Plum renovations reflect California influence

Nation's Restaurant News, March 10, 1986 by Howard Riell

Plum renovations reflect California influence

NEW YORK -- Quite simply, it was time for a change.

The ambience and direction of Warner LeRoy's 19-year-old Upper East Side landmark, Maxwell's Plum, had become passe, old hat--"as dated as the mop-top haircut," wrote New York Times reviewer Bryan Miller. The hip crowd was turning away from the Art Nouveau, psychedelic singles bar scene and toward a fuller restaurant experience, which included, logically, an emphasis on food.

Enter Mark Peel, at 31 a native California chef with credentials that included tours at such nouvelle bastions as Chez Panisse, Michael's and, since January 1982, Spago, where he and wife Nancy Silverton worked under the innovative Wolfgang Puck.

"Warner LeRoy called me and said he was planning on redoing his kitchen anyway," Peel said. "So we figured, since we were coming, why not wait and do the whole thing together."

The couple started at Maxwell's Plum in October, changing 90% of the menu with an infusion of light appetizers, salads, pastas and grilled items and creating an entirely new set of demands and functions for the restaurant's three kitchens to meet. Maxwell's seats 235 and averages 6,000 covers a week on average per-person dinner tabs of $28, according to manager Robin Hollis.

Much of the incoming equipment reflects the Peel-imported emphasis on "California cuisine." A new, $5,500 wood-burning pizza oven imported from Italy (and using 1,500 logs per week of mesquite, oak and cherry woods) is used to prepare such 9-in. nouvelle pizza creations as a potato, pancetta, leeks and sun-dried tomato pizza, priced at $9.50; a spicy chicken with artichoke and cilantro pizza, also for $9.50; and a lobster and shrimp pizza, for $11.50. All are available for lunch and after 10:30 p.m.

Other West Coast menu touches, such as duck salad with pears, papaya and heart of palm, will be prepared with a new, $3,000 duck roasting oven, located in the basement's ingredients area. There is also a new $2,000 spaghetti cooker and $750 pasta maker, for dishes like black pepper fettuccine, with pancetta bacon, asparagus and cream, for $11.50 ($6.25 as an appetizer), saffron fettuccine, with winter vegetables and confit of duck, for $12.50 ($7.25 as an appetizer) and angel hair, with tomato, prosciutto and basil, for $9.75 ($5.95 appetizer).

Ken Yesmont, LeRoy Ventures' director of design, began planning the $260,000 remodeling at the end of July. Construction work on the kitchens--the 1,000-sq.-ft. main kitchen upstairs and the combined 2,500-sq.-ft. ingredient room and butcher/bakery areas (excluding electrical closet, locker room and ice machines) in the basement--began Sept. 1 and continued until its Oct. 15 conclusion without encroaching on normal restaurant operations. Except once.

Workmen had to close the restaurant for 36 hours right after Labor Day (from Sunday night until lunchtime, Tuesday) so they could, according to Yesmont, dismantle all existing equipment in the main kitchen in order to install the 5-ft.-by-5-ft., mesquite pizza oven.

The bulk of the remodeling was done after midnight. One local newspaper writer noted that "revamping a mammoth institution like Maxwell's Plum is like trying to make a U-turn in a supertanker." Yet Yesmont, 40, brushed that aside, saying that he and his six-member design staff "do this all the time. This place is small. Look at Potomac [LeRoy's $9 million Washington, D.C., cafe, set to open this summer]; it's twice as big."

The construction work was carried out in four stages, according to architect Jerry Hager of Mount Kisco, N.Y.-based Restaurant Equipment & Renovation Co., and the project's equipment contractor. Phase I involved removing the basement's existing walk-in freezer, raising existing compressors over the new butcher area, constructing new ceilings, walls and plumbing lines and moving existing butcher equipment into the new area.

Phase II included demolishing the existing bakery and securing the new space for it and for the ingredient area. The third phase involved the demolition of the existing ingredient area and preparation to begin the new one. The last phase included removal of some equipment in the main kitchen and installation and hookup of new machines.

"There was a terrific waste of space in the basement, very badly used space," said Yesmont, who managed to add 250 sq. ft. of usable space by knocking down walls and consolidating storage space elsewhere and onto shelves above work areas. "We didn't add [outside] footage," he said, "just what we had."

The redesigned kitchen is crafted for ease of movement, despite the relatively cramped quarters. For example, the waitress station is located in the center, away from the cooks. In all, the back-of-the-house staff numbers 28, according to manager Hollis.

Other work included the covering of exposed pipes in the butcher area with fiberglass-reinforced plastic wall panels and with ceiling coverings made of vinyl rock. Workers also installed a duplex ejector pump between the butcher and ingredient rooms, which transports waste material up to meet the city's existing sewer line. There was also an overhaul of the basement's air-conditioning and exhaust systems as well as new, brighter lighting.