Food You’ll Never Eat : Film industry insiders are going back to studio commissaries when they do lunch. Blame it on the economy: You don’t score points by eating at expensive restaurants anymore
In the ‘70s and ‘80s, movie people signed up for the gourmet revolution at least as fast as anybody else. Previously, stars had basically wanted a plush environment and a friendly staff; suddenly they were going to the ultimate no-decor foodie hangout, Spago. A restaurant had to be willing to indulge the movie people, but exciting cuisine had become all-important.
That was then, this is now. Today the talent agencies, traditional patrons of Los Angeles’ hot restaurants, are suffering. One agency folded last year, and 100 agents were let go when the William Morris Agency bought Triad. Meanwhile, artist rosters continue to be cut, spending limits are being imposed, and some agents have actually had their credit cards pulled. As a result, a couple of famous Beverly Hills restaurants are complaining about lost business--to say nothing of overdrawn tabs.
Hollywood’s instinctive solution has been to go back to the neglected studio commissaries. They’re cheaper than restaurants, but they have the same potential for schmoozing and table-hopping and the all-important Hollywood activity of being seen with people. And they have a real advantage over any restaurant--to eat at a commissary, you have to have an invitation from somebody who “is officed”--that’s studio-ese for “has an office” at the studio. That means nobody has to deal with gawkers from the general public. (The authors visited seven of them as guests of people who have offices on the studio lots.)
Like all workplace dining places, the studio commissaries have very reasonable prices. The fact that most people pay cash is a pretty clear sign of that (you can also use credit cards, and on some lots there are people who just sign and put the meal on their accounts).
So the commissaries are booming. People in the industry are trading notes about which studios have the better ones. At another time, the biggies might have been dining out, but in recent months you could see Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas and Anthony Hopkins all at the Sony commissary, which isn’t even one of the hot ones.
The studios are responding to this, though not all with the same rapidity--several have been sold or relocated in the last year--and the result is not necessarily that eating on the lot is just like eating in a restaurant. Most studios have two levels of food service: a cafeteria for a quick sandwich and a more restaurant-like dining room for more significant, and more leisurely, meals. But particularly in the dining rooms, they are upgrading their food, broadening the selections, adding a fashionable tray of variety breads.
Still, commissary dining is not quite like restaurant dining. Since the diners are under the eye of their peers and the studio itself, a self-imposed code of culinary correctness prevails. People are reluctant to be seen ordering dessert, which explains a lot of perfunctory dessert lists. The tastiest choice on a menu is likely to be a salad, since salad is absolutely the most culinary correct thing to eat.
Paramount
“The studio commissaries have always lost money,” observes producer Marvin Worth, sitting at one of the power tables at the Paramount commissary. (The power seats are in the corners of the big, square patio; the masses mostly sit indoors, in a dining room that looks like a cross between a gazebo and an Art Deco-era cruise ship.)
“The original reason for them in the old days,” Worth continues, “was to keep the actors on the lot at lunchtime so they wouldn’t go out and get drunk. They lost money, but they kept the studio from losing hours.”
The ‘90s commissaries, by contrast, offer wine but nobody will touch it, and they have culinary ambitions. Sherry Lansing, who has been sitting at a power table in the opposite corner and now comes over to say hello to Worth’s lunch partner--music and sports publicist Gary Stromberg--and to congratulate Worth on getting “Malcolm X” produced, is Paramount’s studio head. Her ascent to power is expected to mean major changes all around, but the Paramount commissary has already been soliciting menu suggestions (most of them have turned out to be for pasta and vegetarian dishes).
As sampled one recent day, the food at Paramount is roughly in the middle of the pack as movie studio commissary food goes. There are a couple of fashionable appetizers, such as crab cakes. Several hip pastas are listed (black linguine; Cajun fettuccine; angel hair with your choice of chicken and pesto, or artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes, or fresh tomatoes and extra-virgin olive oil), though the bestseller is tendorcho --an unfashionably rich dish of cheese ravioli in a cream sauce flavored with smoked turkey.
Mostly the food is upscale lunch counter stuff, still the foundation of most studio cuisine: Cobb salad, Chinese chicken salad, the usual hot and cold sandwiches, including French dip. There’s a diet section (“trim and slim”), and you can ask for your omelet to be made with Egg Beaters. Vegetarians have a couple of choices, such as an eggplant mozzarella quesadilla.
Those fashionable crab cakes are just OK--a little mushy, a little spicy. The gazpacho uses good fresh tomatoes. The fish of the day is accompanied by the vegetables of the day (turnip and chard, say). A blueberry duck salad comes on a Westsidey foundation of mixed greens, the blueberry part of the name referring not only to blueberry vinegar in the soy-laced vinaigrette but the scattering of berries on the salad. Another special is pork loin with a little thin pan gravy and very good roasted potatoes. The dessert selection is dominated by frozen yogurt and Pepperidge Farms cookies.
The effect is a little wobbly, an uncertain compromise between serious restaurant food and serious luncheonette food. A sense of transition is in the air.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. may represent the future. A year ago, the studio cast out the contract food service it had been using and remodeled the old Blue Room to look like a restaurant in a ‘30s movie, complete with marble floor and sweeping Art Deco curve to the wall--Art Deco being the accepted way of invoking memories of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Above all, Warner’s brought in chef Maurizio Binotti. The commissary (as distinct from the fast-food cafeteria next door) is now a real restaurant.
You cannot feed film people without offering chopped salad, deli sandwiches and chicken soup, of course, but this menu basically recalls 72 Market Street or any of dozens of California cuisine places. It has some American nostalgia food, oddball California pizzas (one with cheese and lime-marinated chicken), grilled dishes, vintage-dated California wines and fresh bread sticks in the bread tray.
You could start out with an impressive venison pate, served on mixed greens with roasted garlic cloves and grilled shiitake mushroom caps, at least as good an appetizer as you can get in any San Fernando Valley restaurant. The split-pea soup is smooth and light, enlivened with sweet red peppers. There’s an elegant Nouvelle American meat loaf, studded with chunks of carrot and served with mushroom gravy and fresh mashed potatoes. The pastry tray includes a very light napoleon with a whipped-cream filling.
None of this may suggest Hollywood tradition, but oddly, one thing does, whether the management realizes it or not. If you order an espresso, the server brings it in a regular coffee mug, recalling Stan Laurel’s classic line “I’ll have a demitasse--in a big cup.”
Disney
The fancier of the Disney Studios’ dining areas is the Rotunda, situated in lonely isolation at the top of the Team Disney Building, one of the grand new structures of red-brown stone built under Michael Eisner. We are in another world here on the Disney lot in Burbank, an adorable place you might call Planet Disney, where the studio groundskeepers carry sacks of nuts to feed the squirrels.
It’s lonely at the top of the Team Disney Building, but still cute. The round room is circled by plump Doric columns supporting a dome decorated with what appear to be gigantic fabric swatches. The chairs reproduce the classic director’s chair in wood, but there’s a cutout Mickey Mouse head in the backrest; the plates have Mickey head patterns on them; the waiters wear Mickey ties. For some reason, the sugar packets tout the Sherman brothers, “Disney’s Supercalifragilistic Songwriting Team.”
The Rotunda may be small, but it’s full of mouse muscle. TV producers Allan Burns and Charlie Hauck are at one table. Joe Roth--former head of Fox, who now has an independent producer deal at Disney--is across the room in a leather jacket. Ricardo Mestres, president of Disney’s Hollywood Pictures division, comes in, sits down, gets up and talks on a phone for 20 minutes, and then leaves without ordering anything--a bona fide studio lunch.
The food is surprisingly serious here. Crudites with a blue-cheese dressing come first, with a bread tray of rolls, jalapeno cheese bread and sesame rusks. The menu choices lean to sandwiches and salads and health food, as usual, but the daily specials are more ambitious, such as Manila clams in a no-kidding sauce of garlic and white wine sprinkled with fresh sage (the clams themselves could be a tiny bit fresher, however).
The Cobb salad features big chunks of blue cheese. Grilled vegetables, from the health menu, include broccoli, tomato, squashes, carrots and Japanese eggplant marinated in balsamic vinegar. Salmon in pesto sauce is accompanied by fried broccoli ravioli. Rosemary chicken paillard comes with a mixture of mashed potatoes and turnips, currently considered a cutting-edge idea on the Westside.
At dessert time, Disney is the place to be. It makes an outstanding creme caramel , so light it’s as if creme anglaise had precariously attained a solid state. The cookies are baked on the premises: sugar cookies, chocolate chip with walnuts, tiny real American brownies. The special dessert one recent day was profiteroles with ice cream filling and hearty chocolate sauce.
Universal
The Celebrity Room at Universal Studios has no show-biz references in the decor, as a result of the recent remodel; it’s the Studio Cafe next door, the fast-food dispensary, that is covered with posters. Today Craig T. Nelson and Laura Dern have both wandered in. Studio head Tom Pollock and producer Rafaela Di Laurentiis are here too, though not sitting together. At the next table, Charles Grodin is eating matzo ball soup with Ivan Reitman.
That matzo ball soup is pretty good, starring a farinaceous sphere the approximate size of a softball.
You’re supposed to eat the Chinese chicken salad, made from smoked chicken and fresh fried won-ton strips, using chopsticks. There’s a simple grilled chicken breast stuffed with mushrooms and spinach.
But the menu goes beyond all this. It lists black linguine with goat cheese and Japanese eggplant, and an open-face ahi sandwich where the grilled tuna is quaintly covered with melted Havarti cheese and fresh dill. A tortilla soup, scattered with blue and lurid-red tortilla strips, is thickened with masa and melted cheese, like a vegetarian enchilada with extra sauce.
The creme brulee has a nice sugar crust, but the rest of the desserts are perfunctory: apple cobbler with a rather commercial-tasting cider-thickened filling and a chocolate peanut cake served so cold that the layer of peanut butter, between the butter-cream frosting and the chocolaty bottom, is stiff and chewy.
20th Century Fox
The commissary at 20th Century Fox Studios (now increasingly wishing to be known simply as Fox, for an obvious reason) is drenched in tradition. It was originally known as Cafe de Paris, because it was built on the location of a set representing a French restaurant by that name. Before that time, the Fox staff had eaten box lunches, because there were scarcely any restaurants in then-rural Westwood.
The walls are covered with murals representing the studio’s stars as of 1935, cavorting all over the world--Janet Gaynor surfboarding in Waikiki, Will Rogers with his prizewinning pig Blue Boy from “State Fair.” It’s the most famous studio commissary and has been used as a restaurant setting in TV shows and movies such as “Escape From the Planet of the Apes.”
In 1972 the room was partitioned so that one side would serve as a cafeteria, the other as a more formal restaurant. The foods are pretty firmly in the lunch counter category: chopped salad, Chinese chicken salad, burgers and sandwiches, plus angel-hair pasta, California pizzas and fish. One hears that Barry Diller saw the commissary as a personal project when he was the studio head, for instance, decreeing that diners should be seated immediately, even if their whole party has not arrived. This policy seems to have since fallen into abeyance. More surprisingly, so has the menu practice of listing fat, sodium and calorie counts.
At least the Chinese chicken salad is interesting, featuring stir-fried snow peas and several shades of cabbage along with the usual chicken and fried noodles. You can get a conventional ginger dressing or a sesame-flavored mayonnaise dressing.
Pizza bianca is said to be popular, possibly because it’s piled with about two inches of vegetables on a layer of melted low-fat mozzarella. It’s more like a bunch of steamed vegetables served on a cheese-covered doughnut than a pizza, but you really get your culinarily correct veggies here.
The garden burger is a pretty good one of rolled oats, brown rice, onions and walnuts, though the kitchen has a pretty heavy hand with sprouts. On the other hand, it has an exceedingly light hand with some of the soups and salads. The clam chowder tastes more like cream of celery than anything else, and on the Caesar salad (in a sort of ranch dressing), anchovies are by request only.
Sony
In the face of fairly sophisticated competition from the likes of Warner or Disney, Sony (incorporating Columbia and TriStar, located on the old MGM lot in Culver City) is at a disadvantage. The old commissary dating from the MGM days was just torn down as a consequence of the studio’s ambitious building project.
The studio is putting up a spacious new one there, but that will take at least another six months. Meanwhile, Barry Wine of the Quilted Giraffe in New York is consulting on the food at Sony.
At the moment, there’s an interim cafeteria called the Studio Grill near the temporary main gate on Culver Boulevard, across from the Sony Pictures Plaza--formerly the Filmland Building, originally known as the new MGM building--and a more upscale interim commissary, the Atrium Restaurant, right in the Sony Pictures Plaza.
The Atrium occupies a lovely space behind and to the right of the lobby, a spot little known to old employees because it was formerly reserved for private parties. It’s a quiet, carpeted room with blond wood walls. The top MGM and Sony people frequent it, but maitre d’ Elaine Woo, formerly of Wolfgang Puck’s Eureka, keeps their presence a secret from the would-be stars and writers who scan the reservations book at the entryway.
The menu is soups, salads, a sandwich of the day, changing hot entrees and vegetarian plates. The chicken soup with matzo ball is always available, and on special you might find an acceptable barley and wild mushroom soup. One day there’s a wonderful roasted pear and Jarlsberg cheese salad with endive, lettuces, fruits and toasted almonds--and a yellow pansy for garnish.
The Sony people lunch on saffron couscous topped with Spanish artichokes or a seafood enchilada in roasted tomatillo sauce (if an inexperienced waiter tries to serve the first and second courses at the same time, it may end up spending too long under the hot lamps). They can get angel-hair pasta, steamed vegetables or big non-greasy steak fries and good onion rings. This is the rare commissary that doesn’t offer wine.
The desserts include an “apple strip,” dressed in sticky blueberry syrup, the pastry slightly singed--a flashback to true ‘60s-era French food. At least the kitchen can handle the balance of flavors in a chocolate raspberry mousse cake.
Raleigh
Insiders around town know Raleigh Studios as a place for good food. It may not be a name to conjure with on the order of Fox or Paramount, but you’ve seen a lot of things shot there--a lot of TV commercials. The Cafe is around in the back, looking so much like a ramshackle Mexican cantina that it could have been a set at one time.
Raleigh stands out from the rest for its specialty in ethnic food. It offers Jamaican jerk chicken salad and Thai beef salad as well as the Italian and occasional Mexican items found at the other commissaries. It has a full page of salads, many of which can be ordered in (still pretty large) half-portions.
Raleigh regulars like the Mandarin chicken salad, with fried rice noodles as well as fried won-tons, romaine and shredded carrot in a rather sweet sesame and rice vinegar dressing. The jerk chicken salad, also based on romaine, is made with white meat rubbed with red pepper and cumin and comes with red onion and tomato in a sharp lime-juice dressing.
The Raleigh version of clam chowder has scarcely any clam flavor and is no more likely to convince a New Englander than any other around town, but its combination of potatoes and cream is pleasantly set off with sweet red peppers. On the other hand, the carne asada is generous with the steak, the beef fried crisp and surprisingly smoky.
A garden burger takes a safe road to palatable vegetarianism: The patty is in effect a big falafel wafer on a multigrain bun. The half rotisserie chicken is tender and moist and comes with barbecue sauce glazed on, with a dipping sauce of unexpected pepperiness.
The baked vegetables on the side are limp and dreary, though. And the duck sausage pizza is bizarre. On a bed of melted mozzarella come zucchini slices, a cilantro-flavored duck sausage--and a sweet syrup, evidently maple. Maybe some people just associate the flavor of sausage with pancakes and syrup. Raleigh doesn’t knock itself out at dessert: just cookies it bakes itself and some commercial pastries.
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Hollywood has always had a complex relationship with the rest of the country. It’s profoundly elitist, but it makes its living by appealing to the masses, and Hollywood people themselves mostly come from plebeian backgrounds.
So the film industry is going back to the commissaries for budget reasons, meaning that you don’t make marks by eating at expensive restaurants anymore--but not having to deal with the public is also a reason. It wants light, trendy pastas--but no commissary would be crazy enough to leave homely old chicken or matzo ball soup off the menu.
There is snobbery here, but a bewildering, Byzantine mixture of plain, reverse, double- and triple-reverse snobbery. Once again, we’re living in another New Age and the counters have changed, but the Hollywood game remains the same.
And the name of that game, as always, is: Lunch.
