Drai’s Restaurant: Parlez-Vous le Show Biz? : Industry: Hollywood powerbrokers flock to Victor Drai’s West Hollywood restaurant. But is it for the former producer’s Southern France-style food?

“Do you know who I am?” asks Victor Drai in his signature French accent as he pulls up a chair at his trendy West Hollywood restaurant.

Indeed, the engaging owner of Drai’s is no stranger to controversy.

When he first opened the doors last summer, he angered some of Hollywood’s powerbrokers by turning them away from his packed restaurant if they called late expecting reservations. He showed the door to former Spago maitre d’ Bernard Erpicum after accusing him of table-hopping with customers and asking them to invest in a new restaurant. He refused a table to the publisher of a Beverly Hills weekly and later found Drai’s listed as “out” in the publication’s “In and Out” column.

Drai, who for years has forged key relationships in Hollywood both as a movie producer (“The Woman in Red,” “Weekend at Bernies”) and as an escort of beautiful actresses, is now in a role some believe he was destined to play. The tall, bespectacled Parisian runs Drai’s on North La Cienega Boulevard--the site of the once popular L’Ermitage restaurant--which has now become one of the town’s hot dining spots. Like Monday night at Mortons, Friday lunch at Drai’s attracts a crowd of high-powered studio executives, agents and celebrities.

Regular patrons include Barbra Streisand, Denzel Washington, Quincy Jones and Paramount Pictures chief Sherry Lansing. ICM’s powerful agent Ed Limato has a regular table tucked in a sun-drenched corner. “The reason I give him that table,” Drai confides, “is because he is a smoker and I have to put him next to a window.”

Limato is one of Drai’s 30 investors, who also include producers Freddie Fields (former head of MGM) and David Begelman (one-time Columbia Pictures topper), as well as recently departed CBS network chief Jeff Sagansky and Robert Shapiro, the high-profile attorney defending O. J. Simpson on murder charges.

Fields, who regularly dines at the restaurant with his business associates, says one of Drai’s main attractions to Hollywood types is they could dine with some privacy.

“That’s what they like,” explained the producer. “No one is going to walk up and ask for their autograph.”

On a recent Wednesday night, actor Kirk Douglas and motion picture association czar Jack Valenti and their party are sitting at one table, while another former MGM studio boss, Alan Ladd Jr., is cater-corner with his party.

“Try the vegetarian ravioli,” Valenti tells a visitor, quipping. “It is as if you are in Rome!”

The cuisine at Drai’s, however, is that of Southern France. Nothing laden with heavy sauces and butter. “When you are French, you never eat sauces all day long,” Drai observes. “You can’t do it!”

While black-vested waiters lend stateliness to the ambience, Drai’s is not a restaurant where formalities are always observed. One recent Friday afternoon, as his actress wife, Loryn Locklin, sat at a table with a stroller by her side, Drai greeted guests while proudly holding his 8-month-old son, Dustin George.

It was the baby, Drai said, that prompted him to get into the restaurant business.

“So, I was in the movie business,” explained Drai, who even after two decades in America still speaks with a distinct accent and still struggles with his English. “Then, my wife got pregnant and I wanted to go away (to make a movie). I wait 46 years to have a baby. I decided not to go away. I woke up one morning and I said, ‘I want to open a restaurant.’ And my wife says, ‘What do you mean you want to open a restaurant?’ ”

Realizing he needed some financial partners to launch his new venture, Drai thumbed through his Rolodex and within 90 minutes had several commitments in hand.

“And four months later, we opened,” said Drai, noting that “we were very quickly packed. I turned down hundreds of people and the biggest people in this business. They were calling me at home. I said, ‘You call like anybody else and make a reservation.’ And they were never used to that in this town. Especially what they call the royalty in this town. . . . They didn’t like that.”

According to those closest to him, Drai was not always that cocky, but in fact was shy and somewhat intimidated by the town when he arrived speaking little English in 1976.

His entree into Hollywood was actress Jacqueline Bisset, whom he dated for seven years beginning in the mid-’70s. “I knew the whole (film) industry through her,” Drai said. “So, when we (broke) up, I decided to go into the movie business.”

Drai was often seen at night spots around town with beautiful stars, but insists he was “not like the typical gigolo” as some assumed him to be in those days. “I didn’t look that good,” he laughed.

He later married and divorced actress Kelly LeBrock. Seven years ago he met his current wife at a Valentine’s party.

Last year, Locklin applied her creative talents to help decorate Drai’s, which is a series of three main dining rooms with a front lounge and adjoining enclosed garden whose walls are painted with tropical palms and leopards. The color scheme is soft gold and rich woods. French impressionist reproductions and some modern originals adorn the walls. Drai jokes that if he could afford real French impressionists, he wouldn’t be in the restaurant business.

Locklin said she chose kentia palms to decorate the restaurant because “they’re very sexy.” Expressing herself by slowly waving her hands, she adds, “The whole shape, the movement, they make kind of a warm feeling. Food and sex are very closely related.”

”. . . She’s from the Valley,” Drai interjects with a laugh.

Prior to becoming a restaurateur, Drai worked in real estate, refurbishing “fixer-uppers” in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills and selling multimillion-dollar properties. He saw his fortunes rise and fall with the volatile Southern California real estate market.

As for running one of Hollywood’s hottest restaurants today, the easygoing Drai observes:

“When I came to Hollywood, there were three restaurants and that was it. People were making parties at their own houses, but not anymore. Now, you have more restaurants, more places to go. It’s easy. They come. They eat. They go home.”