Returning to Their First Love

NINO OSTI

While the Beverly Hills Hotel was sleeping through major surgery, longtime maitre d’ Nino Osti was dreaming about the Polo Lounge.

“People would come, ‘Oh, I need this table,’ ‘Hey, I need that table.’ You know how busy this place gets,” says Osti, who ushered the famous and merely wealthy to their Polo Lounge banquettes for 25 years. “And then I wake up, it was just a dream.”

Osti’s waking hours were spent traveling--up the California coast to the wine country, west to Hawaii. He and his wife were about to go to Italy when Trader Vic’s summoned him.

“I was missing the people,” says the congenial Osti. “Trader Vic’s is not a Chinese restaurant, it’s a Beverly Hills restaurant. You’ve got the same clientele.”

But a Beverly Hills restaurant wasn’t the Beverly Hills restaurant where Osti had spent nearly half his life. So when hotel general manager Kerman Beriker called, Osti came.

“I had no choice but to say goodby to them and come back here. And I remember when [Beriker] personally gave me a little tour of the hotel. And we came here in the Polo Lounge. . . . There were people painting, there was so much work going on here, but I tell you my heart went like this when I walked in here. Ah, after so many years in the place, I felt like I was coming back home.”

Now, after Osti wakes up, his evenings are set amid the dusky green booths of the Polo Lounge. He begins the day studying newspapers and magazines over his morning coffee, to suit up for the science of power seating.

“It’s part of my job to recognize the people,” he says, “and to know how important people are.”