The Dining Is Fine on the Picket Line : Labor: Beverly Hills restaurateurs do lunch for striking teachers.

Walking the picket line may not be fun, but in Beverly Hills, at least it’s tasty.

More than 25 local restaurants--including some of Beverly Hills’ trendier eateries--are donating meals to striking teachers to keep up their spirits and spare them some lunch money.

Although the teachers have not been paid for two weeks, they have been well fed with Cobb salads from The Grill, hero sandwiches from Il Fornaio and lemon pies from Kate Mantilini.

The idea for the meals came from Beverly Hills parent Carole Hakak, who said she didn’t want to merely feed the teachers but to show the school board that the district’s first-ever strike is “being watched by the whole community.”

Hakak said five restaurants she called declined to donate because they said they did not want to get involved in politics. Another restaurant refused because it did not agree with her view that “the board should return to the table and compromise to end the strike,” she said.

Beverly Hills school board President Dana Tomarken called the restaurants’ gestures “lovely” and said she believes the donations are not politically motivated.

Several of the donating restaurateurs agreed.

“I feel for both sides,” said La Famiglia owner Joe Patti, whose patrons at the restaurant hear Italian opera while paying $15 to $26 for dinner entrees.

“On the one hand, the district doesn’t have the money, but on the other hand, teachers need the money,” said Patti, whose two children grew up in Bel-Air and attended private schools there. “We restore the food in their bodies so they can think better.”

On Tuesday, Patti dished up 25 orders of penne paradiso-- pasta with creamy tomato and prosciutto sauce--for the teachers, who walked out Oct. 16 and are deadlocked with the district over demands for higher salaries and health benefits.

“I hope the day I go on strike they help me in same way,” he joked.

Roberto Rossi, manager at Prego, said this week, “(The) teachers need to make the same amount as any other teachers in Los Angeles County.” As he spoke, two chefs patted out pizza dough for the teachers and sprinkled it with mozzarella cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts and olives.

At Roxbury Park, where striking Beverly Hills High School teachers meet for lunch, 10 pizzas and two large containers of pasta from Prego vanished in minutes. “The gulp that invaded Roxbury Park,” quipped Alan Weiner, chairman of the foreign language department.

“It hit the spot, ring-a-ding,” said science teacher Frank Memmer, licking his fork clean.

While at school, Memmer said, he usually brown-bags it. He said he and his wife cannot afford to eat out too often and when they do, it is at casual places where they can spend less than $15 between them.

Memmer pronounced the pizza and fusilli con luganega “delicate, very fine.” But he was quick to add that “it’s not the food so much as what it represents. Somebody’s thinking about us. . . . That’s what counts.”