72 Market Street Principals Plan a Beverly Hills Address

As was reported in this column not long ago, it has been something of a trend in Los Angeles recently for restaurants on the east side of town to open branches or associated places on the Westside--Melrose Avenue’s Angeli spreading its wings with Trattoria Angeli in West Los Angeles, for instance.

Now, though, comes word that one of the hottest and most typically Westside of all L.A. restaurants, 72 Market Street in Venice, is moving east, to Beverly Hills--or, rather, that some of the restaurant’s principals are.

According to Julie Stone, manager and co-owner of 72, a number of the investors in that establishment--including actor/director/writer/etc./etc. Tony Bill, actor/writer/musician/etc./etc. Dudley Moore, architect/designer Tony Heinsbergen and investment banker Jeff Barbakow--will also be involved in a new 8,000-square-foot ground-floor restaurant in the just-opened Maple Plaza complex on Maple Drive between Third Street and Alden Drive. Tentative name for the new place is Maple Drive (with no street number attached, just to be different). Operating owners will be Stone and 72 Market Street executive chef Leonard Schwartz, both of whom will also continue with their duties at 72. The new restaurant will be designed by Anthony Greenberg.

No details on the menu are available yet--�We’re still working on it,� says Stone--but, thus far at least, it is planned that the emphasis will be on seafood. There will be an oyster bar, in any case, and a large bar bar--and, stresses Stone, “Both the food and the look of the place will be completely different from 72.� An opening date next fall is predicted.

TASTE OF S.M.: Speaking of restaurants opening Westside branches, the new Mediterranean-style restaurant to be opened soon in Santa Monica by Doug Delfeld and Jerry Singer of Trumps now has a name: Gusto--which is Spanish for taste or liking , and was also a catchword from a beer commercial popular a few years back (though presumably the proprietors of this establishment expect their customers to come around more than once). Gusto’s executive chef will be Ron Smoire, a veteran of 72 Market Street, the California-style Marshal’s in Paris and the Darwin in Santa Monica.

YOU SAY TOMATO, I SAY STUPIDO : Wolfgang Puck, who has had an assortment of frozen desserts bearing his name in supermarkets for some time now, is about to launch his long-awaited line of frozen pizzas as well. As has been reported elsewhere in this newspaper, though, he has had a little run-in with the Feds about his labeling of the latter product.

Specifically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture maintains that, in order to be called “pizza,� a product must be dough-based (no problem there) and contain both cheese and tomato sauce (big problem there). As anyone who has ever sampled a pizza at Puck’s Spago knows, part of the reason for that item’s big success there is that it comes with unorthodox toppings--duck sausage instead of pepperoni, say, and goat cheese instead of mozzarella . . . and maybe sauteed red and yellow peppers and/or Maui onions instead of tomatoes.

The USDA’s definition, demanding both cheese and tomato sauce, was doubtless formulated originally to protect consumers against cheapskate products, and obviously draws its terms from the standard pizza-shop pizza. Indeed, as far as anyone can tell, the original pizza, a specialty of the Naples region of southern Italy, was indeed always made with mozzarella cheese and fresh tomatoes. But things have changed. All over Italy, pizzas may be found today with neither cheese nor tomatoes. (One of my favorite varieties of the so-called pizza rustica served in Rome is covered with nothing but thinly sliced potatoes!) The same is true in Provence--whose pizzas, anyway, were more the inspiration for Puck’s than those of Italy.

The nature of “pizza� in America has changed in recent years--becoming more authentically European on one hand, and turning into something purely American on the other--and the old definition. The USDA ought to change it (or at least allow some flexibility in its application). Puck, meanwhile, has agreed to stir tomato chunks into whatever other sauces his pizzas might contain, thereby apparently satisfying our protectors in Washington.

The USDA, incidentally, also made Puck change the designation of his “Country Sausage� pizza--on the grounds that the sausage used wasn’t made in the country. But is cottage cheese made in a little house? Are tollhouse cookies produced in a place that collects money from travelers for the use of a certain byway? Come on, you guys. Go test some prosciutto for swine fever or something.