51 Maple Drive #2

Part 1 of 9. How I fell in love with my wife. A paid series from the 365 collection. This first post is available to free subscribers. Subsequent posts will be subscriber only.

Oscar night at Maple Drive. Courtesy of Billboard Magazine

You would either want to go to this restaurant or you were in the wrong city.

The restaurant was tucked away in a residential Beverly Hills neighborhood. By design it was not a place you would stumble upon walking or driving by; it was, deliberately, a restaurant that had to find you, through early word-of-mouth over lunch at Spago or some eager young assistant who had her ear to the ground for that sort of thing.

The fact that the place was enormous inside and yet practically hidden was a key ingredient, part of its industry caché, like not having the restaurant name readily visible as you entered.

On the face of the matchbook was a simple black and white line drawing of a piano and an intertwined lobster. The name of the street – Maple Drive – was printed there. There may have been a street address. There may have been a telephone number.

If you did not valet park your car – which you did – and you approached the place on foot or, better yet, if you were a well-to-do elderly local out walking her miniature dog collection, then you would have felt the frisson charge of the place growing stronger as you moved towards it.

To walk by at night and peer in through the open terrace was to look onto the USS Enterprise bridge before the roll of opening credits. The restaurant’s insides hummed and glowed with a marvelous golden energy from the future, an energy that everyone inside took completely for granted.

With its vast open-plan, its multi-level battle-stations, and the crisp efficiency of its workers moving across the starship floor, the restaurant seemed capable of breaking apart from the absurd, over-irrigated jungle that surrounded it and streaking into the Hollywood skies.

CUT BACK TO and CLOSE ON the NOISY CHIHUAHUAS, slack-jawed, stunned into silence.

*

Dudley Moore was one of the owners and some nights after driving up in his white Rolls Royce – a match for the one from Arthur – he would sit down at his Yamaha grand piano. He would play his compositions seriously and with sensitivity, but not as a movie comedian, not as Arthur, hardly as an entertainer at all. In his own way when he was at the piano he was unmasked and hiding behind nothing, even if his back was turned to his audience, and perhaps it was turned to make the greater revelation possible.

Stage right of the piano there was an oyster bar with handsome young men dressed as handsomely in white buttoned kitchen jackets. They filled mignonette ramekins, speared lemon wedges with cocktail forks and effortlessly cracked open Kumamotos and tucked them into clean white beds of ice. And all the while they would laugh good-naturedly at the clientele’s jokes and top up their fluted glasses of Tattinger.

Adjacent to the oyster bar there was the hum of open kitchen; the occasional adrenaline burst of flame from a sauté pan; the gravel buzz of metal scooping into crushed ice and infused vodka sloshing into bar glasses; the steady delivery of dishes to the expediter managing the line who surveyed his hot steel shelves with the gravity of an aircraft controller; and way, way, way back in the mix, buried there for the aficionado, the ever-so-faint sound of dishes staged and prepped for washing.

In its original review of the restaurant LA Magazine wrote that the grey architecture of cool surfaces and sharp angles was “neo-Flinstonian.” Some of the walls pitched at odd-angles inspired this, but there were other Flinstonian details, in particular a space odyssey, monolithic slab of water-sculpture on the terrace that guided water down its serrated granite edge. It is true these water flow sculptures are everywhere these days – the original owners would shudder to know that smaller scale knock-offs can now be purchased from Costco – but thirty years ago major film stars and their bored, been-there, done-that agents couldn’t resist, like children, poking the sculpture on their way out and letting water trickle over their fingertips.

It should be mentioned if only in passing that the food was exceptional.

*

The restaurant was part of a small constellation of restaurants that had the size and reputation to host Oscar and Grammy parties, and on awards nights the winners would make their way up the concrete and steel steps and along the red carpet, breezing past the hunting dog photographers banned from the house but tolerated barking and braying at the door.

Inside the winners would get a smile from a Demi Moore at court chatting with a semi-circle of friends or they would be welcomed, as if in an elementary school dream, by Elton John, the Oscar party’s annual host, who would shake their hands with his friendly, toothy smile and his improbably chubby fingers, those piano playing hands, the same hands that had played the soundtrack of everyone’s youth – now warmly touching their own on this evening of euphoria.

The winners would float deliriously about the restaurant accepting praise for the shining, golden heft of their Oscars, idols they held so tightly in their warm hands as to bring them within striking distance of human body temperature.

*

The waitstaff, of which I was a member, could tell you the exact ingredients in the dishes. We had learned our lines, and the command of details lent us an illusory, brief edge-of-table power. We could explain both with words and subtle hand movements how the parts and techniques comprised the sublime culinary whole – gesticulating “smoothing” and “sprinkling” and “gently folding” like auditioning hand models. We could tell you about the rich mineral content in the oyster beds in faraway Washington State and the far-flung origins of the seafood in the bouillabaisse.

During desert, when it could be demonstrated without shuffling plates, we could show you the individual designs in the seamlessly inlaid tabletops. We would not – but we could have if we wanted to – tell you who was who – and who was not – right then and there in the room. We could have – but we would not have – inserted ourselves into your conspiratorial conversation to let you know your second young wife is correct, and you are wrong: the friendly laugh in the booth behind her is, in fact, Faye Dunaway’s.

*

Despite its near mantra status and repetition, at any given time there may only be – I’m guessing – a thousand businesses in the United States where the customer is always right. For a season this restaurant was among them. The waiters were hired because they had an instinctive feel for this, for the needs of the client, for the delicate acrobatic craft being performed at casually extravagant dinners for eight.

If a patron, in front of his arrayed guests, decided to compose an ad-hoc recipe foraged from elsewhere on the menu and turned the entrée descriptions into a personal spice and produce stand of exotic ingredients – then that new and improved recipe would be attentively written down on the waiter’s tiny white pad, echoed back for clarity and brought to the busy chef, where similar diplomatic skills would be engaged on the receiving end.

There was an invisible high-wire strung between table and kitchen that a server walked, and, perhaps in recognition of this, it was not unheard of for the waiters to receive absurd, disproportionate gratuities with zeros strung together like Christmas baubles.

*

Melanie was seated at table 51, position #2.

Chapter 2 ➡️