Four Seasons Loses Chef; Metro Closes

Chef Seppi Renggli’s recent (and surprise) departure from the Four Seasons isn’t the only big news on the New York restaurant scene these days. Metro, the 2-year-old, Upper East Side showcase for chef Patrick Clark, has gone out of business too.

“We just got hit by the kind of slump that’s going on in New York right now,” Clark said. “We were very busy every night at prime time, between about 7:30 and 9 p.m., but not before or after that--and basically, with our overhead, we needed to fill the restaurant more of the time.”

Clark has no immediate plans and said, “it’s all just up in the air right now.”

Metro was designed by Adam Tihany, who recently opened a version of his New York Remi in Santa Monica (see stories on page 98).

Hubert’s, another sophisticated Tihany-designed restaurant on the Upper East Side, is about to close too--but only temporarily (weekends in July and the month of August), and for strictly seasonal reasons.

Hubert’s chef and co-owner, Len Allison, will run a summertime restaurant on Shelter Island, between the north and south forks of Long Island. “It’ll be very health-oriented,” he says, “with lots of seafood--very light.” The site is the recently renovated Chequit Inn, an old Victorian mansion on a hilltop overlooking the water, and the restaurant will be open from Memorial Day through the end of September.

After that, Allison, who has previously discussed the possibility of opening a spa-type restaurant somewhere in Southern California, plans to tour Arizona, starting with the Scottsdale area, “to see how I feel about the place.” He’s still definitely considering what he calls “this whole inn/resort-style restaurant concept--if not in California, then close by.”

In other New York restaurant news, executive chef Geoffrey Zakarian, sous-chef Patrick Robertson and pastry chef Melissa DeMayo exited en masse from the recently opened (and well-reviewed) Restaurant 44 at Manhattan’s Royalton Hotel. They are said to be looking for a restaurant location of their own. And Alain Sailhac--former longtime chef at Le Cirque and briefly Zakarian’s boss at the “21” Club--has left his highly-publicized post as executive chef at the Plaza Hotel. He has reportedly returned to France.

TIP TOPPING: A familiar old canard about restaurant tipping showed up in a “Dear Abby” column in this newspaper recently. In response to a letter from a restaurant chef complaining because he (or she) didn’t get a cut of waiters’ tips, Abby asked three top L.A. restaurateurs for their opinions on the subject--Bruce Vanderhoff of Le Restaurant, Jimmy Murphy of Jimmy’s, and a third who wished to remain anonymous. All three basically defended the system by which chefs receive salaries commensurate (at least theoretically) with their talent and experience, while waiters are rewarded on a check-by-check basis by the diners they serve. But the anonymous restaurateur added, “In most European countries, the gratuity is included in the cost of the meal. This covers the preparation as well as the serving. I feel certain that if the choice were up to diners, they too would prefer to do away with tipping.”

I call this a canard because it is simply not true that individual tipping has been done away with in Europe. An obligatory service charge--which can be anything from 8% to 25%, depending on the country and the nature of the establishment--is indeed added automatically to checks in most of Europe, even in bars and cafes.

This is so institutionalized a practice, in fact, that the service charge is often included in the price of items ordered and not added as a supplement. But both customers at elegant restaurants and regulars at casual bistros or cafes almost invariably supplement this service charge with some extra cash.

At an upscale restaurant in France, for instance, it is common to leave an additional 5% to 10% of the total amount (which, remember, already includes a service charge). You won’t necessarily be scorned if you don’t--but you’ll probably get more attention next time if you do.

If automatic service charges were indeed to be widely implemented in this country, I guarantee that diners who are already generous tippers would add something on the side--while those who are not generous would doubtless grouch all the way home about having been forced to ante up 15% or so against their will.

TABLE SCRAPS: Bice Pomodoro on La Cienega is, as the large sign outside informs passers-by, “Closed for Remodeling.” The owners hope to reopen the restaurant soon, says a spokesman, “with a whole new concept.”