Patina Gets a Shine

“I think I would go back. I would take that 60-seat restaurant any day.”

That was Joachim Splichal last winter in the Los Angeles Times, responding to fellow chefs’ laments that the business climate makes it impossible to run a small restaurant with perfect food and perfect service.

“But that’s your idealistic side, not your practical side,” countered Piero Selvaggio of Valentino.

Splichal agreed.

Or maybe he didn’t. This summer, he remodeled his 11-year-old flagship restaurant, Patina, and while it’s no 60-seater--its top capacity is 85--it seems smaller because a new dining patio means less crowding. “And I no longer enlarge tables, four seats to eight or six to nine,” Splichal says.

At the same time, he altered Patina’s kitchen beyond all recognition. Once a typical restaurant hellhole as cramped as a ship’s galley and as noisy as a boiler factory, it has taken over most of the space of a small parking lot that used to adjoin the restaurant. Splichal describes the cost of all this only as “in the millions.”

And after 10 years of developing a chain of 13 restaurants particularly known for inventive dishes based on humble ingredients such as the potato, he has revised Patina’s menu to emphasize luxury ingredients: foie gras, line-caught salmon, heirloom tomatoes.

Splichal has a habit of surprising us. When he burst on the Los Angeles restaurant scene in 1984 at 7th Street Bistro in downtown L.A., and even more a year later at Max au Triangle in Beverly Hills, he showed a wild inventiveness that deeply colored the frenetic late-’80s restaurant scene. Fifty years ago, every jazz saxophonist suddenly wanted to play like Charlie Parker; 15 years ago, every California chef wanted to take chances like Joachim.

When he opened Patina in 1989, with its simpler menu, it became L.A.’s favorite restaurant (or at least the favorite of the Zagat Guide’s correspondents) for the next 10 years--and handily survived the recession of 1991 that killed off a lot of restaurant high-fliers. In fact, Splichal’s operation managed to grow continuously throughout the ‘90s, adding six Pinot bistros, four museum cafes, a downtown steakhouse and an Italian takeout.

Finally, last November, he astonished fellow restaurateurs by selling the whole Patina Group chain to the huge Restaurant Associates firm of New York. Under the deal, he stays on to run the operation.

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In the beginning, he didn’t dream of building an ideal kitchen--he didn’t dream of kitchens at all. As the son of innkeepers in the small south German town of Spaichingen, he attended a Swiss hotel school. After graduating in 1973, he went to Holland to work as desk man at a hotel. But he found he didn’t like hotel work after all, so he signed on in the kitchen as a lowly commis chef.

“I liked working in the kitchen,” he says. “I found that as a cook I could travel and see other countries, learn other languages, meet people. I was young, all I had was two pair of jeans and two shirts, I could go whenever.”

He soon did travel--to Quebec, because his Dutch girlfriend had dumped him. “He’d gone to Holland because he was totally in love with this Dutch girl,” says Christine Splichal, whom Joachim would marry in 1981. “When I found out, I thought it was so romantic of him.”

He showed promise in Quebec, and the chefs there told him he should get experience in a Swiss hotel restaurant. So he spent a summer in a big old Swiss hotel, “the kind where people come from all over Europe and stay in the same room every year,” he recalls, “and the waiters know their names and exactly how they like their eggs done.”

Then he knocked around for a couple of years. For three months he picked fruit on a kibbutz in Israel. He worked in a restaurant in Stockholm. He applied to 60 restaurants in France and chose La Bonne Auberge in Antibes, where he met chef Jacques Maximin, chef of Chantecler at the Hotel Negresco in nearby Nice. He went back to Switzerland, to Zermatt.

“He was a ski bum, a long-haired ski bum,” says Christine. “I’ve seen pictures.”

Meanwhile, he was studying the art of cooking intensively. “At one time I memorized all 100 classical ways of cooking potatoes,” he says, “because I had started late, in European terms--I hadn’t apprenticed at 14 or 15. We don’t use those recipes anymore, but it was good to study.”

In 1978, when Splichal was 23, Maximin invited him to be his chef saucier at Chantecler. Five months later he promoted him to sous chef, in charge of 40 French chefs, all older than he was. “It was tough,” Splichal recalls. “I got my nose broken in a fight.” But two years later Chantecler had two Michelin stars and Le Cercle Epicurien had named Splichal most creative young chef.

In 1981--in what was becoming a familiar pattern--another girlfriend dumped him, and again he wanted to get out of town. He accepted a job at the newly founded Regency Club in Los Angeles and trained under the club’s consulting chef, Louis Outhier of L’Oasis in La Napoule, one of the most famous restaurants in France.

At the beginning, the Regency Club kitchen reproduced Outhier’s menu exactly, though some members were dubious about all the cream and butter of classic French cuisine. But gradually Splichal started introducing original dishes.

“When I came to Los Angeles,” he says, “I slowly developed my own style, influenced by the cooking of Provence from my time with Maximin: fish, fresh vegetables, olive oil. Also I was learning from what was available here--the Mexican ingredients, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, some Italian.

“I went to the produce market three times a week, which not many guys were doing at that time, and I started getting ingredients people had just been throwing away. Zucchini blossoms--they would just throw them on the ground. And ‘junk’ fish: sculpin, fresh sardines, skate.”

In 1983 he left the club and made his first public splash at 7th Street Bistro in downtown L.A. By this time he had married French-born Christine Mandion, who would serve as hostess at his restaurants--and also handle corporate marketing, public relations, management training and many other tasks; she has a business school degree and an MBA in international management.

At 7th Street Bistro he was mixing genres of food in a way that seemed dizzying at the time but has became a regular feature of California cuisine. For dessert, he might make raspberry-filled filo “ravioli” in apricot-flavored almond cream. A vegetable “napoleon” became a trademark appetizer of his.

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The next year he headed an even more ambitious restaurant in Beverly Hills, Max au Triangle. It went broke while making spectacularly inventive food, such as a “wiener schnitzel” of artichoke bottoms (another dish that became a Splichal trademark).

After the failure of Max, Splichal dropped out of the public eye for several years, consulting with restaurants all around the world, but his presence continued strong in the Southland.

When the Splichals opened Patina in 1989, some critics were disappointed with its relatively cautious menu. “We were undercapitalized at the start,” says Christine. “After the experience at Max, we wanted the place to be on a sound economic basis. That’s why we used so many humble ingredients.”

Fortunately, Joachim enjoyed mixing luxurious and peasanty elements--ham hocks with lobster, for instance. And he became the darling of the Idaho Potato Board for the startling new uses he found for potatoes, such as potato lasagna and potato ravioli. The rest is history.

Which brings us to the recent changes.

Nobody who knew the old Patina kitchen would recognize it today. Nothing at all is cooked in the original kitchen area now; it houses the pastry and garde-manger (salads and cold appetizers) stations.

The new section is dominated by six ranges, three for meat and three more, backed up against them, for cooking fish and hot appetizers. They’re closed-top ranges, giving the effect of a stove-top griddle that happens to be 9 feet long. The three center burners are always on high, and burners on either side are kept at successively lower temperatures so you never have to adjust the flame while cooking, you just slide the skillet over the right burner.

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At the far end of the kitchen there’s a wood-burning grill. The walls are all tile or stainless steel. Closed-circuit TV lets the kitchen keep an eye on the dining room. For the first time, Splichal has a kitchen with room for him to walk around behind the line cooks to supervise their work.

Amazingly, it’s about as quiet as the dining room, now that dishes are washed elsewhere in the building. In the biggest change of all, the whole working space is air-conditioned to 72 degrees, except for a 50-degree room for cutting up meat and fish and making sorbet.

Out in the dining room, the ceiling has been raised, the walls are mostly blond Italian pearlwood and there’s a new motif of arches with crossbars. From the street, Patina now looks like some sort of Frank Gehry log cabin.

Splichal describes his new menu as “less playful a little bit. More New Yorkish. Slicker, sexier.” There’s no “soup of yesterday” (as he used to call soupe du jour), no section of unusual organ meats. It lays far more emphasis on luxurious ingredients: aged Parmesan, Spanish serrano ham, Persian mulberries.

The food is more subtle. Lobster and shrimp with basil oil and sweet yellow tomatoes comes in a delicate, pastel sauce of tomato juices. Hearty braised short ribs are smoked at the last minute over almond wood. The Splichals think of this as a matter of the restaurant maturing with its clientele.

And the sale of their whole operation to Restaurant Associates?

“Being under the corporate umbrella takes a big burden off our shoulders,” says Christine. “And they let us run a restaurant like this.”

“It means more space, more luxury,” says Joachim. “Now we can have the most luxurious ingredients, the best chicken there is, and so on.”

“And you please yourself with it too, eh?” says Christine with a nudge.

“Well, yes,” he says, with a faintly sheepish grin. “So in relation to seats, now I have the biggest kitchen in town.”

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Perry contributed text to Splichal’s “Spuds, Truffles and Wild Gnocchi: The Patina Cookbook” (Collins, 1995).