‘Menu’ Documents Last Days of Chasen’s With Wit, Charm

While staying at a L.A.-area bed-and-breakfast, New York filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and her husband, Robert Pulcini, learned from the B&B;’s owner, Raymond Bilbool--also Chasen’s banquet captain--that the landmark restaurant would soon be closing. They seized the opportunity to document the restaurant’s final two weeks in late March 1995.

The result is “Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s,” an irresistible piece of social history assembled with wit and panache. Above all, their affectionate yet tart film is a heartbreaking tribute to the restaurant’s key longtime staffers, individuals who were lucky enough to find work they loved and who dedicated themselves to an institution they cherished and surely hoped would outlive them.

In 1936, vaudeville performer Dave Chasen opened a modest restaurant on Beverly Boulevard at Doheny Drive on the edge of West Hollywood. Chasen’s specialty was a chili that he had, according to legend, concocted in Frank Capra’s kitchen--and which Elizabeth Taylor famously had shipped to Rome while filming “Cleopatra.” Good food, a gemutlich atmosphere and Chasen’s many show-business friends and acquaintances guaranteed its success. Over the years, Chasen’s expanded greatly but always kept its atmosphere of warm red-leather booths and wood paneling.

For nearly 60 years Chasen’s hosted not only Hollywood’s greatest stars but also heads of state and the famous in every field. According to columnist Army Archerd, Ronald Reagan proposed to Nancy Davis at Chasen’s. Indeed, Reagan is one of the four presidents who posed with the restaurant’s legendary, affable headwaiter, Tommy Gallagher.

Berman and Pulcini include a montage of the stars arriving at Chasen’s over the decades for gala parties and reminiscences from a host of celebrities, ranging from Fay Wray to Sharon Stone and including producers A.C. Lyles, David Brown and Charles Fries.

Chasen’s was the most enduring restaurant of Hollywood’s Golden Era, but its era was dying out literally. (Alfred Hitchcock, who dined en famille every Thursday at the same booth, and James Stewart were longtime regulars.) It became a bastion of elegance and class, exclusive and expensive, in which guests were tastefully dressed and were served great food impeccably. In short, it became the refuge of the older crowd, and its rich menu and formal dress code did not attract Hollywood’s younger generations, who flocked to a series of trendier, more casual places, most notably Wolfgang Puck’s Spago.

Still, its staffers, while reluctant to point fingers, do make it clear that they feel they had been let down by indifferent, unimaginative management once advancing age and illness at last forced Dave Chasen’s beautiful and chic widow Maude to retire.

Once the restaurant had posted its closing notice, it not surprisingly became booked solid once again. “It’s like when somebody’s sick,” observes bartender Pepe Ruiz. “Nobody calls, but everybody goes to the funeral.” Celebrated for his blazing Flame of Love martini, Ruiz is one of several key Chasen’s employees whom the filmmakers gradually move to the fore once the rich and famous have told their stories.

Shrewdly, memorably and rightly, Berman and Pulcini focus on the people who made Chasen’s work all those years. They include Ronnie Clint, the restaurant’s handsome, silver-haired British-born general manager; Val Schwab, who checked coats for years, receiving $200 regularly from Hitchcock--and $1 from Stewart; the sentimental Gallagher, for whom the restaurant became so much of his life that his son says it was his “other woman”; Onetta Johnson, the ladies’ room attendant who inspired Donna Summer’s song “She Works Hard for the Money”; and above all, Bilbool, an amusingly mercurial and very sharp perfectionist. (Actor Adam Heller swears he landed his featured Broadway role in “Victor/Victoria” emulating Bilbool’s carriage and manner while auditioning for the part of a Parisian nightclub owner.)

At the time “Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s” was completed, things looked bleak for the restaurant’s heritage, with talk of a smaller-scale resurrection in a mall to be built once the restaurant was torn down. Three years later, however, Chasen’s was able to relocate to Canon Drive in Beverly Hills and still opens the original location for special events.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film is suitable for all ages.

‘Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s’

A Northern Arts Entertainment on A La Carte Films production. Directors Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini. Producer Julia Strohm. Executive producers Diandra Douglas, Alicia Sams. Cinematographer Ken Kobland. Editor Pulcini. Music Mark Suozzo. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.