POTS (and Pans) OF GOLD

It’s 9 on a Monday morning, and Joachim Splichal is anxious to get going. The chef and proprietor of Patina and five other L.A.-area restaurants picks up the keys to a rented Lincoln Town Car at the Oakland airport and hurries outside ahead of his business partner, Doug Flohr. Splichal opens the trunk and tosses his bags inside. He walks back to find Flohr in the driver’s seat. * “What are you doing?” Splichal asks. Flohr looks up, nonplussed. * “I’m driving,” Splichal says. * He steers the large gray car out of the rental lot, joining the taxi and bus traffic leaving the terminal. At a red light, he grasps the wheel impatiently, hikes himself up in the seat and fiddles with the mirror. On this morning, Splichal doesn’t really want to drive anywhere--he wants to be there. “Let’s get out of here,” he murmurs. Splichal is bound for Napa Valley--and an important test for his small but rapidly expanding restaurant empire. In the tourist mecca of St. Helena, where there are more wineries than gas stations, the chef will open Pinot Blanc--another in his series of themed restaurants offering bistro fare--this month.

At about $32 per person, diners will be able to feast at about half the price as at his famed Melrose Avenue flagship, Patina.

There’s a lot at stake, which may explain the chef’s edginess. Splichal and 73 other investors are spending $1.35 million, more than twice what it cost to open Patina in 1989. (The chef declined to specify his stake but noted that he would be general partner and controlling shareholder.) As his first restaurant outside Los Angeles County, Pinot Blanc could also serve as a litmus test for whether his approach to dining--upscale bistro atmosphere and food at reasonable prices--will sell against the stiff competition in the Napa Valley. And if it goes well, more Pinots could sprout elsewhere in the state.

Make no mistake: Joachim Splichal (pronounced JOE-a-keem Splee-SHALL, with a soft J as in the French je) is a businessman. He made his name in the kitchen with wry, Southern French-influenced dishes in which, as one admiring critic put it, “ingredients are constantly masquerading as one another.” The potatoes in his lasagna might taste like pasta, in his creme brulie like caramelized sugar. Since 1992, Patina has been ranked “most popular” restaurant in Zagat Survey.

But lately, the German-born Splichal has been raising eyebrows with his business plan more than with his recipes. In the past 14 months, he has led his company, Hollywood Hospitality Corp., on an aggressive expansion. Last year, he opened Cafe Pinot in downtown Los Angeles and then launched Pinot Hollywood. Tacone, a fast-food outlet, debuted last month at Century City Marketplace, and another is planned for Woodland Hills later this year. Pinot at the Chronicle will come to Pasadena this fall. They join Patinette, a gourmet lunch stand at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Pinot Bistro in Studio City, plus a successful catering division. By the end of 1996, Splichal expects to operate a total of nine restaurants generating about $21 million in sales and employing 550, and he’s discussing plans for future Pinots in Newport Beach, Las Vegas, Long Beach and La Jolla.

Oh, and don’t forget the name-brand olive oil and cookies on sale at his restaurants.

Splichal is riding a wave of change in the upscale food business. Twenty years ago, superstar chefs were content to hold court at one restaurant. Fans came to pay homage--and pay heartburn-inducing prices. But during the 1980s, Wolfgang Puck proved that a chef with a marquee name could do a lot more than sell a few thousand cookbooks. Puck franchised his California cuisine everywhere, from $60-a-person gastronomic nirvanas and noisy mall and airport cafes to the humming freezers of Ralphs.

This kind of merchandising juggernaut has proven tempting to other top chefs. One restaurant has only so much revenue potential. But multiple restaurants have endless possibilities, with different price ranges, including fast food. This means high volume. And it can also mean higher profit margins. Splichal says one of his Pinots generally has a higher profit margin than Patina because a Pinot uses less expensive ingredients and tableware.

In Splichal’s case, much of the drive behind expansion comes from his downbeat assessment of the prospects for the most expensive restaurants--such as Patina. Asked his thoughts on the future of fine dining in Los Angeles, he responds, “Right now I don’t think there is a future.”

“In New York, they have 200 restaurants where your average check is $100 or more,” he says one morning in his small, cluttered office at Patina, shrink-wrapped stacks of his new cookbook, his first, piled high on shelves. “Here we have maybe 10, and if 50% of them are full, that’s a big deal. So in New York, if you want to go to Bouley, Lespinasse, Le Cirque, any of those restaurants, you call up and you have to wait four or five days to get in. Here, in any of the upscale restaurants, you can get in within 24 hours.”

Most nights, Splichal still dons his chef’s whites and supervises dinner at Patina. But the opening of a new spot invariably draws him away, sometimes for days at a time. “I will be [at a new outlet] till everything works, until I know there will be a profit,” he says. “That’s the way I run our places. And the moment there’s a profit and I feel there’s a strong management, then I back out. Because it’s not my thing to run them; it’s their thing to run themselves and [have the managers] make good judgments on behalf of the company.”

But the key question is whether a chef-entrepreneur like Splichal can still function as a chef. Can the same guy interview job-seekers, woo investors, negotiate leases, broker deals, schmooze customers, approve advertisements, size up the competition--and think up new ways to serve blini and caviar? What does it mean to say you ate in a Joachim Splichal restaurant if Joachim Splichal wasn’t anywhere near the kitchen?

“Every restaurateur is expanding as fast as he can,” says Alan Richman, dining critic for GQ, who last year gave Patina one of its few mixed reviews. “Joachim Splichal is never going to have bad food in his restaurants. They’re going to be perfectly good restaurants. But they’re never going to be great restaurants. There’s no chance of great restaurants happening this way; it’s just repetition of the same restaurant. . . . The real essence of a restaurant comes out of the kitchen, not a bank draft.”

Indeed, even at Patina, which serves as his base of operations, Splichal’s duties in the kitchen are limited to a largely supervisory rather than a hands-on role. But he notes that he trains and watches over all his executive chefs, two of whom, Jonny Fernow and Octavio Becerra, have been made partners in his company. (His wife, Christine, and Doug Flohr also are partners.) “I think it would be difficult to run a $20-million company,” he admits, “and cook each meal at Patina.”

*

Joachim Bernard Splichal was raised in the hospitality business. His late parents operated a small Gasthaus, or inn, in Spaichingen, a village of 11,000 near Stuttgart. His brother and sister (a trucker and housewife, respectively) still live in Germany, though he is not close to either. “I respect them for what they are, but they don’t understand what I do, I don’t think.”

He decided early on that he wanted to be a chef. In his late teens and early 20s, he worked as an apprentice chef in hotel restaurants in Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Holland. Then he landed an apprentice job with the legendary chef Jacques Maximin. He rose quickly in Maximin’s kitchen at the Hotel Negresco in Nice, becoming sous-chef, second-in-command to the executive chef, in 1978 at the age of 23.

Whether it’s the love of food or money that drives Splichal, one thing is certain: He has drive. Now 41, he carries an almost-military air of authority. His English is flawless but still marked with a clipped Southern German accent. He has a moon face, with a high forehead and a scraggly beard, and stands well under 6 feet tall, although he seems taller. One of the first things one notices is his nose, a boxer’s pug with a smashed bridge and flattened tip. It’s a schnoz with a story.

If Splichal’s talent was already evident at an early age, so was his impatient and unyielding nature. By his own admission, he got into fisticuffs with a line cook working under him at Hotel Negresco at least twice. On one occasion, he dodged a crate of lobsters hurled during a kitchen skirmish.

“It was a French kitchen, so it was OK,” he explains. “I was 23 years old and I worked with 40 French guys. They drove me nuts because they didn’t like that I was a German. I was in a French kitchen and most of them were older. So I had to keep a very strong stand of what I’m all about. It took me a year to get them all in line the way I wanted.”

He moved to Los Angeles in 1981 to take a job as executive chef at the Regency Club in Westwood, then went to the Seventh Street Bistro downtown a year later. At the Regency, he had his nose broken (he says once, friends and co-workers say at least twice) during kitchen brawls. Splichal claims that he has since mellowed considerably but admits: “When I run my kitchen, my guys are like top-trained SEALs.” Others view his approach as arrogant and unnecessarily demanding. Asked to describe Splichal’s personality, his former pastry chef, Fred Eric, who now owns the trendy Vida in Los Feliz, ticked off a list of adjectives: “Condescending, arrogant, intolerant, insensitive. Nothin that a good group of therapists at UCLA couldn’t handle in a couple of decades of work.”

About a year after he moved to the United States, Splichal met Christine Mandion, a French-born graduate student whose family owned a pastry shop in Biarritz. The two began dating when she was on a break from studies at the American Graduate School of International Management in Phoenix and visiting the L.A.-based French chef Michel Richard, who would later open Citrus.

She moved in with Splichal during the following year and debated whether to return to France. “My parents were of course not very happy that I was living in sin with a German,” she recalls in the couple’s three-bedroom home in the Hollywood Hills, where scattered about are gift teddy bears and flower arrangements commemorating the birth in March of their twin boys, Stephane and Nicolas. The family is moving to San Marino this month, partly so Splichal can be closer to the planned Pasadena Pinot.

Back in 1984, the same year that he and Christine were married, Splichal opened his first restaurant as both chef and partner, Max au Triangle in Beverly Hills. Critics raved about the elegant (and very expensive) food. But the location--on the second floor of a chic but struggling shopping mall on Beverly Drive--proved disastrous. Max closed within two years. Splichal had little of his own money tied up in the deal, although he said his salary went unpaid for weeks as the enterprise collapsed. By the end, the stress caused him to develop shingles. He threw himself into consulting jobs and plotted his next move.

“That experience [at Max] really scarred him,” says Traci Des Jardins, a protege who is now the executive chef at Rubicon in San Francisco. “But it also taught him a lot.”

Splichal was determined that his next venture not fail. After raising $650,000 from 38 investors, he took over an aging, slightly shabby-looking two-story apartment building (the former Le St. Germain restaurant) on Melrose Avenue, not far from Paramount Studios. Patina opened in July 1989. The address ensured a steady stream of movie-industry diners. The menu was brief but solid: gratin of lamb, free-range chicken, John Dory. Entree prices were held under $23. (Today the average entree price is $25.) Christine worked the front of the house, while Joachim concentrated on the kitchen.

Some who remembered the glories of Max au Triangle were let down. Ruth Reichl, in 1989 The Times’ restaurant critic, quarreled with the limited menu. But Splichal was undaunted. “My major issue for Patina was: ‘I don’t care what the press says. I want to make sure it’s a financial success first,’ ” he says. “You can be the most brilliant painter, but if nobody buys your art, how can you survive?”

Patina was profitable by its second month of operation, according to Splichal. It proved popular with both hard-core “foodies” and the status-conscious entertainment crowd. (Doug Flohr says that on the day Viacom fired studio chief Frank Biondi, a group of Paramount executives were seen huddled in conversation over a table at Patina. But the real boost came a year later when Reichl’s return resulted in a rave review in July 1990. Gushing over the barley risotto, mushroom-and-potato lasagna and creme brulie, she wrote: “Food this good is a thrill to eat; it reminds you how glad you are to be alive.”

Splichal finally had a winning restaurant. And he wasted little time capitalizing on his good fortune. He opened Pinot Bistro in Studio City in 1992, thriving amid a severe recession partly because he wasn’t facing stiff Westside competition. He had hit on a solid formula: Link your name to well-conceived, quality restaurants in gastronomically under-served areas, and people will come. Splichal’s role? Not as chef, but rather “founder and advisor,” as he puts it.

But growth always carries risks--especially in the fickle business of food. For Wolfgang Puck, who has been gradually spreading his reach for years, expansion has yielded impressive results. Venture capitalists invested $15 million in his Wolfgang Puck Food Co. as it geared up for a public offering this year. The picture is not so rosy for others. Evan Kleiman had grand designs for her Angeli brand of rustic Italian trattorias. But her outlets in Beverly Hills, West Los Angeles and Marina del Rey all closed, leaving by last year only the original location on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. Splichal’s strategy can also yield a certain irony. Octavio Becerra, who serves as executive chef at Pinot Bistro, says that customers often wander in and ask whether Joachim happens to be in the kitchen. The answer, at least in the case of Pinot Bistro, is always no.

*

On a sunny but chilly march morning, Joachim Splichal sits on the patio behind Pinot Blanc in St. Helena. The buzz of power saws and clink of hammers fill the air as carpenters retrofit the stucco Santa Fe-style space, a former cafe that was shuttered after four weeks, into a French country inn. The front windows face Highway 29 and a vineyard, where the first clumps of green are sprouting on the cross-shaped vines.

Splichal envisions a bright country bistro serving “very simple, hearty food . . . a lot of braising, a lot of roasting.” He had toyed for years with the idea of opening a Napa Valley restaurant. “I always liked the area a lot. It’s very European,” he says. Last year, when he cooked a special dinner for former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, he was contacted by the owner of the space in St. Helena. At first, Splichal says, he wasn’t interested, but at the last minute he drove the 50 or so miles to see it. “The next day we were up with the lawyer and negotiated the final deal,” he says.

He is sitting on a patio bench, his back to a trellis, going over a pre-opening checklist with Pinot Blanc’s management team: general manager Guy Rebentisch, executive chef David Daniels and Doug Flohr. Splichal runs his fingers down a clipboard list, inquiring after each item: Bar supplies. Bar stools. Bookkeeping. Mailboxes. Management opening and closing procedures. Menu description. Vacuum. Vendor setup. Votive candles.

Christopher Meeske approaches. The sommelier at Patina, Meeske has been piecing together the wine list for Pinot Blanc. A good-humored man with a broad smile, he endures a lot of ribbing from Splichal and the others about his expensive tastes, which can be somewhat indulged in the company’s $2-million wine and liquor budget. Mindful of how seriously wine is regarded in St. Helena and its environs, Splichal is paying special attention to the choices for Pinot Blanc. The chef wants a list leaning heavily toward Napa wines.

“How are we progressing here?” Splichal asks. A cold breeze is gliding off the Mayacamas Range a mile or so to the west, rustling a legal pad on the table.

Meeske settles into his seat. “Well, um . . . boy!”

“It’s not ‘boy!’ ” Splichal interrupts. “I have [to have] the list by next Saturday.”

The others titter.

“Oh, no, that’s fine,” Meeske recovers. “No, it’s no problem. What we need to talk about is, philosophically, where the list is going in regards to, you know, the percentages of where everything’s coming from and stuff like that. That’s all. And the amount, the amount that we wanna spend on the list.”

Splichal reflects for a moment. “Well,” he says. “We will spend some dollars.”

Later, after the meeting disbands, Splichal confides his fear that the new restaurant might fail. “I have this each time, because I say, ‘. . . if I don’t make it . . . $1.35 million . . . I like the space, I like everything, I think I’m very positive. . . . But it’s always like you’re in the theater. It’s your play, and you worry about what will happen if no one comes.”

Several hours later he is more upbeat. It is almost midnight on Napa Valley’s Highway 29, and Splichal is behind the wheel once more. The day has been a long grind of interviews and meetings. But he finally relaxed over a three-hour dinner with several bottles of wine at Catahoula, a restaurant in nearby Calistoga. Splichal’s friend David Burke, a visiting chef from the Park Avenue Cafe in New York City, cooked a special menu that included eggshells filled with flan and foie gras as well as a trio of bacon, pastrami and smoked salmon. “I feel good,” he announces, the dashboard lights reflected in his spectacles. Outside, the glowing lights of wineries and restaurants fly by, as the car approaches St. Helena and the next chapter in Splichal’s story.