After the Review, Sometimes a Deluge

“It’s something you need--the biggest advertisement you’ll ever get. But you only get it once and you’ve got to be ready.”

--Duplex chef/owner Mark Carter

An empty restaurant is the single most feared disaster of every restaurateur. But the alternative--customers eager, even desperate to eat your food--can cripple newly opened restaurants, too.

Restaurant reviews pack restaurants, but a spread in a fashion magazine or a blurb in a tip sheet often has the same effect.

“It’s wonderful, but it’s a nightmare, too,” Cha Cha Cha’s Toribio Prado said recently. Shortly after it opened four years ago, the tiny Caribbean restaurant was featured in three different articles within four days. “We’d been serving about 20 or 30 dinners a night, and suddenly that Saturday, we were up to 180. It was so crazy that night--we only had one waiter, so Mario (Tamayo, Prado’s former partner in the restaurant) had to run around serving the food. I remember he was wearing a white suit--by the end of the night his suit was gray. And we’d run out of food for the following day.”

The Daily Grill in Brentwood was so overwhelmed by crowds during its first weeks in business it had to stop serving breakfast. Customers had started lining up at 6 in the morning.

And the phenomenon isn’t new: Valentino was hit hard and fast by crowds responding to a small mention in The Times years ago which praised Piero Selvaggio’s establishment. “You’re talking to someone who literally went from 11 dinners on Saturday night, Dec. 23, 1972,” Selvaggio says, “to 110 dinners on Dec. 25.”

The difference between Valentino and Cha Cha Cha is a matter of timing. When Cha Cha Cha suddenly became hot, it had been open just a few weeks. Valentino had been open several months. The extra time gave Valentino’s staff the seasoning it needed to handle the unexpected deluge of new customers without disaster.

“The process of opening a restaurant these days is rather strange,” Trattoria Angeli co-owner John Strobel says. “You hire a lot of people who’ve never worked together before and put them to work on equipment that may be totally unfamiliar to them. Waiters have to learn to place orders, the kitchen staff has to get to know each other’s quirks, and the front door has to learn how to book the restaurant.

“Then, let’s say, three or four weeks after you open, you get a review--it doesn’t even have to be a good review--suddenly, you’re doing 50% more business and nobody’s ready for it. And so instead of working on developing a strong staff, you’re working on dealing with the volume of people walking in the door. The staff, instead of continuing to improve, actually goes downhill. They get confused, they get anxious, they get overworked and tired. And you can never recover from that.”

“Now, it’s more difficult than ever,” Selvaggio says. “There’s an explosion, or exaggeration of restaurants. Most are somehow hyped out from the beginning, because of a famous chef, because a famous group of investors--these days, a good review might be the icing on the cake.”

A lot of restaurants, aware of the problems crowds cause, try to combat the anticipated chaos with a tactical counterassault. They’re rarely successful.

Joachim and Christine Splichal, for instance, tried to maintain control over their new restaurant, Patina, by underbooking. But when a tiny, 200-word story in The Times announced the restaurant’s opening, crowds clamored to be fed as at every other hot restaurant. Long waits for tables and short tempers resulted. “We fill the restaurant to capacity, but the phone keeps ringing off the hook,” Christine said at the time. “You know, it’s the hardest thing in the world to tell someone: ‘No, you can’t come to my restaurant.’ ”

Certain restaurant staffers (usually not owners) don’t exactly torture themselves over dispensing rejection. When Santa Monica’s DC 3 had been open just two weeks, a caller seeking a reservation for the following week was greeted with hysterical laughter, followed by a “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“The one thing I’ve learned about opening restaurants,” says Trattoria Angeli’s Strobel, “is that they never turn out the way you think they’re going to before you open, never. No matter how much you prepare and research,” Strobel says. “I think it takes a restaurant a good year and a half to come into its own. Unfortunately, a lot of restaurants aren’t given that much time.”