California's high costs, legislation make No. 1 foodservice market look

Nation's Restaurant News, August 23, 1999 by Amy Spector

Fraser left to help the family at prominent restaurateur Jimmy Murphy reopen Jimmy's, a Nation's Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame inductee that closed last year but plans to welcome guests again starting next month.

Michael Chow, best known for his upper-crusty Mr. Chow restaurants, entered the Westwood culinary scene in June with Eurochow, his first new restaurant in 20 years. It boasts an Italian chef, a multi-cultural menu and a specialty Chow has called the dish of the moment - chilled plateau de fruits de mer, French for seafood platter.

That of-the-moment characterization would put Long Beach-based King's Seafood Co. ahead of its time. Company chairman Jeff King says King's 12-year-old Santa Monica restaurant, the noted Ocean Avenue Seafood, has been serving chilled seafood platters for years, as has the company's swank Water Grill in downtown Los Angeles.

Kog's has been busy this year adding locations to its budding King's Fish House chain of high-volume, dualconcept dinner houses, which include a traditional dining room and a lively, Louisiana roadhouse adjunct called King Crab Lounge.

In Los Angeles, another seafood place making a splash is the landmark Gladstone's 4 Fish, reputedly California's highest-grossing restaurant. Its owners invested $3 million in Gladstone's beachfront location in Pacific Palisades to rebuild its kitchen, overhaul its dining rooms and add a private-function room, complete with beach access. Company officials say they plan to add a second Gladstone's along the Southern California coastline next year.

Also making waves in the seafood arena is Allyson Thurber, executive chef at The Lobster, a landmark near the foot of the Santa Monica Pier that reopened in July in an expanded version of the restaurant's old-fashioned original incarnation. Thurber, who left Water Grill in 1 1997 to head the kitchen of The Striped Bass in Philadelphia and earn what was then considered the highest-paid executive chef salary ever paid to a women, says she came back to Los Angeles for personal reasons.

Some ever-popular local Italian restaurateurs turned out impressive new and refurbished restaurants this year. In Westwood, celebrated chef Celestino Drago's brothers Tanino and Calogero hopped from the stoves at Drago to the kitchen of Tanino. Also on Los Angeles' west side, Piero Selvaggio polished the cuisine at Primi by introducing chef Vittorio Lucariello and his Southern Italian specialties.

Broader Mediterranean influences prevail in Westwood at the new Palomino, a branch of Seattle-based Restaurants Unlimited Inc.'s "Euro Bistro" chain. The company launched the new place using the chef and manager from its shuttered Stepps restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, whose old venue was earmarked to become a new steakhouse concept by Patina Group chef-owner Joachim Splichal.

In a more casual vein, partners Jay Fagnano and Ben Cheng have added dinner service and floor space at exlncendo, the bakery-restaurant-lifestyle emporium they pioneered at the renascent intersection of Hollywood and Vine.