Pie, coffee and copper re-piping?

SOME may find it tacky, a little pushy perhaps, but advertising in restaurant menus seems to have arrived.

At the Cheesecake Factory, not only are there 200 menu items to choose from, there are also plumbers, roofers, upholsterers and a plastic surgeon. Higher-end restaurants like Giorgio Baldi and Campanile aren’t immune to the trend either, though they tend to hawk their own products or the places that sell them.

There may be no place more brazen about menu advertising than the Cheesecake Factory, a chain of 57 restaurants in 20 states. The restaurant’s spiral notebook of a menu is as much a service catalog as it is a food-and-drink list. For almost every laminated page of menu, there’s a facing page of advertising. “We’re such a busy restaurant that it not only gives the customers something to look at, it’s also a great place for advertisers,” says Howard Gordon, the senior president of business development and marketing for the chain. “People have come to expect it in our menu; it’s part of the entertainment.”

It’s also a clever business maneuver: Menu Dynamics, a Southern California company, sells the ads and produces the menus for no charge to the restaurant. In return, advertisers pay Menu Dynamics $5,000 for each six-month, full page ad.

For the advertisers, results have been mixed.

“I haven’t gotten a single call in the last four months,” says Robert Simon of Simon & Simon Plumbing, who advertises in the Brentwood menu.

On the other hand, Susan Gordon, a real estate agent in Sherman Oaks, says, “I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of exposure. People stop me on the street.”

At finer restaurants, the menus promote the house-label products and the chef’s cookbooks. Ads are placed in a more discreet manner amid the evening’s specials.

Still, when Elena Baldi was asked about the logos in her menu for Gelson’s Markets, Santa Monica Seafood, Vicente Foods, Lazy Acres Market, Pacific Coast Greens Market and Wally’s, she bristled.

“It’s not advertising,” she said. “It’s just a way for people to know where our sauces are sold.”

At Campanile, manager Jessica Buonocore also prefers to describe the pictures of cookbooks by Mark Peel and Nancy Silverton and the prices listed underneath as information.

“Not only do these chefs have books,” she says, “but they’re available to purchase right here at the restaurant and at the bakery.”

Cash or credit will do just fine.

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mall bites

Chadwick in Beverly Hills has closed for good. In September, owner Ben Ford said the restaurant would restructure and reopen in October.

Now he’s decided to abandon the elegantly appointed brick bungalow on Beverly Drive and start Chadwick Catering, at (323) 493-2016.