Patina, Pinot, Patinette . . . Pastrami?

With his new bistro, Pinot, due to open at the end of the month in Studio City (on the site of the former La Serre), Joachim Splichal has started to work on his next project. He’s even moved some of the offices of his highly acclaimed Melrose Avenue restaurant, Patina, up the street to make room for the new venture.

“What we want to do,” he says, “is put in a little kitchen, chairs, tables--maybe 30-35 seats--and have a little takeout/wine shop operation that would promote our own products.” Splichal says the new restaurant, Patinette, will be an offshoot of Patina, and he expects it to have a built-in clientele. After all, Paramount Pictures has about 6,000 employees just down the street, he says. “All those people,” adds Splichal, “and they either can’t afford, are not dressed up, or don’t have the time to eat at Patina.”

Patinette, which is scheduled to open early next year, will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “I think the area needs something like this,” says Splichal. “ ‘Cheers’ calls up and wants lunch for 20. They order from Patina, and there’s a certain price attached to it. My feeling is that there are probably 100 on the lot at Paramount that want to call up and say, ‘Send me 100 pastramis.’ ”

SPAGETTES?: “This is definitely not a Spago by any stretch of the imagination,” says the president of the Wolfgang Puck Food Co. He’s talking about the 3,000-square-foot pizzeria that Puck is considering for the MCA Citywalk complex due to open at Universal City in early 1993. “The only entrees will be pizza, pasta and maybe one or two grilled items,” says Selwyn Joffe, who heads the frozen food company that sells Puck’s gourmet pizzas to America’s major supermarkets. Puck has already put pizzerias in Macy’s in San Francisco and in the mega Mall of America in Minneapolis.

“Wolfgang will probably kill me for saying this,” says Joffe, describing the upscale pizzeria, “but it will sort of be a slice of pizza from a slice of Spago. . . .”

MEAT & POTATOES: Patrick Healy, former chef/owner of Champagne, made a guest chef appearance at Xiomara restaurant in Pasadena last month. Now owner Xiomara Ardolina tells us it turned out so well she will turn her California contemporary style restaurant into a lower-priced bistro, and Healy will consult. Ardolina says the new menu should be in effect by Nov. 1. “I didn’t realize how much this restaurant looks like a bistro,” says Ardolina, “and bistros are getting very popular. Haute cuisine is out. People want meat and potatoes again.”

SAME SONG: Karen Gordy is determined to open a soul-food restaurant, but, as they might say in the South, she’s had trouble getting that dog to hunt. Last February, Gordy, daughter-in-law of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr., announced she had bought Pomegranate, the 7,000-square-foot Melrose Avenue restaurant and bakery, and would turn it into SOUL on melrose, serving down-home food such as black-eyed peas, smothered pork chops and Southern fried chicken. That deal fell through. Then we heard that she was looking at the L’Ermitage space on La Cienega. Now a spokeswoman for Gordy says she will open her restaurant--to be named Georgia--back at Pomegranate in November. She still plans to feature Southern food.

VISITING CHEF: “I’m sure this year he is going to get three stars,” says Champagne Bis owner Sophie Healy, “and then I will not be able to afford him.” So Healy has persuaded 39-year-old Jacques Chibois, executive chef of the luxurious two-star Le Royal Gray in Cannes, France, to come and cook at her West Los Angeles restaurant for a week beginning Friday. But visiting chefs don’t come cheap: A prix-fixe , three-course dinner, a la carte costs $75, four courses plus two desserts, $105. Says Healy: “It’s a recession, but we still have to enjoy life.”