Ex-Chefs to the Stars : Celebrity Kitchens Serve as Special Training Grounds for Future Restaurateurs

Tony Di Lembo’s linkup with Barbra Streisand happened as the result of a conversation he overheard at a party in Los Angeles about her interest in hiring a personal chef. “I was her biggest fan so I thought if I applied, at the very least I’d get to see her house.”

Di Lembo’s family was in the restaurant business in Pittsburgh and though he went into the computer software business after college he had soon quit his job to attend cooking school and then went to Europe and apprenticed himself in a variety of French and Italian restaurants.

Hired by Streisand to cook dinner for four at her home, Di Lembo was soon whirling through the Irvine Ranch Market, stocking up to meet the demands of the constant entertaining in Streisand’s Beverly Hills and Malibu homes.

He was Streisand’s personal chef for two years. “It was in many ways a cook’s paradise but my goal had always been to own my own restaurant,” he says, “and so I had to make the big decision eventually to leave.”

Now co-owner of Indigo restaurant on 3rd Street and the adjacent Breadworks bakery, (Indigo, opened in 1988, spawned a demand for the breads Di Lembo created there, leading to the opening of the Breadworks Bakery in 1990), Di Lembo still acknowledges the influence his mid-’80s stint with Streisand has had on his style. “I learned an enormous amount about nutrition from her. She was the busiest person I ever met, but she was so into food she always had time to buzz the kitchen, often to draw my attention to something she had read in a diet book, a health book or a cookbook.”

Di Lembo is not alone among Los Angeles’ young and innovative chefs who found it beneficial to work for a Hollywood celebrity. Whitney Werner, owner of Whitney’s restaurant on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, and Mani Niall, of Mani’s Bakery on Fairfax, both found their time working for the rich and famous has been good for more than name-dropping.

Werner was private chef to “Dynasty” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” producer Aaron Spelling and his wife Candy. Far from demanding anything exotic, Werner discovered that the Spellings’ tastes “brought me back to my roots. Aaron liked pork chops and ketchup--probably the greatest sauce ever invented--and Candy’s concern about her weight taught me how to make really good soups without cream and butter, and salad dressings with little or no oil.

“They wanted straightforward good food, attractively prepared. That was something I had lost touch with working in gourmet restaurants, doing my own thing. They certainly didn’t want ancient Chinese recipes--fish with eyes, things like that which I had learned when I worked in hotels in Taiwan.”

Werner’s interest in cooking started early. “Growing up I would rather watch ‘The Galloping Gourmet’ than cartoons,” he admits. He began working for the Spellings four years ago when, looking to pick up some spare hours of work, he was recommended to them through an agency.

The hours turned into a five-day-a-week job and during his days off he would make sure the fridge contained the fat-free meals for Candy. But his goal always held to open his own restaurant, which he was eventually able to do with his wife Cheryl Kunitake, whom he met when they were both working at the Bel Age Hotel. They opened Whitney’s in 1990.

Contrary to rumor, Michael Jackson isn’t particularly outlandish in his eating habits, simply preferring vegetarian versions of American favorites. “He liked the tried and the true, just prepared without meat. Pizza, Chinese salads, Mexican food . . .,” says Mani Niall, who now owns Mani’s Bakery restaurant on Fairfax.

Niall, who cooked a vegetarian meal for his whole school when he was 16, met Jackson when the entertainer frequented the vegetarian Golden Temple restaurant where Niall was working. He began bringing meals to the studio where Jackson was recording the “Thriller” album and then signed on for the U. S. leg of the concert tour, working on the private jet and in the kitchens of many hotels where the staff was usually very co-operative “probably because they were curious and looking at what he was going to eat was going to be the nearest they got to him.”

Niall found Jackson fun to be around and so stayed on for a year working in the star’s Encino home where there always had to be cookies for the many guests. “People think of Michael as a health nut but that’s not correct, he likes healthy food not ‘health’ food,” Niall says.

But Jackson also had a very sweet tooth and to satisfy that taste Niall began creating desserts, using whole wheat flour and sweetening with fruit juice concentrate or barley malt instead of sugar. Jackson liked Niall’s chocolate-dipped almond shortbread and his banana cranberry crunch cake, and current patrons of Niall’s tiny Fairfax shop delight in the same, especially the show business crowd, ever mindful of staying in shape. The chocolate-dipped peanut butter cookies have prompted The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis to write Niall fan letters, and rave reviews came from other celebrities including Judith Light and Roseanne and Tom Arnold.