An Oasis Fades From the Landscape

The Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills, one of the city’s most picturesque and civilized dining spots, is scheduled to close April 1. Owner Kurt Niklas confirmed his plans months after rumors of an anti-Semitic insult to a patron had caused a number of the restaurant’s Jewish customers to defect. The fabled restaurant has also been the victim of attrition as regular patrons moved on to new hangouts.

A group of investors from Creative Artists Agency is reportedly buying the restaurant. Sources said that Bob Goldman, the agency’s chief financial officer, is negotiating the purchase, but CAA would not confirm that company employees are the buyers.

The 18-year-old establishment is the ultimate ladies-who-lunch destination (even though it is also open for dinner), particularly for those who can secure a table in or overlooking the garden patio, which was designed for people-watching.

Niklas opened the Bistro Garden in 1979 as an informal alternative to his luxurious Bistro restaurant, just up the street on Canon Drive. Like Ma Maison, which opened a few years earlier, the Bistro Garden favored serving haute cuisine to a high-powered crowd in an outdoorsy setting.

By night, the Garden’s tone becomes decidedly glamorous. Agent Swifty Lazar moved his famous Oscar party there from the Bistro in the early ‘80s before transferring it to Spago. Niklas said the greatest party that ever took place in the Garden’s private Pavilion Room was producer Jerry Perenchio’s one-year wedding anniversary bash. “He flew Pavarotti over to sing.”

The Bistro--a restaurant that was born long after Hollywood’s golden age but still captured some of the era’s magic for movie stars and tycoons alike--closed in January 1994, after 31 years, as a result of landlord and labor disputes. Another offshoot, the Bistro Garden at Coldwater in Studio City, which opened in 1990, will continue to operate.

The Westside social crowd, still recovering from the shuttering of Chasen’s last April, is taking the news of the Bistro Garden harshly. “I told Kurt, ‘We’re moving to Geneva if the Bistro Garden closes,’ ” Jayne Berger said. Berger and her husband, Henry, lunch there every Thursday and Friday at Table No. 18, a banquette facing the garden. “The Bistro Garden and what it stands for--that’s the end of our lifestyle. It really is,” she said, teary eyed.

“It’s going to be like the closing of I. Magnin,” said Marcia Wilson Hobbs, who grew up celebrating special occasions at the Bistro Garden with her family.

As for Niklas’ take on the matter, he allowed: “I am 70 years old. I got a good deal [on the sale of the restaurant], and I feel I am entitled to retire.”

But however upbeat he sounded last week, a deep sadness had enveloped him earlier.

“I was totally crushed to come to this decision,” he admitted in an interview in late December, in which he discussed the restaurant’s troubles. Last summer, a regular Jewish customer, Ellen Byrens, was reportedly insulted by an anti-Semitic remark made by Niklas’ son, Chris, who works at the restaurant. Word spread through the Jewish community like one of L.A.’s raging summer fires. Many patrons informally boycotted the restaurant, never to return.

“It killed us,” Niklas said, even though his son denied making the comment. In an article published in The Times in September, Chris Niklas said he had apologized to Byrens “about anything you might have interpreted that I said.”

A good friend of Byrens, society photographer Alan Berliner, said Byrens told him that she was very upset and that Chris Niklas had invited her to lunch to make reparations. Two days after that lunch at the Bistro Garden, she died of a heart attack.

“All would have been forgiven,” Berliner said. “The point is, I know Ellen would have let it drop.”

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But Niklas said Jews had long distrusted his German accent and suspected him of “being a Nazi,” and that the rumored incident merely confirmed people’s deepest fears. Niklas, an American citizen, said he is half Jewish and that his Jewish father was killed by the Gestapo in 1937.

“I never wanted to be in the [restaurant] business,” he said. “I wanted to be an architect, but as a half Jew they wouldn’t let you go to school” in Germany, where he was raised.

Through a connection of his mother, he secured a waiter’s job in a hotel. In 1950, when he came to Los Angeles, Niklas couldn’t afford to pay for tuition at an art school, so he took a job as a waiter at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. He rose to maitre d’, and the day after Romanoff’s closed on New Year’s Eve, 1962, director Billy Wilder called and offered to back Niklas in a restaurant with a group of investors that included Jack Benny, Jack Warner and Otto Preminger.

Of the Bistro Garden’s closing, Bob Spivak, owner of the Grill on nearby Dayton Way, said, “I’m real sad about it.” His restaurant in recent years has attracted many of the Garden’s lunchtime patrons, including Nancy Reagan.

“It was an institution, and it’s a shame it’s going,” Spivak said. “For a restaurant to last the length of time the Bistro Garden lasted, you have to be a brilliant operator with a brilliant concept. You can probably count on one hand the high-end restaurants in Los Angeles open longer than the Bistro Garden.”

“It’s a sadness for us because it’s been a part of our lives,” said Armand Deutsch, one of the Bistro’s original investors. “The number of times we went there is incalculable. The Bistro first, and then the Bistro Garden were our locals,” he said of himself, his wife Harriet, and their friends.

“We’ve been to wonderful parties there and have given wonderful parties there,” he said. Last Fourth of July, the Deutsches hosted a dinner for Walter and Lee Annenberg.

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Similar feelings of loss echoed throughout town. “I gave birthday parties and luncheons there,” said Nancy Livingston, an associate at Sotheby’s. “It was one of the prettiest restaurants in town. There was a sense of elegance and opulence. I always dressed up when I went there--I always felt I had to match the wonderful setting. I can’t go to all the trendy new restaurants. It’s like lemmings, everybody rushes to them.”

Many agreed that the Garden was part of another era, another style of dining destined to disappear. “Ken Hansen from Scandia said that after 10 years a restaurant becomes tired and needs a freshening up, a change of menu to keep up with the current customers’ tastes,” said Joan Luther, a restaurant consultant. “Today people are far more health conscious and certainly much more informal in their eating styles. It’s a whole new scene.”

“When we don’t go to parties, we eat at home. We’re so diet-conscious,” Livingston said of her and her entertainment executive husband, Alan.

Nancy Vreeland, a fund-raiser and producer of women’s health seminars, said she used to go to the Garden regularly, “but my daily attire is much more informal and we tend not to take dining as seriously.”

Of the rumors of anti-Semitism, she said, “It’s hard for me, having had a long relationship with the Niklas family, to believe the story as I heard it. When something is told to you by hearsay, by people who weren’t present, it becomes gossip, and I never paid it a tremendous amount of attention.

“It’s the community’s loss to see it go,” Vreeland said. “I’ve never been to a bad party there. It’s just a beautiful restaurant. We all said, especially over the holidays, when you’re all dressed up and want to go out to dine, you don’t want to fall into one of those trattorias.”