Eater's Digest

Seeing and Being Seen in L.A. Eateries

BY EVE BABITZ

The great thing about eating out in L.A. is that it's done with a vengeance. Poor Hugo's—which used to be a nice place for lunch and dinner after art openings— now opens at six A.M. SO you can cram breakfast down and everyone will know you're up, just in case they missed you last night at the Ivy, sitting practically on top of James Cobum, across from Susan Anton or Farrah, or yesterday having a power lunch at the Grill with William Morris agents and a few show-biz lawyers. High tea can be squeezed in if at four P.M. one can get over to Tmmps and watch the decorators and art crowd mix tea and martinis in such a purposeful way you'd hardly notice it was Southern California.

For what's left of L.A.'s bar scene, of course, there's always the West Beach Cafe in Venice at night, where the hauts artistes gather to laugh at the movie business. And if it's hot artists you're after, there's still Ports, which has a bar so jammed with video prodigies you'd think you'd died and gone to SoHo. These days people in the music business have fastened onto a den of iniquity called Le Dome on Sunset Strip, which looks like a set for a Mick Jagger insult. It's one of those places where they still let you in right before you have to join A.A. For the kids who dream video, it's the Hard Rock Cafe, where the Bret Easton Ellis Less than Zero blase eighteen-year-old blonds of all sexes have nothing to say to each other, so it doesn't matter if the music is too loud—which it always is.

For civilized dining across from Barbra Streisand with Tony Bill dropping by for an earnest chat, there's 72 Market St. in Venice, which almost looks as if it's for people who go sailing and not really Hollywood—but it's Hollywood all right. It's just so Hollywood, you sort of give up and can relax.

Mortons is still the spot where you can see big stars from big soaps like Joan Collins and where I was mistaken for Suzanne Somers by Allan Carr, who was so incredibly nice to me it took fifteen minutes before he realized he was barking up the wrong tan blonde with cleavage.

I guess the most famous secret in L.A. is I Love Juicy, on the hip part of Melrose. Young stars like Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez float in and out eating their Juicy Raps and Kakies. There are also a lot of severely vegetarian video producers, writers like Carol Eastman (a.k.a. Adrien Joyce, the vegetarian who wrote Five Easy Pieces), and all the people trying to stay perfect and still eat like pigs, which you can do there because you don't have to worry about sugar, dairy, or anything else the least bit corrupt. The guy who invented the place, Michael, hangs around all day long giving intense lectures on the Danger of Meat and is as maniacally zealous as Richard Simmons, so it probably won't be a secret for long. Michael doesn't have much of a sense of humor, but his string-bean pat6 tastes like French pork with brandy, which counts for a lot in a town where no one would touch French pork with brandy with a stick. The tofu quiche tastes like roast(goose stuffing from out of Dickens. Some of us think Michael is up there with Albert Einstein. Others have a "problem" with him and go to the East/West Cafe instead.

No one in the miasma of Hollywood likes to admit the Valley exists, but since Disney (the new Disney), Universal, Warner Bros., Columbia, and most of the musicians here actually are stranded in the Valley, they have to eat, and where they have lunch is this nice place called Hamptons, which is dark and cool and where studio heads and secretaries who can't bear the cafeteria food they force on you in the commissaries cluster every day and talk the same deals you hear all over Beverly Hills, except that at Hamptons everyone is so incognito that you can feel a kind of purr of people actually working.

Perhaps the most un-L.A. place totally and completely always jammed with L.A. types like Rickie Lee Jones and Chuck E. Weiss is Duke's, a diner-type restaurant in West Hollywood where a savagely hungry crowd lines up daily to sit at shared tables with all and sundry. It's complete chaos, but it reminds people of New York.

I myself personally, of course, have always preferred Musso's (i.e., Musso & Frank Grill, which has been on Hollywood Boulevard since 1919, when Charlie Chaplin used to go there). I know this isn't a very sophisticated choice in this day and age of less-ismore fashionability, but at Musso's I can feel like an ingenue again and remember that William Faulkner sat at the comer table. Most people in L.A., like Warren Zevon a month or so ago, show up there when no one's looking.

If you really succumb to "being seen," the best place in town is Spago. The only time I felt really awkward in Spago was when I wore a T-shirt and jeans and got seated next to Alan Ladd Jr. and Frank Yablans. Spago is the only place in Hollywood that would seat a nobody in jeans next to two studio heads. Spago mixes business with pleasure and then throws in firecrackers and balloons. If you have just one night to be seen in L.A., go to Spago and find out what fun dining with a vengeance can be. □