Remi in Santa Monica) has been hired to turn the red brick building that Schwarzenegger owns into a 130-seat restaurant.

The style of cuisine? A blend of Spago and the Ivy, Schwarzenegger’s favorite restaurants. But the Austrian-born hunk also has a heart--he will open for breakfast so his bodybuilding friends will have a place to go to get granola, vegetable juices, bran muffins and other healthy snacks.

And the big guy remembers his homeland--he offered fellow Austrian Manfred Krankl, now manager at Campanile on La Brea, the job of restaurant manager. Krankl, however, declined.

“I’m a partner at Campanile for one thing,” he said, “so it would take quite a lot to move. And the question of me working there was so far away from becoming any kind of reality that I didn’t come close to discussing it in any detail.”

LITTLE BITES?: Mario Oliver, the handsome, French-born co-owner of the downtown nightclub Vertigo and ex-fiance of Monaco’s Princess Stephanie, is about to take over the Greek Connection on La Cienega. He plans to rename the restaurant Tryst and change the menu. In place of Greek food, there will be hot and cold tapas , served from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.

But Oliver is still struggling with the proper way to describe his new menu: “The restaurant I am opening is going to be inexpensive, high-qualify food, tapas, but I don’t want to call them tapas . Tapas means Spanish cuisine. I want to be international cuisine.”

Oliver has hired designer Ron Meyers (who created the interior space for Club Lux and Atlas restaurant) to help him make the cosmetic changes he has planned for the space. “I have a lot of knowledge in interior decorating,” Oliver said. “I have been to school. So I know how to take care of those things. Ron, myself and the chef are going to be a great team.”

If all goes well, the chef will be 31-year-old Frenchman Philippe Reynaud, sous chef at the Westwood Marquis. “We are going to have him,” Oliver said, “but we haven’t signed a contract because the restaurant isn’t legally mine yet.”

And what kind of clientele is Oliver hoping to attract? “I am trying to work two crowds,” he said. “The conservative crowd who go to dinner from 6 o’clock until 9 o’clock--that’s one crowd. But also I am trying to attract the other crowd, people who go to Roxbury until 1 or 2, kind of trendy.”

But Oliver says he doesn’t really want to be too trendy: “I want to be alive in two or three years.”

LAST RESORT: French chef Claude Segal has left Tapenade, the independently run restaurant at the Rancho Santa Fe tennis resort Rancho Valencia, where the well-known, peripatetic French chef has cooked off and on since 1990. “With Claude Segal it was a very interesting experiment,” said Rudolph Richter, the resort’s general manager. “It’s just not really what we are looking for. Claude is a great chef, but we will do something different, and I think it will be very exciting.”

Richter added that the management felt a different type of cuisine was needed at the resort, but he declined to say what they had in mind. However, The Times has learned that the resort has hired Bradley Ogden, the innovative Northern California chef who owns the Lark Creek Inn in Larkspur, as consulting chef. In the meantime, Segal has been parked for a few weeks at La Valencia, the sister hotel to Rancho Valencia, which is in La Jolla.

Ogden said he was invited down to the resort about a month ago to take a look at the place. “The property has got a real nice feel,” he said. “It just needs some energy to it--some good food--and it needs to be repositioned. It’s always been considered a tennis resort; I’d like to see it more like a Bel-Air or a resort hotel, not just for tennis.”

His first order of business is to reorganize the kitchen--he hopes to have a wood-burning oven installed--and to hire and train a new chef. Does he have someone in mind?

“I do,” he said. “Three or four people. There are some good candidates, including one guy who used to work with Larry Forgione for a number of years in New York.” The food will be lighter, fresher. “My food,” he said.

THE CART BEFORE THE HORSES?: On Monday, the Board of Recreation and Parks, which had previously issued a cease-and-desist order to prevent the opening of the Los Angeles International Culinary Institute at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, granted the institute permission to open a school for professional chefs at the center, effective Sept. 9 . . . on several conditions.

A new, amended contract with the Equestrian Center must be approved giving the Recreation and Parks Department, which oversees the center’s operations, 5 1/2% of the gross receipts from the restaurant and school operations. The Culinary Institute must also grant scholarships to minorities and the needy.

Also on Monday, The Times received a press release in the mail from the Culinary Institute, dated Aug. 23, announcing Italian wine and food cooking classes and a gala reception to be held on Sept. 13 “at the recently opened Los Angeles International Culinary Institute at the Equestrian Center in Griffith Park.”

“That’s interesting,” said Greg Nelson of Councilman Joel Wachs’ office. “There is still a point of argument that is unresolved there. How it is going to get resolved, I’m not sure yet. It looks pretty dim that (the Culinary Institute) can get the full contract renegotiated by Sept. 9 in a way that makes everybody happy.” If the institute opens without a renegotiated contract, Nelson said, “we’ll settle it through the courts.”