Blues Foundation Room Requires Lots of Green
Want a table in the House of Blues’ private Foundation Room, where Ken Frank is cooking his fabulous French food? Easy enough: You just need to be a member of the House of Blues Foundation.
Last week, one of the West Hollywood club’s “phone ambassadors” stammeringly quoted us a $4,500 membership fee. This week, they’re positive: A table in the 70-seat Foundation Room requires an initial fee of $1,000, plus a monthly minimum tab of $200. On top of that, they’re asking for a “voluntary” contribution to the foundation’s ambitious program, which supports arts and music education for inner-city youth. Simply writing a check is not enough: It gets more even more complicated. Your application has to be approved by the board of directors. According to a spokeswoman for Isaac Tigrett’s $9-million music club and restaurant on the Sunset Strip, 500 sponsorship forms are currently being mailed out, and they are in no hurry to fill the slots.
“We can’t have the whole world up there,” says a House of Blues spokeswoman. “It isn’t a room for Madonna to hang out in. If Madonna wants to be a sponsor and we have a space and she is going to contribute to the program, then great.”
Tigrett, co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe, opened the three House of Blues venues (the others are in Cambridge, Mass., and New Orleans) on the advice of his Indian swami, Sai Baba. The blues clubs’ trademarked slogan--courtesy of the Blues Brothers--is “We’re on a Mission From God.” According to the spokeswoman, Tigrett is so dedicated that he gets up at 6 a.m. daily to pray. His beliefs enter into the way he runs his business, too. “Last Saturday, he gathered 350 of us to talk about community and diversity,” she gushes. “He told us it will make us a better person to treat everybody equal.”
So if you don’t receive a sponsorship application form in the mail in the next few weeks, don’t feel bad. It’s not as if you aren’t equal, it’s just that you didn’t qualify.
PUBLIC EYE: Ever since Mezzaluna opened, owner Karim Souki has been trying to promote the Brentwood branch of the New York-based mini-chain. Now business is suddenly booming and he’s even had offers to open more pizza and pasta spots. But at the moment, the restaurateur couldn’t care less.
Mezzaluna, you’ll recall, is where Ronald Goldman waited tables until his murder and where Nicole Brown Simpson, a regular customer, ate her last meal--rigatoni melanzane .
“We are still in the middle of a tragedy and the impact that it has had on a couple of weeks of business seems very insignificant in comparison,” says Souki. “Brentwood in general is busier. There are a lot more people walking around town. They go by O.J.’s house and step over the yellow tape, they go to Nicole’s apartment, and they are coming here. . . .
“I’m just extremely sad for all the families: the Browns and the Goldmans.”
PATRIOT GAMES: The peripatetic Elka Gilmore, who cooked at the former Camelions in Santa Monica, Tumbleweed in Beverly Hills, Checkers downtown and Palette in West Hollywood, left L.A. two years ago for San Francisco. First, she opened Elka, a seafood restaurant in the Miyako Hotel in Japantown. And she’s made such an impression in such a short time that, “around San Francisco today,” explains a recent press release, “she is known simply as ‘Elka.”’
Now the one-named wonder chef has become patriotic. When Elka mailed out invitations to the opening of her new French restaurant Liberte, she pleaded, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . . “
OPENINGS: A Fatburger stand has opened in West Hollywood and 20 more will open throughout the state. The burger chain, founded in 1952 by Mrs. Lovie Yancey of Los Angeles, plans to double its size by 1995. . . . Steven Lau has opened Fortune Inn in Glendale featuring Mandarin cuisine under $10. . . . Critixx, a European tapas-style restaurant by the owners of Roxxi in Pasadena, is slated to open Friday. Original tapas creations include sherry marinated salmon, roasted eggplant and garlic, and prosciutto with grissini. *