Opera’s Impresario

“A temperamental chef?” Claude Koeberle ponders the phrase as he sits in the airy new Santa Monica restaurant Opera that he opened this week on Ocean Avenue and where he intends to introduce his chic pan-Mediterranean cuisine to hungry patrons.

“Yes, I’m temperamental,” he finally agrees. “I think that’s a good compliment. A chef should be emotional.”

The French-trained Koeberle--he’s cooked at Ma Maison, L’Orangerie, Les Anges, the recently opened Tamayo in East L.A. and his own 30th Street Bistro in Newport Beach--seems to revel in his persona as this city’s bad boy of haute cuisine.

Ask him what his early inspirations were and he’ll crack: “Good Burgundy wine and good-looking women.”

Ask him why he decided to become a chef in the first place, and he’ll say: “Because I hated school.”

And ask him about the rumor that he once dumped water on a female chef during a dispute, and he’ll smile broadly and say: “Ah, the story of the bucket of water . . . it’s all true.”

But Koeberle emphatically denies that he’s a sexist. He points out that the woman he dumped the water on (Anne Sprecher, a pastry chef at Ma Maison at the time) came to work with him in the kitchen at Opera. “We’ve been close friends for a long time,” Koeberle says. “She laughs about (the incident) now. . . . Of course she wasn’t laughing that day.”

Neither were other female chefs, a number of whom were insulted by Koeberle’s act.

“It became a symbol of the struggle of women in the kitchen,” Koeberle says with just a bit too much pride. “It got blown out of proportion.” If Koeberle seems a bit, well, chauvinistic, take note that his equal partner in the kitchen is a woman. “We’re both the executive chefs,” says Debbie Slutsky, who has helped open several restaurants around the country.