To the Hip and the Hungry, This Guy’s Hot Stuff

Will Karges is thinking about muffins.

Well, not muffins exactly. It’s the little scoops of butter that go into the basket with the muffins.

“Do we need that?” he asks. “Are people using it? I think the muffins by themselves are fine.”

It’s late morning at Blueberry, Karges’ new country-style breakfast and lunch restaurant in Santa Monica, where he’s in the middle of a meeting with the chef and manager. Blueberry, open since mid-March, is getting its kinks worked out. Along with the butter issue, there’s the sausage question (people are ordering more bacon), the pot pie debate (one crust or two?), the pork chop consideration (they should be added to the menu) and the lemonade dilemma (where can you find those big glass spigot jugs?).

The aforementioned muffins sit in a basket on the table, miniaturized round cakes tailored to a baby’s hand. They are the restaurant’s signature. Someone offers Will one, and he shakes his head.

“Nah,” he says, “I’m about muffined out today.”

Ah, the glamorous life of a restaurateur.

There is a lot churning in the life of 35-year-old William Arthur Karges III, whose restaurant roster also includes being creative director and chairman of the Johnnie’s chain of pizzerias; a partner (with Jon Sidel and boyhood friend Sean MacPherson) in Jones, the ultra-cool Hollywood bar-restaurant catering to young industry types; and a partner (with Neal Morse) in Rix, a Santa Monica supper club.

The supper club’s popularity is helping to cement Karges as one of the city’s up-and-coming restaurateurs. Not quite yet on a scale with kingpins Wolfgang Puck or Joachim Splichal, he may be a contender.

Not bad for a guy who admits that while growing up in a well-to-do Malibu family he had more interest in skateboarding and surfing than he did in getting an education. His parents eventually insisted on boarding school in Arizona, “where I clearly couldn’t surf,” he says. “That kind of whipped my butt. But, actually, that was a great learning experience and gave me a little discipline and some structure.”

Enough, it seems, to have one of the city’s most talked-about night spots. Rix is the perfect hyphenate for the ‘90s: white linen and mahogany restaurant-bar-lounge-patio with a members-only feel. The clientele who have been swarming here since its white-hot opening a year ago are the beautiful, the Hollywood powerful, movers and shakers stirred by the lure of ice-cold martinis, good food, live music and verve.

Rix and Blueberry, though polar opposites on the atmosphere scale, are literally around the corner from one another. Employees shuttling between the two often scoot through one of Blueberry’s upstairs windows onto Rix’s patio.

As Blueberry is evolving, so is Rix; the expansive patio is adding a fire-and-water fountain, foliage and a mini-mezzanine with a tropical feel. The back martini lounge is now an homage to retro Vegas.

But the road here has hardly been straight and narrow.

After graduating from Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, Karges tried a stint at his father’s L.A. BMW dealership, then left in the mid-1980s to sell exotic cars elsewhere.

He never caught the fever of selling, he says, even on a cash sale for a Porsche.

“I was good at it,” he recalls, “but I couldn’t understand nice people getting screwed because you wouldn’t discount the price because you were making money off of them, and then with the guy who would hammer you to the bone, it would be a blood bath and you’d make a dollar. That just wasn’t a philosophy I was into.”

Meanwhile, a more appealing offer came up: His girlfriend (and eventually, wife) was taking off for Europe to model. She invited Karges to come along, start modeling, and see the continent. It didn’t take him long to decide.

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Nine months later, his father called. He had invested in a pizzeria with a family friend; actually, Will’s former baby-sitter.

“I remember the call,” Karges says. “My father said, ‘You could start as a cashier, learn the business. We might grow it as a chain.’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘How far could I really get in a pizza shop?’ ”

Pretty far, as it turned out. There are now six Johnnie’s, vastly different in design and menu from the red Formica deli case decor of the original. In his quest to liberate it from generic-dom, he ventured to New York, going to every single pizza place, studying every last detail, down to the water used to make the pizza.

“I just began to live, eat and breathe it,” he says.

That MO was not surprising to Karges’ father, Bill Jr., the owner of art galleries in L.A. and Carmel, where he and his wife have relocated, along with their younger son, Rob, 29, a professional race car driver. Says Karges Jr., “He had real tunnel vision when he wanted something. If he wanted to learn how to surf or fish, he stayed with it until he accomplished what he wanted to do.”

Will also developed a penchant for fine dining early on, adds his father, since the family ate out more often than in. At an age when most boys were catching frogs in the backyard, Will was ordering them sauteed in butter.

On a recent weekday, Karges took a break from his frenetic schedule of meetings and sipped a glass of juice on the deck of his Beverly Hills home. Recently divorced (he and ex-wife Kathy, who had a hand in the restaurants’ design, have a daughter, Ashley, 6), he has moved in with a roommate.

He got involved with Jones, the Hollywood bar-restaurant, because it offered him “knowledge about a full-blown restaurant, which is different than a Johnnie’s. It was exciting to just kind of watch that room, that ambience, and watch how people respond to things like different lighting and booths.”

But there was more to come. The space that once housed foodie-magnet restaurants Bikini and Abiquiu was available, and Karges couldn’t resist.

“I saw that patio,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘You know what? Something incredible could happen here--kind of an homage to old supper clubs. You could do performances. Something like a Musso and Frank’s, but with the sensibility of today.’ ”

Restaurant critic Bill Stern says he was “struck by the supper club aspect” of Rix “with its different spaces that have different functions. I think what’s happened is there is a new, young affluent generation here, a phenomenon of the last 10 years, . . . I think people like to go where they feel special, and I think that’s always part of the appeal.”

Karges hopes Blueberry finds its audience, as Rix has done.

“I have a lot to learn, but I’m just starting to feel my stride. It’s taken me this long to really know what I can execute, and I know that Blueberry is something that clearly could be dupe-able, and I could do something substantial with it.”

His friend Phillip Troy Linger, publisher and president of Brentwood magazine, believes Karges’ “Midas touch” is “with a smaller, boutique kind of chain. Of all of his restaurants, Blueberry is ripe for expanding, if he doesn’t get sidetracked and get another whim. I’d like to see him really stay focused. I think Will fits in great in a personal, small, custom restaurant. And I think he loves it when people say, ‘That’s a really great dish.’ ”

Karges would certainly agree with that.

“Success to me is having somebody say, ‘Those were the best pancakes I’ve ever had.’ That’s what gets me going. It’s just watching people go ‘Mmmmmm.’ I’m a total people-pleaser. I just want to make sure everybody’s happy.”