The State of the Plate

When today’s hotshot chefs and restaurateurs think about expanding, they go to Las Vegas. From Los Angeles alone, Spago’s Wolfgang Puck, Too Hot Tamales’ Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger and Valentino’s Piero Selvaggio have all opened restaurants there in the last two years.

It used to be Los Angeles everyone wanted. In the 1980s, the local restaurant scene went from being considered almost a contradiction in terms to being one of the best in the United States, possibly the world.

L.A. was hot. Every week there was another place opening that you just had to try. Every month there was another article in a national magazine marveling at the diversity and quality of our restaurants: Michael’s, Spago, Angeli, The Mandarin, La Toque, Trumps, Citrus, Campanile, Katsu, Chinois on Main, Valentino, Patina, City Restaurant, Rex Il Ristorante.

Culinary stars came from all over to try their hands in the new dining mecca: Eberhard Muller, Patrick Clark and Thomas Keller from New York; Lydia Shire from Boston; Alex and Gigi Patout from Louisiana; Jonathan Waxman from San Francisco; and even French two-star chef Michel Rostang.

That all seems very long ago. After recessions, riots, earthquakes and 20 years of maturing diners, Los Angeles seems to be about a few big names spinning off as many moderately priced restaurants as they can, with culinary goals to match.

What happened? The Times Food section gathered some of the biggest names in Los Angeles for a discussion of where fine dining in this city is going. At times the talk was heated. Almost everyone came in for criticism, beginning with the Los Angeles Times.

‘Small Peas’

Wolfgang Puck: The Los Angeles Times doesn’t represent the city the way a newspaper should. It’s disgraceful that we don’t have more coverage. I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t care if anybody writes about me in Los Angeles. I can go on any television show: I can do “Good Morning America,” I can do “Jay Leno,” I can do whatever I want. But I want L.A. to become a major force in what we all do. And I think we need the support of the Los Angeles Times first, and we don’t get it.

Actually, I think restaurants now are more ambitious than they were in the ‘80s. I think they are underrated now. It feels like, from the L.A. Times on down, we get complexes of being an inferior city. If the Los Angeles Times doesn’t go out and say that we have better restaurants than they do in Chicago or San Francisco, how is anybody else going to believe it?

Piero Selvaggio: The national press has really neglected this city. Now they kind of regard Los Angeles as small peas, but that’s not true. So much more is happening here and we don’t get the respect.

Joachim Splichal: We’re behind in upscale restaurants.

Mark Peel: You think we are?

Fred Eric: Oh, definitely. Look at how much money they spend in New York. We’re way behind. Boston has more restaurants.

Splichal: We can’t attract the talent. Look at Eberhard Muller. He’s a good chef. He came; he failed.

Eric: Thomas Keller failed. Lydia Shire failed.

Peel: There are a lot of diverse reasons behind those. You can’t ascribe it to any one reason and group them all together. Eberhard had a lousy location.

Eric: L.A.’s fickle too. It’s a difficult city to do anything in. It’s a city in the present tense, it’s projecting what the future should be. New York is present tense, but it’s past tense, too.

Puck: New York is tough on restaurants too. All the old ones, except for La Grenouille, which were famous once, they are basically gone now. I believe that we have wonderful restaurants here. I believe we have many talented chefs who we never hear about. I think if I look at L.A. and just take some restaurants from Monterey Park to Santa Monica, we’re just as good as anybody.

‘Veal Kidneys’ Times: Has there been a difference in your customers over the last 30 years?

Selvaggio: I think that part of the problem here is that most of the money comes from the movie industry, which is usually very unsophisticated. And we are a dispersed city. That and people’s concerns about drinking and driving make people go out maybe only between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. You’ve only got two hours to do all your business.

Today [the customer] has more money, but he likes the casual approach. For some reason, it’s becoming very fashionable in L.A. to bring your own wine.

Travel has made a difference. This is an amazing thing. I’ll use the Valley as an example, since I have a restaurant there. They’ll go to Paris and London and [pay a certain amount for a restaurant meal] but then, coming back home, they won’t. You have to fight all of that.

Peel: Menu diversity has become a problem, too. There are a lot of things you can’t sell anymore. I love veal kidneys.

Mary Sue Milliken: Me too. But we could sell a lot more veal kidneys in ’82 or ’83 than we can now.

Selvaggio: The sophistication hasn’t developed.

Eric: I think also there is a reaction to the ‘80s when there were a lot of kiwi sauces. A lot of people opened places that were . . .

Milliken: Less than delicious?

Eric: Food became a gag. Culinary food became a gag, and the gag did some damage that has lasted into other time periods. We suffer from that a little bit. People went out and they spent a lot of money at some places that just weren’t very good.

Peel: Where I think the restaurant scene should go is to focus on producers instead of chefs. Who is doing something great and then what do you do with it? Who is producing great vegetables? Who are the fishermen who are going out on day boats and bringing back fish that haven’t been beaten up in the belly of a trawler? And then what are we doing with it?

‘Overblown Expectations’

Times: You’ve complained about the difficulty of finding and keeping good help. Why is that, when we have so many culinary academies churning out what seems like an endless supply of graduates?

Selvaggio: Because whenever you make anybody blossom, he’s going to be impatient. Most kids today don’t have the patience that it took all of us to wait and to arrive at where we are. The other thing is competition. It is so tough. Eventually opportunities come, as soon as someone else sees there is some potential in someone. You know as well as I do that if someone works for Wolf or for Joachim or for me or whoever, they are able to say, “I am 23 and I am a chef at a great restaurant.”

Lately, after having my disappointment with some of them, I told one that I firmly believe that until you pass 30, I cannot call you a chef. Otherwise, what am I going to call you at 35? A genius? I think we have to go back to the idea that everyone should have to pay their dues.

Peel: What’s really difficult is finding talented young cooks. I know I’m getting too old to work the grill six nights a week. We need to train these people and these people need to understand that it is an interesting career and that it is an exciting career and that it is a career with a lot of possibilities.

Eric: People don’t want to have that much pressure put on them; they’re not getting paid that much money. They could go to work building sets in Hollywood and make five times the amount.

Splichal: They have to have passion. It’s a small amount of people who have the passion in the way they work, the way they approach food, what they read, what they want to do. It’s very hard to find.

Peel: It may be they’re getting an overblown expectation coming out of school. And then, when reality crashes through the window, they get disappointed and quit.

Puck: I believe that we have better people in America than we ever have. Twenty-five years ago you couldn’t find an American chef to run a fine restaurant. Now you have thousands. You go to small cities, big cities, you have a young guy who worked in some of the famous restaurants and now he has a very good restaurant. I think we are on the forefront of the culinary world. We will be, for sure, the leader in the future.

Peel: If we have gone through a sleepy period, and I think we probably have, we’re on the verge of a very vital period. This coming decade, this restaurant scene is going to become much more vital, because of the elements we’ve been talking about: We have the products, we have the people; and although it is hard to find good young cooks, they’re out there. And I think we’re developing the customers. It’s our job to find out what they want, give it to them and then lead them further.

‘Casual City’ Splichal: Our average check has not gone up, hardly at all. In 1983 I opened 7th Street Bistro and the tasting menu was $65. Almost 20 years later, at Patina it’s $72. That’s a $7 increase. L.A. is very tight when it comes to high-end spending in restaurants. We don’t have the power that New York has. There you have 100 restaurants where you can spend $150 a person, no problem.

Susan Feniger: That’s a strange thing: Why in L.A., where there’s so much money, is that an issue?

Times: Does the casualness of the restaurants undercut the menu pricing? In New York, if you’re going to a fine dining restaurant, you get dressed up; it’s an event, like a Broadway opening. In Los Angeles, we’re casual, we’re friendly, we go to a great restaurant and then we go do something else.

Selvaggio: You have to accept the fact that this is a casual city and it’s going to be even more casual.

Puck: Different people have a lot of money now than 30 or 40 years ago. Then it was the bankers, the insurance guys. Now you have the high-tech nerds who wear T-shirts but on paper they’re worth $50 million or $100 million. You think “Oh my god, why did they come in dressed like that?” And then they order a $500 bottle of wine.

Selvaggio: It’s casual, but there has to be very good quality.

Puck: What’s on the plate has to be serious, but we’re not going to decide how the customer comes to our restaurant.

Feniger: We’re the perfect example of it. Our restaurants have always been sort of casual. As a result, we’re unable to charge higher prices. We just got back a bunch of comment cards from Ciudad at lunch. Eighty-five percent of them say we’re too pricey.

I think being at that $20 to $30 price point is really difficult. We have to do 350 dinners serving pretty comparable food to create the same dollar sales. It’s a weird thing; the middle might be a killer place. It might be easier just to be high-priced or at the lower end.

Puck: At Spago we average $80 a person; at Chinois $70. At the Cafes, maybe it’s $20, but they are the most successful and make the most money. If I had to choose just for the money alone, which would I take--Spago in Beverly Hills or the Cafe on Sunset? I would take the Cafe on Sunset blindfolded. It’s not even close.

Selvaggio: That’s because it’s called the Wolfgang Puck Cafe and people know you because of Spago.

Puck: We still have to deliver the food and the service to make people happy. To me, it’s much easier to deliver in the $20 range than the $80 range.

Selvaggio: We are in a market that seems to want the middle of the road, yet they want the quality and the service too. And if you want to be in this business, you have to accept that those are the rules you’re going to play by.

‘The Real Thing’ Selvaggio: There are those of us who have several restaurants. What is the reason? We have the mama, as I call it, and then we have decided to express other things. Twenty to 30 years ago, I couldn’t imagine that. The old school said that you cultivate your little niche and then you stay there, like Alex Perino [of Perino’s] and Kenneth Hansen [of Scandia]. We have made a revolution. We became businessmen.

And that’s because opening a restaurant in Los Angeles is an economic problem. Opening a restaurant today, even at the lower level, is more expensive than ever. The risks involved are more than ever. The competition involved is bigger than ever. People, fortunately or unfortunately, are more traveled, more palate-oriented, more knowledgeable. They have higher expectations. So what else can we do? Because I don’t see how you’re getting any of those $3-[million] or $4-[million] or $5-million restaurants open comfortably, unless you’ve got a rich hotel or a rich Santa Claus behind you. And at the same time, the labor pool is shrinking.

Times: Say more about those pressures that force you to open multiple restaurants.

Peel: Nobody’s being forced to do that.

Eric: It’s the dream. You’ve got your flagship that it’s taken you 20 or 30 years to create, your ideal restaurant, and then after that you say, “You know what? I’d like to do a steakhouse. I love steakhouses. Wouldn’t it be great to have a steakhouse? I want to open the best steakhouse in L.A.”

Times: Is there a danger that things have become too corporate? Could someone open a boutique restaurant here? A restaurant with 60 seats, with perfect food and perfect service and charge $105 to $115 a person?

Puck: I think if you really deliver for the price, people are willing to pay it. I don’t see a price resistance if you really deliver on their expectations. It might be that the chef has to be there every day . . . at least for the first three years, maybe. But I believe that if somebody wants to open up tomorrow a 60-seat restaurant and the average check is 20% above the most expensive restaurant in town, they will be full all the time, as long as they deliver the real thing.

Selvaggio: At that size, you need to charge those prices in order to make it or you’re wasting your time. If I’m working 15 hours a day and taking all of the risks involved, I want something back. Sure, we all want to have a jewel box, but I think the economics won’t let us do that. It is a business.

We would all be proud to have a restaurant like that in the community. It would be a feather in the cap of Los Angeles. But would we do it personally? Probably not. Personally, I’m down too far in the game to use my legs that much and I’d rather use my head, my experience. Also, it’s a matter of personal economics. As we progress, we have a lot of costs. It’s a matter of choice.

Splichal: I think I would go back. I would take that 60-seat restaurant any day. Your connection with what we all do, with what we all learned, that’s the most important thing. The more restaurants you open, to some extent you lose that connection. You’re driven by all the different things we’re driven by. To me, that connection is what’s most important in the long run.

Selvaggio: But that’s your idealistic side, not your practical side.

Splichal: Right.

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The participants

Fred Eric is owner of Fred 62 and Vida in Los Feliz. Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger are owners of Border Grills in Santa Monica and Las Vegas and Ciudad in downtown Los Angeles and have a cooking show on the Food Network. Mark Peel is co-owner of Campanile and La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles. Wolfgang Puck is chef-owner of Spago Beverly Hills and Chinois on Main in Santa Monica, as well as dozens of other restaurants and cafes. Piero Selvaggio is owner of Valentino in Santa Monica and three other restaurants. Joachim Splichal is chef-owner of Patina in Hollywood and seven other restaurants, including the new Nick and Stef’s steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles.

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Diners’ Fedback

What do you think about the Los Angeles restaurant scene? How could it be improved? Let us know by writing to:

Fine Dining

Food Section

Los Angeles Times

Times Mirror Square

Los Angeles, CA 90053

or by e-mailing: food@latimes.com