Political Indigestion : Saucy Restaurant Ads Are Canceled

Apparently, Southern Californians take their politics more seriously than one ad agency and one Orange County restaurant chain would have imagined.

An advertising campaign for Irvine-based Charley Brown’s restaurants has been canceled after objections from dozens of newspaper readers. The ad pictured Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton and alluded to the controversy about his sex life with such phrases as “We’re not fooling around” and “faithful new customers.”

Mike Monasmith, office manager for the Democratic Party of Orange County, said he took more than 20 phone calls Friday after the ad ran in the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register.

“People told us they didn’t like the dig at Clinton,” Monasmith said. He said he has received a verbal apology from the company but requested that the apology be printed in the newspapers.

Restaurant Enterprises Group, the parent company of Charley Brown’s, has not complied with that request. In a printed statement, the company said the ad was intended to be tongue-in-cheek political commentary, such as that put forth by late-night talk show hosts. The company declined to say how many calls it had received about the ad, but said that its intent was “clearly misinterpreted.”

On Sunday, Charley Brown’s ran a similar ad, again promoting its prime rib dinner, with a photo of Vice President Dan Quayle that misspelled the word potato as potatoe --an allusion to Quayle’s much-publicized effort to correct the already-correct spelling of a Trenton, N.J., sixth-grader during a school visit in June.

“I wasn’t real impressed with either ad,” said Greg Haskin, executive director of the Republican Party of Orange County. “But the Clinton ad referred to something much more serious than misspelling potato.”

The agency that created the campaign is Evans, Hardy & Young in Santa Barbara. Asked how the agency could have miscalculated public reaction to the ads, Executive Vice President Dennis Hardy said, “I don’t know.”

“These ads weren’t written to shock anyone or to promote any political agenda,” he added. “We wanted to cause somebody to smile when they looked at the ad; we had no loftier objectives than that.”

At a Glance: Restaurant Enterprises Group

* Corporate headquarters: Irvine

* Founded: 1986

* Corporate officers: Norman N. Habermann, president, chief executive; Mike Malanga, vice president of corporate development

* Nature of business: Owns and manages more than 500 restaurants worldwide

* Restaurants owned: Charley Brown’s, Reuben’s, Baxter’s, El Torito, Casa Maria, Coco’s, Carrow’s, Bob’s Big Boy (the company owns 104)

* Employees: 4,700

* 1991 sales: $869.9 million

Source: Los Angeles Times Editorial Library

Researched by DALLAS M. JACKSON / Los Angeles Times