COVER STORY : Hot Cuisine--Who Turned Off the Heat? : Southern California is a culinary paradise lost. Too many restaurants and too little money are reasons, but other factors took a toll

Asking a fellow chef “how’s business” these days is like asking a woman of a certain age how old she is.

--Campanile chef and co-owner Mark Peel

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You know you’re in a recession when hip-restaurant hostesses are nice to you when you call for a reservation. Even if the restaurant is booked, you’ll often get friendly encouragement: “We’ve got lots of openings tomorrow night.”

In 1990, Money magazine called Los Angeles the culinary capital of the United States, citing the city’s “soaring wealth” and its “anything-goes atmosphere.” Well, things have changed.

Last month, Los Angeles lost one of its best restaurants, Trumps, where Michael Roberts helped found L.A.’s modern California food movement. Other recent big-name closings in Southern California: La Serre, Seventh Street Bistro, Magdalena’s, St. Estephe, the Rex of Newport Beach, Fresco, Symphonie. Even Wolfgang Puck was forced to close a restaurant: Eureka, which did well but not well enough to support the money-losing brewery to which it was attached.

To survive, many restaurants have downscaled, lowered prices or even compromised their standards to stay competitive in the marketplace. Michael McCarty, who once boasted of selling $10 bottles of mineral water, dropped prices 30% two years ago at his Santa Monica branch of Michael’s. And L.A.’s great French chef, Michel Richard, has had his biggest financial success with the Broadway Deli, a place where macaroni and cheese is one of the best things on the menu.

“People don’t want the latest, the hottest, the newest anymore,” says Michael Franks, co-owner of the South Bay’s Chez Melange, Depot, Fino and Misto. “People want food they’re familiar with. They want large portions. They want value. They don’t want to spend $100 for dinner.”

If restaurants had TV Guide log lines, this is how a lot of the successful new ones might be described: a nice, neighborhood place with reasonable prices. Isn’t it bland--and yet so comforting?

“I never thought I’d serve a dish at Valentino like grilled chicken on top of Caesar salad,” says restaurateur Piero Selvaggio. “Even for lunch. But we’re in business to please the public--and somebody requested it. It’s become a big item.”

It used to be, says L.A. restaurateur Bruce Marder (he opened West Beach Cafe, Rebecca’s, DC 3 and, with partners Michel Richard and Marvin Zeidler, Broadway Deli), “you open a restaurant, you serve great food, you do great business.”

Not anymore. In August, the trade magazine Restaurants & Institutions put Los Angeles near the bottom of its ranking of the best cities in America in which to open a restaurant. The top spot, with a score of 122 on the magazine’s restaurant opportunity index: Gadsden, Ala. Los Angeles scored just 70.

As one chef put it: “The ‘80s are over.”

What happened?

“I think it’s hard to underestimate the recession as a sort of base level of horror,” Angeli’s Evan Kleiman says.

The accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand reported earlier this year that sales in Southern California’s upscale restaurants dropped 5.4% from 1990 to 1991. Another big drop is expected this year.

“People have been talking about recession on a national level for two years now,” Bikini’s John Sedlar says. “But here in Los Angeles, it only hit home recently, over the last six to nine months. Of course, when it hit, it hit hard.”

“I don’t see a quick turnaround,” says David Wilhelm, who has built a restaurant empire in Orange County and this year opened Kachina Grill in downtown Los Angeles and Diva in Costa Mesa. “If I had my choice, I wouldn’t be doing restaurants in Southern California right now.”

Still, recession is just one of many problems facing restaurants. One factor: there’s simply more competition.

Listen to Bruce Marder: “When I opened the West Beach Cafe in 1978, I had Malibu, the Palisades, Brentwood, Venice, Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, Hollywood--people from all those places were coming to my restaurant. Now there’s something like my place all over. The pie is being cut up into smaller pieces.”

Here’s Evan Kleiman: “When we opened Angeli in ‘84, we were the hottest thing since sliced bread--it was as if people had never seen a sandwich before. We were immediately absorbed into this wave of consumption. Now there are clones of us all over the place--it’s a completely different environment.”

For one thing, the California food movement, copied all over the world, is now 15 years old, which is a nice age for a teen rebel but pretty much over the hill for a trend. Most of the young chef pioneers--like their fellow baby boomers, their customers--are, much as they hate to hear it, middle-aged.

“We started a revolution and the revolution happened, but now what?” Kleiman asks.

So many of the ingredients that chefs in Southern California had to struggle to obtain 10 years ago--mesclun, arugula, shiitake, lemongrass, fresh Thai chiles--now show up in supermarkets. Many home cooks will look at a dish listed on a restaurant menu and smugly tell their friends, “I made this for dinner last week, but I used mizuna instead of radicchio.”

There’s also what Marder calls the localization of communities. People don’t have to drive 15, 10 or even five miles to find a nice place to eat. “There’s more of everything,” Marder says, “more malls, more movie theaters, more restaurants, less traveling.” Every neighborhood wants its own version of West Beach and Angeli, and most neighborhoods are getting just that.

“What was missing in Los Angeles 10 years ago were the restaurants in the middle, the American equivalents of Italy’s trattorias and osterias , of France’s brasseries and bistros,” says Selvaggio, who followed up his high-service Valentino with two casual places, Primi and Posto. “The early ‘80s started that proliferation of the neighborhood restaurant. Little cafes started opening all over, and they sustained themselves by having good food--not necessarily great food--at a reasonable price. That became the model.”

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And that became a problem for the restaurants trying to maintain a tradition of fine dining--they started to seem unnecessarily expensive.

“Eating out became something that didn’t have to be taken very seriously,” Selvaggio says. “People said, ‘Look, I can have all this food and I don’t have to spend a lot of money.’ So the gap between those places and the tablecloth restaurants closed. People don’t really care what you put into a restaurant in terms of cost and detail; all they want to know is ‘How much am I going to pay for it?’ ”

“We were supposed to become European,” says one disappointed eater. “We were supposed to care about food. Were we so fickle that this was all just another trend?”

Food here can be wonderful, but no L.A. restaurant would earn three stars in France’s Michelin Guide. Luxury ingredients and service cost big money, and L.A. diners don’t want to pay. It’s telling that the most expensive restaurant in town, Sushi Ko, is Japanese.

This is both our strength and our weakness. You don’t have to dress up to get a good meal in this town, and you don’t have to suffer through stiff service either. (Of course, the trade-off is you often get lousy service.) Also, no city, not even Singapore, can rival Los Angeles for the diversity of its authentic ethnic cooking.

What the ‘80s gave us is a democratic food scene where, for once, the trickle-down theory worked.

Even Sizzler went from what Mike Minchin, the company’s recently retired executive vice president, called “a cheap, budget steakhouse with poor-quality meat, not very much service and less-than-desirable ambience” to “a repositioned restaurant for families, singles, even yuppies.”

As the low end moved up, the high end moved down.

In 1988, Bob Spivak opened the first Daily Grill, now a successful mini-chain of restaurants that he says is exactly what people are looking for in the ‘90s.

“A lot of people don’t want to spend two hours eating dinner anymore,” Spivak says. “They don’t want to make plans. The Daily Grill is the kind of restaurant where people say, ‘Oh, let’s just go to the Daily Grill.’ It’s easy.”

It’s so easy that you don’t even have to go to the restaurant. All four branches of the Daily Grill deliver.

“Lifestyles have changed so much in the past 10 years,” Spivak says. “More people are having kids and they’re staying home, but at least in the areas our restaurants are located, they don’t have time to cook. They’re working two jobs and they’re exhausted. I think that’s why we’ve seen such an increase in our takeout and delivery business.”

Another lifestyle factor: health. People are settling down, getting rid of their bad habits. They worry about cholesterol and they drink less, which means they spend less money.

“At West Beach Cafe,” Marder says, “we were getting the same amount of people for lunch as ever, but the beverage percentage is down. That means my lunch profits are down. Where I was doing $1,500 for lunch four or five years ago, I’d do $1,000 now.” Marder recently decided to serve lunch at West Beach only on weekends.

“The challenge now,” says Angeli’s Kleiman, “is to learn how to operate within all these constraints.”

“In the ‘80s,” says Robert Bell, who co-owns the Chez Melange restaurant group with Franks, “it was a lot more fun to be a restaurateur, it was a lot more fun to cook, it was a lot more fun to go out to eat. This is a time to tighten your reins and be more of a businessman. It takes a lot more work to turn a profit.”

“Ten years ago when Robert and I started the company,” Franks says, “all we were thinking about was food, wine and service. Now we think about workmen’s comp rates, FICA taxes, all the political aspects of the restaurant business.”

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In many ways, though, Franks and Bell were ahead of the curve. Because their restaurants were outside the Melrose-Westside axis of most cutting-edge restaurants, they had to struggle through the ‘80s to attract attention. They held wine dinners, guest chef weeks, ethnic theme nights that other restaurants have only recently come to adopt. Once they even had a snake charmer. Early last year, they started a frequent-diner program--every dollar spent in a Chez Melange restaurant earns customers a point, which can be redeemed for shopping sprees at Nordstrom, free dinners, even a laser printer.

“I tried so hard to do a downscale restaurant,” says Bikini’s Sedlar, “but it’s not the way I eat, it’s not the way I live, and it’s not the way I like to feed my clientele. I love to challenge diners, and I love diners to challenge me.”

Even still, Sedlar made sure to put a steak and Caesar salad on Bikini’s menu. He set his lunches at accessible prices. And he recently opened a tamale bar at Bikini, which means customers can have a fun meal in fancy surroundings without paying a lot of money.

This summer, despite the recession, Orange County’s Wilhelm also opened a high-end restaurant with an unusual menu. “I’m not just going to roll over and say, ‘OK, here’s the same stuff you’re ordering every place else,’ ” he says. “But to a certain degree I’m playing it safe at Diva. I mean, some of the dishes on the menu, like rare ahi tuna, are almost cliche-ish.

“At the same time,” Wilhelm adds, “I’m going to exercise some creativity--and give people a reason to come back to my restaurant.”

In the end, it’s going to be the restaurants that keep their individuality that have the best chance of succeeding beyond the recession. Over and over again chefs, restaurateurs and analysts used the word passion in describing the key to success.

Even Sizzler’s Minchin says: “The biggest mistake a restaurant can make is to compromise on quality when times go bad. That’s the surest way to go out of business.”

And what about the next generation? Piero Selvaggio thinks the slump may actually help.

“When you are in your early 20s, it’s unfair to call you chef,” he says. “Wait until you are 30, 35, because then you have years of experimenting behind you, of burning your hands, of suffering the heat and, at the same time, clearing your ideas about taste and creativity and organization. This is how it’s supposed to be; this is how it’s done in Europe. It makes for better chefs and better restaurants.”

Consider Fred Eric and Octavio Becerra, who cooked the experimental food at the now-defunct nightclub Flaming Colossus. If the two had come of age as chefs three or four years earlier, they might have become part of the quotable L.A. chefs circle that includes, among others, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, Michel Richard and Michael Roberts.

Instead, they’ve trained through the ‘80s with Joachim Splichal at Max au Triangle and Patina, and worked with Chicago’s Rich Melman, who is considered the smartest restaurant businessman in America. Eric has traveled around the world trying to learn different ethnic cuisines, while Becerra stayed on with Splichal to become his executive chef at Patina and the newly opened Pinot. Eventually, the two hope to open a restaurant together.

“If Octavio and I had opened our own restaurant immediately after Flaming Colossus,” says Eric, who is now 30 and cooking at the small, clubby Olive, “I don’t think we would have had the confidence to pull it off. I think we’re both better off where we are. We’re both more mature, and I feel like I’ve finally really formed a style of my own.”

Eric is still idealistic: He wants to open a restaurant with food as true and sincere as Alice Water’s Chez Panisse, and he hopes to acquire the business sense of what he calls “a Rich Melman professional.”

“My real dream restaurant,” Eric says, “would be designed by Noguchi and serve only organic vegetarian food done with fun and humor. Maybe we’d auction the food off. Of course, if I opened that tomorrow, I’d be closing it two weeks later.”

* NEXT WEEK: Look for the tried-and-true and more affordable food. A survey of restaurants expected to open in the next year.