Westside / Cover Story : It’s a down time for upscale restaurants. Some have cut prices and altered their menus, while others have called it quits. The indulgent ‘80s are history. For many, the mood has changed from . . . : Feast to Famine

Eric Stapelman, a partner in the recently defunct Luma restaurant on Montana Avenue, is in rescue mode. He’s just returned to earthquake-ravaged Los Angeles and is rushing to meet someone who plans to open a restaurant in the Beverly Center area. The would-be restaurateur wants Stapelman’s advice.

“I’m going to discourage him,” declared Stapelman, whose politically correct Santa Monica restaurant--no meat, no sugar, no smoking--survived 14 months of economic hard times before going under in December. “I’m going to tell him he’s out of his mind.”

At nearby Santa Monica Place, meanwhile, the lunchtime crowd throngs Rockenroll, a sandwich stand quite unlike chef Hans Rockenwagner’s other creations: the critically acclaimed Rockenwagner and the California-Italian Fama, both in Santa Monica, and upscale ROX in West Los Angeles. At Rockenroll, for the price of an appetizer, even underpaid office workers can bite into Rockenwagner’s gourmet cuisine. A smoked-chicken and grilled-eggplant sandwich on roasted onion bread costs $5.25.

“Nineties restaurants try to be as lean as possible,” lamented Rockenwagner. “What we restaurateurs have to do is become more diverse in what we offer.”

In a wrenching turnaround from a mere few years ago, the trend-setting Westside restaurants that delivered Los Angeles to culinary prominence--and then preeminence--among the nation’s cities are taking a major battering.

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Today, many of last decade’s playgrounds for upwardly mobile and expense-accounted Angelenos are closing, dropping prices, scaling down menus or barely hanging on. Last year, once-trendy spots such as Bice, Angeli Rodeo, and Matrix all fell victim to the ice-cold economy, as diners turned away from the imaginative, yet exorbitantly priced dishes that characterized the 1980s.

Now the operative word among L.A. diners is “value.”

Said Michael McCarty, owner of Michael’s, the Santa Monica restaurant specializing in California cuisine that typified L.A.’s high-flying dining experience: “No one I know is remotely doing the business they used to.”

Concurred Stapelman: “I call L.A. ‘the menu for disaster.’ ”

In a move typical of many Westside restaurants that now offer discounts and early-bird specials, the popular California Pizza Kitchen chain last week announced that its Brentwood location will begin serving a $6 mini pizza/pasta lunch combination. Both Rebecca’s and Chaya Venice now offer happy hours. And Rockenroll, said Rockenwagner, is a frank attempt to respond to the flat market. “Our profit margins have shrunk to next to nothing,” he said.

The downscaling can be witnessed in the 1994 Zagat Survey of the nation’s restaurants. Released in December, the annual survey found that the average cost of dining out decreased 12% in Los Angeles, from $27.10 to $23.76 per person, the sharpest drop of any of the 10 major cities surveyed.

In addition, Zagat found that from 1991 to 1993, the average cost of a meal at surveyed restaurants in Los Angeles dipped nearly 15%, while the average cost of a meal at the city’s 20 most expensive restaurants fell more than 11%.

Los Angeles Zagat editor Merrill Shindler said the results, while bad for restaurateurs, are a boon to diners. “We’re still eating quite well; we’re just paying less,” he said. “You’re getting high-end restaurants at fairly reasonable prices.”

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Restaurateurs not only are reducing prices, but are seeking to expand their customer base. At Michael’s, McCarty, has been cutting prices for the last several years. In 1989, McCarty dropped prices at Michael’s and at his restaurants in Denver, Detroit and Washington by 30%. Two years later, at Michael’s, he introduced a three-course prix fixe that at $16.50 for lunch and $26.50 for dinner has been termed “the best bargain in town” by one restaurant critic.

This month, McCarty expanded Michael’s menu to include selections of beef, veal and lamb chops and lobster for prices about 20% cheaper than might be expected at a chophouse. A similar addition to the menu at his Manhattan restaurant boosted business there by 15%.

Indeed, if the message of such downscaling is that Angelenos will never eat lunch in this town again for $40 per person, there are plenty of diners taking advantage.

Janie Hewson of Venice says that her favorite restaurants now either offer coupons or have substantially cut their prices. At one recent lunch at Gilliland’s in Santa Monica, Hewson had a “spa-type” lunch complete with a Caesar salad made without oil, fresh bread and tea for $12. “They’ve definitely brought their prices in line,” she said.

Despite the more diner-friendly times, however, some are troubled by the effect the recession has had on the culinary reputation of the city.

Though few critics and gourmets took the city’s cuisine seriously a dozen years ago, Los Angeles vaulted to prominence during the 1980s, with the emphasis on gourmet dining fueled by the region’s booming economy. Such Westside restaurants as Michael’s and Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in West Hollywood and Chinois on Main in Santa Monica were on the cutting edge of the nation’s cuisine.

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But the city’s reputation as a spectacularly innovative restaurant town, confirmed in 1990 by Money magazine when it named Los Angeles the “Best Eating City in America,” has gone south with the economy. Last year, Money ranked Los Angeles third behind New York and San Francisco, a result of the recession that “not only killed some of the area’s brightest restaurant start-ups but knocked the daring out of the chefs who remained.”

“When a city comes along so quickly, almost out of nowhere, money has to be an important part of the equation,” said senior editor Joseph S. Coyle, author of the magazine’s last two restaurant surveys. “When I first went there in the ‘60s, San Francisco was wonderful and Los Angeles was nothing.”

Indeed, in today’s economic climate, say some food critics and restaurateurs, chefs are reluctant to challenge diners with unfamiliar fare. “There’s less of an inclination to be cutting-edge, to lead the customers to new things,” said Richard Martin, West Coast bureau chief of the trade journal Nation’s Restaurant News. “We’re seeing greater value and less provocative dishes.”

Rockenwagner agreed: “I have great concerns that this town’s restaurants have moved a little toward mediocrity. We definitely have had a setback when it comes to creativity.”

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Not all agree that the economy has killed innovation.

While acknowledging the slowing effects of the recession, some critics and restaurateurs say that the city’s cuisine has simply settled down into a bedrock of unique yet dependable cuisine. “People don’t necessarily want eccentricity,” Shindler said. “After all, you get tired of doing silly things. And our tried and true is still radically different from anything else out there.”

Some restaurateurs have resisted scaling back, either in price or innovation. Take Puck, the restaurateur who is credited with putting the city on the nation’s culinary map.

Though he now operates a string of Wolfgang Puck Cafes and Wolfgang Puck Expresses, including one recently opened in the Santa Monica Promenade, the Austrian-born chef says plans for such low-key establishments were made a decade ago. Today, Puck says, he intends to provide more, not less, at his upscale Westside restaurants: Chinois on Main, Granita and Spago.

“To compromise is not the answer,” said Puck, who remodeled Spago last year to provide a better atmosphere and replaced the stainless steel cutlery at Chinois on Main with silverware. “In our business, you have to give people the exceptional . . . and in a recession, you have to give people even more of a reason to go out. They should have the ultimate experience at the restaurant.

“People come to our restaurants for something special,” he added. “People are not going to think of L.A. as a food city in New York or Dallas if we grill a steak like everyone else.”

Offering more of what L.A.’s chefs do best, say Puck and others, is the antidote to recession.

Puck says there’s still a healthy demand for tables at his three Westside restaurants (a fourth, Eureka, went under last year because of the exorbitant cost of running the restaurant’s microbrewery).

“In a big city, there are still enough people to enjoy quality food,” he said.

Similarly, at Matsuhisa, the restaurant’s food and reputation has been enough to keep the reservation book full. Though chef Nobu Matsuhisa acknowledged that business has been slow lately, which he attributes to the recession and the recent earthquake, weekday evenings are still jammed with patrons diving into the restaurant’s Japanese cuisine, such as baby squid in sea urchin sauce or tiger shrimp in hollandaise.

Even Coyle of Money magazine acknowledges that he’d rather eat at Chinois on Main than at any other restaurant, and that there’s “no place in the world” like Matsuhisa.

Such tidings, however, mean little to the many Westside restaurateurs who continue to take a dour view of the future. This year, they say, is shaping up to be another one they simply hope to ride out.

“In New York, we’re doing phenomenal,” said Stapelman, comparing his defunct Santa Monica restaurant with a similar one on 9th Avenue in Manhattan. “Lines (are) out the door; it’s sensational. I’m not opening another business in California until the economy changes.”

Cheaper Meals

In a survey of dining costs in nine major U.S. cities, all showed a decline in the average price per meal. Los Angeles’ drop was the largest:

CITY 1991 1993 CHANGE Los Angeles $27.91 $23.76 -14.9% Houston $15.91 $13.67 -14.1% Boston $22.29 $19.23 -13.7% Philadelphia $26.59 $23.38 -12.1% New York City $33.73 $30.20 -10.5% Seattle $20.72 $18.62 -10.1% New Orleans $17.46 $16.68 -4.5% Dallas/Ft. Worth $18.00 $17.51 -2.7% Atlanta $18.89 $18.49 -2.1%

Source: Zagat Surveys