The Music of Food

With the bass cranked high, Barry White breathes purple promises into your ear. Low light falls in arcs; a smoky spill of golden shimmer fills the room. The effect: a swirl of Scotch in a boxy hi-ball glass.

It’s a five-deep mash around the marble horseshoe bar. To soothe the thirst of the cigarette- and satin-slip-as-au courante-sheath set, Hector and Leslie behind the bar pour goblets of wine, shake Cosmopolitans, ice-chisel martinis. Somehow, above it all, conversations find their way in and out of the static. A couple sway-dance in a narrow hallway, blocking entry to the bathrooms; then, as the music shifts, two men with black and platinum Astro-Boy dos pound out the backbeat to the theme to “Wonder Woman” on the bar.

Winding through the crush come trays--rather, barges fit for the seat of Cleopatra. Servers balance the planks overloaded with appetizers: shrimp, spring rolls, calamari, vegetable skewers, a mound of rice noodles, all served with various spicy sauces, all craftily arranged like Tinker Toys. The black-clad servers step to the trance beat of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, which fades into some fondue party Joao and Astrud Gilberto, folding into conversationally urbane Tom Waits. Or how ‘bout this for a tweak: Bob Wills and His Western Playboys following on the tails of Ian Dury’s “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” for us sentimental post-punks out there?

Might all this be some baroque wrap party? A press-wooing promotional dinner? A whole-nine-yards banquet?

Not quite. It’s just Tuesday night drinks and dinner at Vida, a Los Feliz outpost for various music, film, fashion and TV drones and shakers--the seen-abouts.

Fred Eric, Vida’s chef and owner and de facto party host, has taken the house party-cum-underground club to new levels: globe-trotting cuisine presented as spin art, mixed with an equally all-over-the-place but somehow logical playlist.

“Sometimes I have to watch myself,” says the chef, leaning on the marble bar. His eyes roam; his head--topped with Crayola-yellow hair edged with hints of violet--swivels, taking in the action. “I get so carried away making tapes,” he says, “that it sometimes cuts into my menu planning time.”

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Restaurateurs like Eric have found that music can be as important as a solid yet inventive menu, fresh-cut exotic flowers, correctly spaced sconces, the proper plush of the chairs and the right weight of the silver. The ambience, in other words, can be blown with a careless soundscape.

“For me, music and food are really connected,” says Tom Schnabel, host of KCRW (89.9 FM)’s Cafe L.A. “Both are essential for good living. I wish more people paid more attention to it.”

Schnabel has has gone record shopping with chefs and restaurant owners, made tapes for them or simply provided consultation. He admits that he has slipped a few tapes unsolicited to restaurateur friends whose musical offerings were weak or had just gone stale.

“It’s so ironic to go to your favorite Thai or Indian restaurant and hear Lite 103,” says Schnabel. “And it’s disconcerting to hear a bad match when a restaurant has poured a lot of money into a room and menu; it breaks the spell.”

He points to one Westside restaurant designed with lots of glass, concrete and high ceilings. “They were playing lots of loud country music, which didn’t work,” he says. “It was a sophisticated place; they should have been playing something clean and elegant, some nice jazz.

“Music, like a room, is organized space,” Schnabel says, “and like a room, it can be cluttered and overwhelming.”

As unions go, music and food share a solid bond. Even Shakespeare clamored for this nourishment: “Give me some music, moody food, of us that trade in love.”

In the past, if posh establishments wanted to make an elegant statement, it had to be live: a tasteful piano, a gossamer harp, maybe a spell-casting flute. But within the last five to 10 years, local restaurateurs have not only pumped a lot energy and money into sophisticated sound systems--ones that tuck music into discreet corners like sachets in a lingerie drawer--they’ve also logged hours making tapes or hired local deejays to help them to construct sonic designs.

Many restaurateurs who are aiming for a hip, ear-to-the-ground clientele have figured out that attracting customers is about creating a scene.

Some are trying to harken back to the heyday of the themed Hollywood supper club, a la Coconut Grove or the Trocadero. A few local venues, including Louis XIV on La Brea in Los Angeles and Beverly Hill’s Bo Kaos, have replaced the blasting bandstand with club deejays who spin live ambient grooves--trip-hop, for example, played over a light repast of oyster shooters.

“I see the restaurant industry moving toward theater,” says Mark Leader, creative director of programming for the Seattle-based Audio Environments Inc., which creates sound environments for businesses worldwide, including ubiquitous chains like the Red Lobster and Olive Garden. “There’s a set-design element. How the restaurant is laid out. Why it’s lit that way. Why there is a fountain in the main entryway. Why there is a painting on the wall. Why you are using the music that you are using.

“Some restaurants want to transport you somewhere else, so the music works like a score in a movie or play to send you there. You ask the business owner: ‘What you want to have happen?’ If you want someone to feel sophisticated and elegant, you play Shostakovich or Hayden, but if you want to be sophisticated but not stuffy, you might play jazz. A restaurant with no music is cold and inhibiting. Music is better than no music. But the right music is the best of all.”

“Its one of the planning decisions you have to make in running a restaurant; it’s really part of your identity,” says Kevin Finch, general manager of Santa Monica’s Border Grill. “For most restaurateurs starting out, it becomes a trade-off. You’ve got to raise that additional 50 grand for the sound system, but as you go along, you realize that extra money is dear and you end up putting it in the kitchen or something like that.”

Although, Border Grill co-owner Mary Sue Milliken acknowledges that during peak business hours, it’s about impossible to hear the soft strum of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s guitar or the bleat and rush of classic mariachi trios like Los Ponchos, she says, “We’ve always taken the music really seriously. We’ve been very particular about it and have done a lot of work to keep it really fresh, surprising and pleasing to our guests.”

Many restaurants, however, just do what they can--the bare minimum--which accounts for the same Gloria Estefan tape in so many restaurants.

“Generally, as a rule, most people who own restaurants don’t give very much thought to it,” says Vida’s Eric. “But there’s only so much you can do with lights. With music, your dining room can go from a quiet room for dinner to a campfire sing-along--a group like Electric Light Orchestra or the theme to ‘The Jetsons’ can do that--to a full raging party with a little Led Zep.”

Eric, who trolls record and CD stores as intensely as he scouts a farmers market, says, “What works is pushing the contrasts. I think Milt Jackson is my favorite dining music. Or you can put Serge Gainsborg next to Bardot next to Ella. But it’s too easy to put Ella Fitzgerald everywhere. So you have to fight against that. That’s when you get out the record that’s not on the greatest hits. Or maybe try a little Glenn Gould.”

Still, Eric tries to avoid crossing cultures. “It’s like something Thai built in an American factory, or messing up a Japanese dish; you don’t do soba with salmon.”

He also doesn’t try for perfect food-music matches. Of course, he says, “there are those moments when the food and the music come together--the Bang, Bang Chicken with ‘Take Me Home and Marry Me.’ ”

And Eric admits he can get carried away. “One time,” he remembers, “a businessman sauntered up to the host stand and said, ‘I’m trying to have a business meeting right now, and “George of the Jungle” simply won’t do.’ ”

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Even after a decade in business, you’ll still find a knot of stylish diners pacing on the corner of East Hollywood’s Virgil and Melrose avenues as they wait for tables at the original Cha Cha Cha, a tiny hut of a restaurant that grew up from a lot filled with dry weeds. The pop of congas, the groan of cuicas and often the buzz of brass spill out the narrow door. Some come for the sangria. Others for the the head-opening negro sauce. Others groove on the party-in-progress music.

“I mean the whole thing comes literally from a song,” says chef and co-founder Toribio Prado, grazing over his lunch of steak Argentino, tomato-cucumber salad with pineapple vinaigrette and a salmon fillet blanketed with his signature spicy-sweet negro sauce. “When I left [my job at] the Ivy, I went to New York City for a few weeks,” he recalls. “I was away from home, dealing with a crazy chef. I was a little bit depressed, missing my wife, a little bit drunk; my sentimental side was showing and I heard this song on the radio: ‘Mucheca presrosa que linda que esta cha cha cha.’ I thought it was beautiful.” That, says Prado, was the seed.

He told his friend and then-hair stylist and soon-to-be business partner (it is, for heaven’s sake, L.A.) the late Mario Tamayo about his idea to open his own restaurant. “Mario believed in having a fun restaurant. [He thought] there was need for Latin music in L.A.”

More precisely, they envisioned a place with a dinner club feel. “My dad has an appreciation for Latin music and passed it down to me. I never understood formality in dining. It should be wild and flamboyant and lively. My parents, at dinner, would make our house a salsa club. I don’t think you have to have a dance floor to have a good time. All you need is a good plate of food and a cha cha.”

That has been the working framework for Pacific Innovations, the company that grew out of Cha Cha Cha, says CEO and partner Tod Breslau. He’s noticed a growing emphasis on music as atmosphere in restaurants since 1990. “Because I’m a restaurateur, I’m even looking to see what [other restaurants] are playing in their bathrooms,” he says. “Il Fornaio plays taped Italian classes in theirs.” Cha Cha Cha has jungle rustles and hoots to accompany your nose powder.

For the restaurants of Prado and Breslau (which include the Spanish-themed Cava in the Beverly Plaza Hotel on Third Street in L.A.), the rule of thumb is: When in doubt, play salsa. “Great salsa is really upbeat and warm,” Breslau says. “It gets people really happy.”

Music for the restaurants is procured in various ways. There’s DMX cable radio, which feeds various styles of music into the dining rooms, from cumbia and Polynesian to classical and jazz. “But [with the cable feed] you have less control,” Breslau says. The CD-tape route is more time-intensive but more personalized too. “My wife and I made the tapes until about six months ago,” Prado says. Lately, they have turned to deejays or, as Breslau calls them, “profound tape makers.”

The idea is to make everything appear effortless, to swing seamlessly from one sound to another.

“I take a long look at the room, the menu,” says Silverlake-based club and restaurant jock Ron Miller, “and I try to find music represented in the menu that would enhance dining experience. Like with Cava when it opened, the focus was tapas. The motif is Spanish. So I made the tapes with music of Latin origin. If it’s dinner, I think, ‘I’d like to go with an elegant flamenco, but probably some of that nouveau flamenco--Ottmar Liebert--exotic, smooth, so that conversation can still take place. I then may go on to a light salsa, merengue, maybe some Caribbean, Soka.

Miller, who as a child traveled around Los Angeles with his father, who stocked jukeboxes in restaurants, bars and cafes, uses a broad base of music to sonically drape more than a dozen local restaurants and clubs, among them Louis XIV (where he spins trip hop, trance and ambient dub live), Bo Kaos, Calypso, Mortons, Hard Rock Cafe, Moonlight Tango and the late Flaming Colossus, Bar X, even Kelbo’s.

For West Hollywood’s House of Blues, he’s created what might be called a sonic timeline or aural map, which subtly points to the differences among Delta, Chicago and British Blues. “I have it so [the music] tells a story. But I try to make it subtle. I don’t want to detract from what people are there to do: eat.

“If the music is intelligent and stimulating enough, they don’t leave, and the restaurant sells more drinks.” Good music, then, is good business.

“What the whole evening adds up to,” Miller says, “is a chef-owner who has imagination, who is unique and different. Those who aren’t, well, you wonder why. You have to take some chances.”

At 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, Bo Kaos looks as if it were plucked straight out of Paul Bowles’s Tangier. Sunken seating and low tables half-circle the space’s perimeter; dropped netting brings the ceiling down in tent-like fashion. Bright reds assault the eyes; full-lipped girls tip oysters to their mouths. Others, with heavy-lidded, bored eyes, lean over a menu that travels through many lands: ginseng and royal jelly elixirs, Thai satay, coriander honey-glazed salmon, Chinese roast duck. The shimmer of a sitar blends into a thicket of flamenco as deejay Bruno Guez, his black hair disheveled, spins music on a small stage crowded with vinyl.

It’s the music that carries the place, says Bo Kaos owner and first-name-onlyimpresario, Frederic, who most nights winds back and forth between his two L.A. establishments, Bo Kaos (“beautiful chaos,” he says) and the Little Door on his motorcycle.

Fifteen years ago when he first arrived from France, Frederic was surprised at the dearth of places to dine and hear live or even deejay music in Los Angeles.

“Music gets a place vibrating,” he says. “I love live bands, but the deejay is truly the ambassador of the music. It’s a less expensive way to cover more material and more ground in one evening.”

“He had a crowd; I had the music,” says Guez, who shadowed the deejays behind their vinyl stacks at the old L.A. club-restaurant Flaming Colossus as a teen in the ‘80s. It’s there that he learned the art of clever mixing. “When I’m mixing for dinner, I mix theme to theme,” Guez says. “I try to keep a consistent mood instead of contrasting one against the other as I would after dinner.”

Guez, who is also co-founder of Quango Records, a Beverly Hills-based world music label, has put together several CD compilations, which Frederic sells at his restaurants. Call it music to go. “So when you sign your check,” Frederic explains, “you can put a cigar or a CD on your tab.”

It takes a thick skin to venture into Frederic’s second club-like restaurant, the Little Door. But if you can get past the impassive stare of the frosty hostess, Natasha, squeeze through the throng of gold lame-clad femmes fatales with lips slashed in M.A.C’s inkiest berry shades, you’ll find a world of music to accompany your Moroccan-inspired feast.

It’s the first time I look at my watch after a night at the Little Door, and it’s edging past 1 a.m. As the bodies disappear, the dining area opens up. The air softens from the roar of conversation to a rustle of whispers and occasional heavy sigh. Out in the courtyard I finally feel just a hint of night breeze cooling the back of my neck: a sensation quite like the first moment when a fever breaks, after the heat and visions have subsided. Salif Keita’s voice rises into the night above our heads and over the fence.

At the edge of the space, near the bar, beneath a tangle of vines, a long formal banquet table is still spread with half-full glasses, crumpled wrapping paper, the dregs of dessert. At the head, a tall man rises, bald head and furrowed brow, at once powerful, graceful, dark. He cradles a violin under his chin and plays not to the crowd but to the sky, furiously bowing. Everything stops for a moment, as if suspended in a spell.

“You see,” says Frederic, swirling his wine glass on top of the table’s white linen. “L.A. allows this.” He lifts the goblet, like a priest before his congregation. “That is jazz to me.”