How to Have Your Planet and Eat It Too

The BMW’s door was open, providing a perch for a pair of salmon-crested cockatoos. Their caretaker, psychologist Lorin Lindner, was touching up a mural that frames this Ventura Boulevard parking lot with the verdant image of the Amazon rain forest.

Lindner “rescued” the birds from abusive owners. As the Los Angeles coordinator for Earth First! and a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, she is an activist to the nth degree. At last New Year’s Rose Parade, Lindner was arrested after climbing aboard the General Motors float and unfurling a banner claiming that GM kills animals in crash tests.

So it wasn’t surprising to find Lindner helping paint the exterior of the Amazon Bar & Grill in Sherman Oaks--stage two of an enterprise that bills itself as “L.A.’s Only Environmental Bar & Grill.”

But when Lindner said that she’s a “veganist”--that she shuns all animal products, from leather to wool to goose down--the scent of hypocrisy came wafting across the asphalt.

Or maybe chef Mario Guerrero, late of Cha Cha Cha, had just put some free-range chicken on the grill.

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There are times--say, when you read a menu that promises “purchase of these items directly benefits the indigenous people of the rain forest”--when it’s just too easy to be cynical.

But such are the stated intentions, if not pretensions, of the new Amazon Bar & Grill. When this restaurant opens Friday night, don’t bother checking your attitude at the door. Managing partner Steve Cuccio will try to persuade you that what’s happening here really is, as they say in Hollywood, a beautiful thing.

Cuccio calls himself an “eco-preneur,” a guy trying to make a buck and preserve the planet at the same time. “The club scene” connected him with Tony Delagreco, a fellow Easterner and a veteran of the restaurant and nightclub business.

If rock ‘n’ roll could spawn the Hard Rock Cafe, if the film biz could create Planet Hollywood, Cuccio and Delagreco figured environmentalism could have an eatery of its own. What a concept.

With investors such as actor Dolph Lundgren, they opened the first Amazon six months ago on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. It proved popular enough to inspire this Sherman Oaks showplace, a dark jungle of silk foliage centered on a 15-foot waterfall. Sculpted “trees” rise nearby, hiding the pumps and tubes that cycle the water.

Cuccio says that the entire operation is ecologically correct: Their paper products are recycled. A company called Eco Labs provides all their cleaning agents. Nuts are purchased from Cultural Survival, a nonprofit that helped set up the Xapuri Collective in the western Amazon to help indigenous people preserve their culture. As for the electricity that powers the waterfall, “We’re getting quotes right now on a solar panel system,” Cuccio says.

There’s no beef on the menu. Consumers of red meat, according the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), are prime suspects in the rape of the planet. “One 4-oz. fast-food hamburger is made from the destruction of about 55 square feet of tropical rainforest.” Or so says RAN’s parking lot mural.

But when the Amazon held a glitzy preview party last week, it was pure Hollywood. The paparazzi focused on a guy who looked like the comic Sam Kinison, raised from the dead. He had dutiful female ornaments on each arm. The blonde was sheathed in leather, strategically cut to reveal the curves that Nature, or a cosmetic surgeon, had given her.

Lord knows how much rain forest she killed.

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It’s tempting to suggest that the Amazon exists to allay Hollywood’s guilt. Here in the capital of conspicuous consumption, the principal exports are images that glorify violence and destruction. Hollywood has always wanted to have its planet and eat it too.

Hypocrisy? That’s too strong a word, Lorin Lindner says, both for her and the restaurant. Yes, she suggests, the Amazon would be a healthier, more Earth-sensitive restaurant if it didn’t serve poultry or fish or liquor, if it didn’t allow smoking, if it had a natural-fibers-only dress code. The activist admits she used to wonder if Cuccio and Delagreco were “just a couple of tough New York guys with an angle.”

But now she’s seen enough to vouch for the Amazon’s sincerity. If nothing else, Lindner says, it’s an example of how businesses can join the cause. And if it gives Hollywood some food for thought, what’s wrong with that?

Lindner even forgave the sight of all that animal hide. People, she explained, evolve over time, step by step.

“I used to buy black leather miniskirts,” she explained, “and go out dancing.”