LAST IMPRESSIONS : A Final Tip of the Hat to La Toque

On the night before La Toque shut its doors for good after 14 years in business, the dining room was packed, as it had been for two weeks straight--since people realized that chef Ken Frank was actually making good on his longstanding threat to close his very personal restaurant.

But then the crowds always turned up at La Toque for special occasions, whether it was Valentine’s Day or just garlic month. The problem for Frank was the nights in between: He has always been acknowledged as one of the best chefs in Los Angeles, but a customer could almost always drop by on a weekday night without a reservation and find an empty table, an eager staff. Unlike his neighbor Wolfgang Puck up the street, Frank was never able to generate an income equal to his talent.

Many don’t realize that Frank, who still has yet to reach 40, has been a restaurant star since the late ‘70s--or that La Toque, built on the idea of shaking up the tired food scene that was entrenched at the time, opened before Spago. Frank is as much a pioneer of California cuisine as Puck, but he’s never been on Letterman.

Late Feb. 4, as he emerged from the kitchen after cooking for several long hours, Frank seemed a bit tired but not at all bitter. He greeted old customers, accepted compliments on his wonderful cooking. True to form, he’d included an all-black-truffle menu along with his old favorites, and almost every table seemed to have an order of the rabbit stuffed with foie gras and truffles. There was even truffle ice cream--better than you can imagine.

Making the rounds from table to table, Frank seemed genuinely happy to be moving on to a new project--he’s overseeing the food at Isaac Tigrett’s House of Blues, a giant new nightclub on the Sunset Strip--and he was excited that most of his kitchen and wait staff would be going with him to the new place.

The next night, Frank’s menu was an improvised, gourmet-chef-cleans-out-the-refrigerator kind of thing. There wasn’t enough rabbit to go around, but there was no sense in buying more, because after that Saturday night, there would be no one to order it.