CPK founders launch LA Food Show concept: designer-pizza pioneers Flax, Rosenfield team up for upscale-casual debut

Nation's Restaurant News, June 9, 2003 by Amy Spector

Ten appetizers, priced from $6.95 to $10.95, set the international tone of LA Food Show's menu. They include "spin dip," a variation on spinach-artichoke dip, $7.50; and Szechuan baby back ribs, $10.95.

Because their primarily female lunch clientele at CPK prefers a variety of salads, the partners graced the LA Food Show menu with seven salads, priced as at CPK by half-portion or full-portion sizes. Options range from Three Crunch Chinese Chicken Salad to a Prime-steak salad with slow-roasted Roma tomatoes and crumbled blue cheese.

In addition to Los Angeles' longtime orientation toward salads, a Food Show offering of fried chicken with a waffle speaks to the "L.A." theme by bringing to mind the locally popular Roscoe's House of Chicken N Waffles mini-chain.

The LA Food Show kitchen's bright-red rotisserie determined the restaurant's color scheme, Rosenfield said. That appliance turns out Herbed-Rotisserie Chicken, $13.95, and Thai-Rotisserie Chicken, $13.95. Seafood, steaks and vegetarian entrees also are featured.

CPK veteran Clint Coleman was tapped as chief operations officer for the LA Food Show brand. Flax and Rosenfield said there are no executive chefs. Instead, as once was the case at CPK, the founders themselves head the new concept's research and development team.

"Our kitchens at home are our test kitchens," said Rosenfield, who dons a chef's jacket, as does Flax, when they team up with Coleman to devise dishes for the restaurant.

"We're an upscale grill and bar," Flax said, adding, "The food is the emphasis. We back-draped the kitchen. It's a show."

The creative urge that led the CPK founders to take another crack at chain innovation with LA Food Show has not yet run its course, Flax indicated, hinting that a third concept is simmering on the duo's developmental back burner.

LA Food Show's founders, drawing on their 18 years of experience in the restaurant industry, chose a launch site for the restaurant that was a stone's throw from one of CPK's topgrossing branches.

"If this concept doesn't succeed, it won't be because of the location," Flax observed.

Flax declined to specify how much of his and Rosenfield's $2.1 million development budget, which was augmented by CPK's $2 million contribution, went toward construction. "We have a lot of money in the bank [for future expansion]," he said.

Meanwhile, the show goes on at California Pizza Kitchen, which saw its biggest growth spurt under its former majority ownership by PepsiCo from 1992 to 1997. CPK then trimmed down somewhat under PepsiCo's successor, the New York-based investment firm Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co.

Today the CPK chain is growing again as a public company and adding to its 155 owned or franchised restaurants in 26 states, the District of Columbia and four foreign countries. Plans this year call for the opening of 22 new CPK branches, five of which already have debuted. Rosenfield and Flax retain a 7-percent ownership stake, according to corporate sources.

CPK's revenues for the March-ended first fiscal quarter were $82.9 million, an 18-percent increase over the same period in 2002, yielding net income of $4 million, up from $3.7 million in the year-earlier first quarter.