Can It Be Possible? A Good View and Good Food Too?

Restaurants with great views don’t usually have very good food, simply because they don’t usually need very good food. People come, and come back, anyway. Whoever said you can’t eat the atmosphere didn’t know much about the restaurant game. Sure you can. It saves on food costs, too.

With this in mind, I must report that I’ve just heard about a new restaurant, scheduled to open in May or June, that promises to have a great view but which just might offer some decent stuff to eat as well. It is an Italian restaurant, as yet unnamed, to be perched atop the Pacific Coast Highway wing of the sprawling new Pacific Sunset Building at PCH and (you guessed it) Sunset Boulevard. The vista from this vantage point stretches from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Northern Malibu, and every table, it is said, will partake of the panorama. There will also be a garden patio and an ocean-view banquet room. The ample bar will be furnished, I am told, with “couches, easy chairs and a piano.”

The kitchen staff has not yet been hired for the place, but restaurant consultant Debbie Slutsky--who has worked on Mark Miller’s Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco and our own Hamlet Gardens, among other places--is developing the menu, and general manager and co-owner of the establishment (in partnership with Albertino Parravano, developer of the Pacific Sunset) will be Steven Foster Grant, former general manager of Prego and Chianti Cucina. These two ain’t chopped liver, and don’t serve chopped liver, either.

“We hope this restaurant will be informal, comfortable, warm and affordable,” says Grant. I hope so too. I also hope the food will be first-rate.

GORBACHEV’S SALAD: When Mike and Rae Gorbachev chowed down officially with the Reagan crowd in D.C. a while back, they ate salad greens from Encino--a mix of baby lettuces and such grown by kitchen gardener extraordinaire Andrea Crawford on a plot of San Fernando Valley land owned by Laurence Silverton (father, as it happens, of noted L.A. pastry chef Nancy Silverton). And how were these local leaves presented? As a “Medley of Garden Greens With Avocado Oil and Vinegar, With Brie and Crushed Almonds.” Brie and crushed almonds? I guess goat cheese and pine nuts haven’t trickled down to the White House kitchen yet.

HOLIDAZE: Christmas comes but once a year, and this is it, folks, just in case you haven’t noticed. Ditto New Year’s Eve. And with Christmas and New Year’s come the inevitable complement of pricey special dinners, offered by area restaurants, most of them involving caviar and/or truffles (Why can’t we just eat lentils and sausage at year’s end, like the Italians do?), and virtually all of them including champagne or something masquerading as champagne. I’ve received well over a 100 announcements of such lavish repasts this year, and they are still arriving as I write this.

Obviously, I don’t have room here to give details of all of these--and I have solved the thorny problem of selection (the most interesting dinners of this type are almost invariably the most expensive, making any sort of democratic mix unlikely) by deciding to give details of none. Suffice to say that your favorite restaurant, whatever and wherever it may be, is almost certainly either to be closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and/or New Year’s Eve, or plans something extravagant for the occasion. Call them up and ask them.

And P.S.: Whatever you decide to do, please don’t drink and drive. I need all the readers I can get.

TODAY’S SPECIALS: St. Estephe in Manhattan Beach offers a special “menu within a menu,” featuring new dishes with a Chinese (!) flavor, through the end of the year. These dishes, which include South China Sea lobster consomme with Abiquiu red chiles and Peking duck tamales with chipotle sauce and green corn, were created by St. Estephe chef John Sedlar for his recent presentation of “Modern Southwest Cuisine” at the Repulse Bay Restaurant in Hong Kong. . . . Strolling Christmas carolers will entertain at Trumps in West Hollywood at teatime, tomorrow through Christmas Eve. Trumps’ holiday tea, served daily from 3 to 6 p.m., costs $14 per person. . . . L.A. Ole!, on Wilshire near Western, celebrates Christmas Mexican-style through Wednesday, with traditional seasonal specialties and nightly pinata-bashing. . . . And, for the third year in a row, Jax in Glendale will give a free dinner certificate to anyone dining at the restaurant on Christmas Eve, worth (at a later date) the total amount of their food purchases for the night. The Christmas Brass Quartet will entertain.

NEWS AND NOTES: The Salisbury Manor will open, for breakfast and lunch only, in an historic 1898-vintage stone mansion on West Adams Boulevard at Magnolia, about midway through January. . . . Twenty/20, a nightclub and restaurant, is about to open in the ABC Entertainment Center in Century City. . . . The Parkway Grill in Pasadena now stays open until 11 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays and 12:30 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, serving a new bar menu. . . . Stellini’s on West Pico has been redecorated and is open now for lunch as well as dinner.