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December 15, 2024 · 10:38 am

Continental cuisine comes to Orange County

In the mid 1950s Geril and Gosta Muller arrived on the west coast. They were born in Denmark and had graduated from a Hotel and Restaurant School in Copenhagen in 1943. Following that Geril had served royalty at a Royal Gun Club. [Gosta (left of then-president Nixon) and Geril, 1971, at Chez Cary]

After a few years in Reno NV, they would swiftly work their way to the top of the emerging luxury restaurant pyramid in Southern California, managing and eventually owning award-winning restaurants there.

In Reno, the brothers worked at a motel restaurant called The Bundox (meaning boondocks). After a few years Geril went on to San Francisco to work as manager of the Pink Chateau restaurant in the Continental Motel. It may be significant that the Pink Chateau featured steak cooked on a “flaming dagger,” because flaming food would be a featured attraction at their next engagement in Orange CA. There the brothers firmly established their reputations for creating and running fine restaurants. [above: River House Motel, home of The Bundox]

In 1965 the Mullers helped establish Chez Cary, named for owner Cary Sinclair. The Chez, as it became known, set a model for an exquisitely posh and precious style of “continental” restaurant-ing not found much outside San Francisco and Los Angeles at that time. Orange’s residents may have been well off but they were not used to dressing up for dinner. A suit and tie was a requirement at Chez Cary where princely male waiters threatened to outdress their wealthy customers. [1967 cartoon of Geril wearing tuxedo]

The brothers decorated the restaurant lavishly with red velvet upholstered swivel chairs, crystal chandeliers, silver candlesticks, fine china, and old world decorative objects. Geril rounded up a talented kitchen and dining room staff. And, of course, there was quite a lot of tableside theatrics, with salads tossed and dressed, sauces poured, and meats and desserts flamed.

There was a ladies’ menu – i.e., one with no prices — since madame couldn’t possibly be the one paying the bill. And there were ladies’ footstools under the tables. Why the footstools? I don’t know, but they seemed to impress reviewers.

In 1966 the restaurant reviewer from the Long Beach newspaper observed that the bill for a dinner with his wife came to $18 plus tip. But, he wrote, it was the sort of restaurant where guests were not supposed to care what the total came to. He gave it his highest rating: AAAA. While the brothers were at Chez Cary, acting as managers and maitre d’s, the restaurant won four Holiday Magazine Awards, an accomplishment generally attributed to the Mullers.

The Mullers remained at Chez Cary until 1973 when they opened their own restaurant, Ambrosia, in a Newport Beach location formerly occupied by a restaurant called Karam’s [shown above]. Their ability to win awards continued at Ambrosia [below: cartoon of Geril with a Holiday award, 1975].

Ambrosia strongly resembled Chez Cary in luxurious decor and smooth operation. According to one report the restaurant “served so many flaming dishes that at one point it had to get special permits from the town’s fire department.”

Evidently patrons found Ambrosia very comfortable. Five-hour-long meals were not unheard of. By the 1980s the typical tab for two had risen to $150. [Above, Ambrosia in Newport Beach]

But, alas, ten years after opening Ambrosia the building’s owner threatened to double the rent. The brothers hatched a plan to relocate Ambrosia to an elaborate and expensive new restaurant complex they built in Costa Mesa called Le Premier. But Ambrosia didn’t succeed in its new location, closing a mere two years after opening in 1983. Geril bitterly observed that Costa Mesa was not a good location for a first-class restaurant, saying there weren’t “enough well-traveled people in Costa Mesa” and “Anything exclusive will not work there.”

Despite declaring bankruptcy, the Mullers did not give up the struggle to revive Ambrosia. Another restaurateur had adopted the name Ambrosia and the type style the brothers had used. They sued him, hoping to get back the name. Then they bought the restaurant in Newport Beach that had taken over their former location there – 30th Street Bistro — planning to open a new Ambrosia once they won the suit. Sadly for them, they did not succeed.

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Filed under decor, elite restaurants, proprietors & careers, restaurant prices

Tagged as continental restaurants, Denish restaurateurs, flaming food, Orange County CA

May 2, 2021 · 4:34 pm

Tableside theater

Is tableside service the kind of glamour that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny? It may be a noble tradition in French restaurants, but in the United States it’s another story. Depending upon how you look at it, it can be fun — or it can be understood as a way to charge more for lower quality food.

I haven’t been able to determine how common tableside service was in 19th-century America. But clearly chafing dishes were employed long ago, especially where oysters were served. A widely circulated story from 1843 described a man staying at a fine hotel in New Orleans who was outraged that he should “cook his own victuals” when he ordered a venison steak and the waiter brought a chafing dish for him to prepare it in.

How times change! By the mid-20th century, restaurant guests were delighted to prepare food themselves with a hibachi or fondue pot.

One of the most flamboyant sorts of tableside service is the presentation of food on flaming swords. It represented the consummate display of tableside theatrics, particularly at Chicago’s Pump Room of the late 1930s and 1940s. Master of ceremonies Ernie Byfield asserted that he preferred to host “laughing eaters” rather than “grim gourmets.” He was quite frank about the degree of pretense involved with tableside service at the Pump Room, implicitly acknowledging that formal French service was out of step with mainstream American culture. [Pump Room flaming swords, 1943]

Tableside service as entertaining floorshow got a foothold in American restaurants in the 1930s. By then, according to an essay by A. J. Liebling, Prohibition speakeasies had introduced middle-class New Yorkers to “a pancake that burned with a wan flame,” a reference to Crepes Suzette.

The popularity of flames at the table and other forms of tableside food preparation grew in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The full show was described by the proprietor of the Bubble Bar in Akron OH in 1952: “Just as your Flaming Sword Dinner is about to be served, the Rajah (that’s my assistant) and I dim the house lights and approach your table, sword in hand aflame with choice morsels of lamb, beef tenderloin or chicken. . . . And of course, following such an adventure in dining, you wouldn’t think or dare to order any dessert but our Flaming Cherry Jubilee or Flaming Crepes Suzette.”

Alas, a look behind the scenes quickly dissolves whatever magic adheres to tableside drama. The 1974 how-to book Showmanship in the Dining Room leaves little doubt that tableside service in all its forms — whipping up sauces, tossing Caesar salads, serving beef from shiny rolling carts, flaming things — is all about money. The book builds upon the wisdom articulated in a July 1966 issue of Cooking for Profit that asserts that, for “the table-cloth operation,” service is the prime merchandiser. Tableside service, goes the thinking, makes customers feel important and willing to pay more for what is often food of lesser quality or quantity.

Here are some of the magic-dissolving points made in the Showmanship book:
– The rolling cart has a virtually unique benefit. It allows the restaurateur to sell items he could not otherwise sell.
– Wines on a cart allow the waiter to push particular bottles. Few people can resist when a bottle is held before them with the waiter’s recommendation.
– Coffee can be served by a specialist. For some inexplicable reason customers accept an individual dressed like an Indian maharajah much more readily than a native of a coffee-producing country.
– A casserole item with a low food cost, such as curry made from turkey thighs, which could not be readily sold otherwise, can be merchandised from a self-service chafing dish on the table.
– As a general rule, carving in the dining room gives the operation a better yield; The carver becomes proficient at making less meat look like more; the waiter can divide a piece of meat that is less than the sum of two individual orders.
– If flambéing is done properly, the customers enjoy it and willingly pay for it. In most instances, it does not harm the food very much at all.
– Any waiter who can light a match can flambé a dish.
– Nothing about the perennial flambé favorites, crepes Suzette and cherries Jubilee, is exciting except the showmanship.
– But people like sweet tastes, and people like flames. The combination is seemingly irresistible, as it sells at menu prices so exceeding the cost that they would make a desert water vendor blush.
– The matronly waitress might be able to flambé successfully . . . but she may look domestic making a steak tartare and resemble a washerwoman when tossing a Caesar salad.