Fine Dining With an Extra Dollop of Drama

There’s a failed experiment 55 feet above our heads. It’s a silver, heart-shaped balloon hugging the ceiling of Eurochow, Michael Chow’s new eatery in Westwood. It was supposed to resemble an art installation concocted by a late fan of the New York branch of Mr. Chow, the restaurants. Mr. Chow, the man, still refers to him as Andy. You know. Andy.

“You know Andy’s ‘silver cloud’?” Chow says, staring upward. “It didn’t quite work out. I wanted the balloon floating, instead of going straight up to the ceiling. Very boring.”

Boring isn’t on the menu at Chow’s latest eatery, which opens with great fanfare during a private bash Thursday evening. The place isn’t a restaurant as much as a stage set for the ritual of eating well. But then, Chow is just as much of a hybrid as his new 200-seat restaurant, which has the audacity to offer cuisine from Italy, China and France without employing that great leveler known as fusion.

The father of starlet China Chow was born in China and schooled in England. And if you want to know what kind of restaurateur he is, check out his black-rimmed, owl-like glasses. Hmmmm, we wondered. Is it a coincidence that they resemble those of architecture god Philip Johnson?

“There’s a whole school of people who wear those glasses. The first was Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the furniture and interior designer who was my mentor. There was Le Corbusier. Then I.M. Pei. All the architects wear them. Like all directors have a hat. Like Don King with his hair. Mr. Magoo with his glasses. It’s what I call trade dressing.

“They’re difficult glasses to wear. People look funny in them. You need a face like this. Handsome but not too handsome.”

The just-handsome-enough Chow, who dreamed up Giorgio Armani’s new boutique in Las Vegas, designed the restaurant with his fashion-designer wife, Eva Chun. And now he’s taking us on a tour of his work in progress.

The decor is high drama, not least because it contains so many film references. The main room is white on white--marble, linen, quilted walls and seat covers--with everything lighted with fiber optics, including a 23-foot-high obelisk in the center and a glowing bar that comes straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”

“Kubrick is a very good interior decorator,” Chow says. Who knew? “But it’s easier to make things look beautiful in the movies than it is in real life,” he continues. “The reason is, in movies, you only have to light things so they look good on film. Everything around them can be falling apart. But in life, you have to make everything everywhere look good.”

On opening night, the waiters will look snappy in white gloves (like the waiters in Luchino Visconti’s segment of “Boccaccio ‘70”). Meanwhile, diners seated above the glass-covered wine cellar will be able to peer down at a silver trolley carrying the tackiest items off the menu--plastic food.

Why plastic? “This place is so chic that I can do plastic food to invert the snobbery.”

But, hey, Chow doesn’t have to resort to plastic food to get your attention. He’s introducing fruits de mer, the French version of sashimi that recently tiptoed into New York’s hot eatery Balthazar.

“To me, it’s very glamorous, very luxurious,” Chow says. “In Paris, it’s everywhere. It got to London 20 years ago. I think it’s going to be a food of the next millennium. I don’t why it takes so long to spread.

“Twenty-seven years ago, when Mr. Chow opened here in Los Angeles, I was the first to introduce bottled water to America. It was Evian. People used to want to kill me. They said, ‘You want to charge me for water?’ They went crazy. So now everyone’s drinking bottled water.”

And if fruits de mer is now on the Chow-meter, that can only mean one thing.

“Whatever is personal is universal. If I love it, everybody will love it.”

Sooner or later.

Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]