Tacones--Cuisine Fit for a Conehead

“I wanted to come up with something to replace the hot dog and the pizza,” says Fred Eric. “Something really comfortable for walking in malls. ‘Handable’ food.” Eric finally came up with tacones: a taco in a cone. Colored, cone-shaped fried tortillas are filled with grilled meats, fish or vegetables. Eric plans to fill the green cones with grilled strips of chicken breast, jicama, roasted chile salsa and fresh salsa. The red ones will contain skirt steak; blue, swordfish belly; gold, potatoes.

Eric, who cooked at Olive on Fairfax and is planning on opening The Restaurant on Hillhurst with chef Robert Gadsby, is also consulting at The Lipp, which opened Wednesday in the space formerly occupied by Mel ‘n’ Rose’s Coffee Shop. “The owners wanted me to take their restaurant into something that would work for Melrose,” says Eric. “So we thought and thought about it and decided to make it a real low-priced, straight-forward American restaurant.” Dishes include real roast turkey with mashed potatoes and dressing, burgers, meatloaf and the open-faced chicken pot pie Eric made at Olive. “There are traces of ethnic too,” Eric says: “Instead of calling our typical Thai sauce ‘typical Thai sauce,’ we are calling it spicy sauce. Spicy sauce is really something people can be comfortable ordering in a diner.”

As part of the consulting deal, Eric says the owners agreed to give him space in the parking lot next door for his first tacone stand--called Tacones. “I thought Tacones would be really be great on Melrose,” says Eric, who plans to open that space in two months. “And the brilliance of it is, three employees can easily serve tacones for 2,000.”

LODGE LAUNCH: Remember Jackson’s? That’s the Beverly Boulevard restaurant that Alan Jackson and chef/partner Lionel Deniaud were planning to open back in January. Now the plan is to open in September. “My whole heart and spirit are with this little place,” says Deniaud. “It’s like my father’s restaurant in Brittany. So homey and cozy.”

The food will be simple too. Deniaud, opening chef at Hollywood Canteen, plans hearty, healthy salads and grilled meats. “I want to try to stay away from cream and butter and cheese,” he says. “No greasy stuff.”

In fact, Deniaud is so wrapped up in the restaurant, he’s even dreaming about it. “I woke up this morning with the idea for cooking trout,” he says. “So I went right to the market and bought this corn. Then I stuffed a boneless trout with the corn, a little tomato, cilantro and jalapenos, then cooked it all in the corn husk. It was so juicy and so great. That’s the kind of food I want.”

Although the partners want Jackson’s to be an homage to the quintessential American lodge--big beams, tall ceilings, plastered walls--Deniaud says there will definitely not be stuffed animal heads hanging on the walls. “I don’t want to be Saddle Peak Lodge, and I don’t want to be the new Caribou,” says Deniaud. “No, no, no, no, no.”

MELT DOWN AT MELTING POT: Ad exec Harvey Pool, a co-owner of Columbia Bar and Grill in Hollywood, has bought the former Melting Pot restaurant with three partners and re-christened it Clinton Street (after the little street that runs at a 45-degree angle to Melrose Avenue, not the President). “We’ve had people says it’s a great name,” says Pool. “Others have said it’s a terrible name.” Guess it depends on your politics.

The 175-seat restaurant is now open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Chef/partner Alex Gordon (he used to cook at the Beverly Wilshire) is cooking a new American-style menu, featuring everything from a chopped salad to bow-tie pasta with scrambled eggs to grilled Norwegian salmon.

A new staff has been trained and remodeling is expected to be completed by Labor Day. “We want to be a neighborhood restaurant that offers real good food at a real good price,” he says, “not a place where you go for lunch and have a salad and a glass of wine and the bill is 23 bucks.”

Now what restaurant would that be?

EVEN MORE OPENINGS: Shooting Star Ranch, which calls its food “boot scootin’ and campfire cookin’,” has taken over the spot formerly occupied by Tony Roma’s in Universal City (Tony Roma’s moved up the hill to Universal CityWalk). . . . Until it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last year, the short-lived Stringfellow’s nightclub occupied two floors at Two Rodeo in Beverly Hills. Now, the Portland-based McCormick & Schmick’s fish restaurant chain has signed a lease on the bottom floor. Although nothing has been signed, sources say Southern California’s most expensive restaurant, Ginza Sushiko, is expected to move into the top floor by the end of the year. . . . Another East India Grill has opened on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. Other branches of the popular California-Indian restaurants are located in Los Angeles and Santa Monica.