Palmilla Cocina y Tequila restaurant and burning determination
Ron Newman made a fortune, lost it, and made it again in the bar business. Now he’s crossing the plaza to respectability with a new, high cuisine restaurant
Partners and son and father Greg and Ron Newman in their new La Palmilla restaurant. Photo
Early on the gray morning of May 9, 2006, Ron Newman stood on Hermosa’s Pier Plaza promenade and watched as firefighters mopped up the remnants of a spectacular blaze that burned to the ground his beloved Sharkeez restaurant.
Newman betrayed no emotion as he accepted condolences from city officials, and greeted a reporter as if it was any other day.
“What are we going to do? Make a plan and start all over again,” he said. “We’re not going to quit, that’s for sure.”
At that point in his career, the restaurateur had seen everything but fire. He had built an empire in his corner of the world with 17 sprawling and successful Red Onion restaurants. Then he had seen his empire fall to the Huns of the 1990s recession, and changing attitudes about driving to and from nightspots. Then, partnering with his son Greg Newman, he had created a popular brand in Sharkeez restaurants scattered around Southern California.
Amid the ashes of Sharkeez, Hermosa, the Phoenix was ready to rise again. Rebuild Sharkeez he and Greg did, despite hurdles that had their workers frantically canvassing Hermosa neighborhoods to counter a local activist’s petition drive.
And Newman didn’t stop there. This month, he and Greg opened Palmilla Cocina y Tequila on the other side of the Pier Plaza, designed as a more sophisticated alternative for diners looking for a stimulating experience, but one a bit more sedate than they found with Sharkeez’ casual dining and drinking.
Palmilla’s distinctive, bohemian look — blending Mexican and Latin American influences, highlighted by Mayan-styled plasterwork and hints of 1970s Americana — was achieved by Gulla Jonsdottir, a noted architect and designer who was awarded “Best Design of the Year” by Esquire magazine for her shaping of the Red O restaurant in Los Angeles.
The menu focuses on regionally influenced, contemporary Mexican cuisine featuring fresh seafood, organic meats and tortillas made in the kitchen. The Newmans envisioned diners who have outgrown Sharkeez coming across the Plaza, to the quieter side, and filling the custom-designed interior and the wicker-backed chairs and couches of the patio to munch on carnitas Michoacan and sip premium tequilas.
Up and down again
Ron Newman was born in Montreal and came to Southern California at age 10. He worked for his dad, who had Newman’s Camera at the corner of Pier and Hermosa avenues in Hermosa Beach. At 19 he went on the road as a salesman.
Two years later he and a couple other guys opened an electronics store with TVs, radios and cameras, and in 1967 Newman and two partners, old friends from high school, opened a Mexican restaurant in Westchester, part of the Red Onion chain.
The family restaurant did well, and one day Newman, who lived in Hermosa Beach, saw a land-for-lease sign in the King Harbor area of neighboring Redondo Beach.
“I went to the city, a very naïve 27-year-old or something, and told them I wanted to lease the land and build a restaurant with entertainment and dancing,” Newman said. “A guy at the city took a liking to me and helped me get the location, and we built that store.”
The ambitious, 17,000-foot eatery opened in 1972. The enchiladas sold like hotcakes, and Newman became the Johnny Apple Seed of Red Onions, launching 17 of them all over Southern California.
Newman’s Red Onion reign lasted until the 1990s, when an aerospace and real estate downturn hamstrung the area’s economy, and the restaurants went under.
The Newmans said Red Onion, and other chains such as El Torito, Rusty Pelican and Bobby McGee’s, were hit with a double whammy. In addition to the recession, a sea change was under way in public attitudes toward drinking and driving.
“Mothers Against Drunk Driving had a lot to do with that,” Greg Newman said.
People no longer wanted to drive to a large eatery with a big parking lot, knowing if they wanted to go to a second spot, they would have to get back in the car.
“And people changed,” Ron Newman said. “People wanted to go places where they could walk and bike.”
Three years before the Red Onions went belly up, Newman was offered $50 million for his restaurants, but he didn’t want to sell. That was shortly before Hermosa Beach built the sparkling Pier Plaza that would house Sharkeez and Palmilla.
“This area was dilapidated back then. I could have bought the whole Plaza, but I thought of those buildings as toys. I had 17,000 square feet at Red Onion [in Redondo] and I have 3,000 or 4,000 square feet over there,” Newman said, sitting on the patio of Palmilla and gazing across the Plaza to Sharkeez.
Celebrating the opening of La Palmilla are its designer Gulla Jonsdottir and her longtime friend Chandra Shah, owner of Trilogy Day Spa in Manhattan Beach. Photo
Ron and Greg Newman watch their Hermosa Beach Sharkeez burn to the ground in May 2006. With the two is (center) Chris Pike, a partner in the neighboring Sangria restaurant, which was not seriously damaged. Photo
Palmilla chef Christina Cipres (seated at left)finds a moment to enjoy her own work. Photo
And back up
About the time the Red Onion field was plowed under, Greg was graduating from USC and looking forward to moving from working in his dad’s business to becoming a partner.
“I had been thinking I would be taking over this big company some day,” he said with a laugh.
It was time for a new plan. Greg Newman hit the road, scoping out eateries in Texas and Chicago, and decided they should launch “a restaurant concept, something not as expensive as Red Onion.”
Ron and Greg launched the casual and much smaller Sharkeez restaurants, beginning with one on Highland in north Manhattan Beach in 1993. Back then it was paper plates on the tables and sawdust on the floor. After spending years in three-piece suits, Ron Newman, 55, was back in the trenches, rolling up his sleeves and tending bar.
That was shortly before the Pier Plaza was built, and north Manhattan Beach, where Sharkeez stood, was happening. Sharkeez did well, and the Newmans opened up a second one in Newport in 1995, a third on the Plaza in Hermosa in 1997, a fourth in Santa Barbara in 1999 and a fifth in Huntington Beach in 2003.
Sharkeez Hermosa opened “by accident at the same time they took the [construction] fences off of the new Pier Plaza,” Ron Newman said. Then the Pier Plaza was happening, and Sharkeez Hermosa became the most successful of its siblings, with the eatery in Huntington Beach a close second.
Smoke and flame
Eight years later, at Sharkeez Hermosa, a ceiling fan malfunctioned in the women’s bathroom, starting a fire that spread to an attic-floor storage area and roared through the 80-year-old building, sending yellow flames into the still-dark morning sky, and waking residents blocks away with the acrid smell of thick black smoke.
About 50 firefighters from six departments battled the blaze for hours. They’d knock it down, and it’d flare up again. Sharkeez stood shoulder to shoulder with other buildings, but the thick brick walls that jutted up above its roof helped limit damage to neighboring businesses to smoke and water damage.
On a morning gray as ash, Ron Newman stood sanguine across the Plaza, like the hero of a Rudyard Kipling poem. He determined to rebuild Sharkeez, and expand it as well, but his plans ran headlong into Jim Lissner, a prominent activist bent on limiting what he sees as a saturation of alcohol-serving businesses in Hermosa.
Lissner began to gather signatures for a ballot referendum that would force any expanding Plaza businesses to provide onsite parking, which the Newmans called impossible, because they are hemmed in between the pedestrian Plaza in front and a city parking lot in back.
Sharkeez fought back, mounting a neighborhood-by-neighborhood counter-offensive. Police were called repeatedly to intervene as teams of people for and against Lissner’s referendum argued loudly at shopping centers and went door-to-door through Hermosa neighborhoods, pleading their cases side by side.
Lissner and paid signature gatherers approached shoppers, while Greg Newman, Sharkeez’ employees and Sharkeez customers tried to talk people out of signing Lissner’s petition.
Greg Newman said Lissner and his workers would jump into cars and take off for the neighborhoods, and the Sharkeez side would jump into their cars and follow. Residents were confronted by Lissner-ites standing with Sharkee-ites, both ready to make their cases.
From the ashes
In the end Lissner got his signatures, and the City Council made his referendum law without letting it go to a vote of the public. About a year after the fire, the Newmans found themselves abandoning their plans to rebuild a larger Sharkeez, settling instead for a restaurant the size of the old one.
Looking back, Ron Newman said Lissner’s opposition to the expansion was a blessing in disguise for Sharkeez. The expansion would have crowded out storage to seat more diners.
“It turned out we needed the storage space,” he said.
The rebuilt Sharkeez reopened in 2008, and owners of other Plaza restaurants said business picked up again, after a slack period while Sharkeez was closed.
In 2007 the Newmans had bought the Sandbar restaurant in Santa Barbara, “something to work on while we were getting the new Sharkeez approved,” and then took over Panama Joe’s in the popular Belmont Shore section of Long Beach.
The Newman men are quick to credit the indispensable contributions of the Newman women. Ron’s wife Bobbi went to work in the restaurants to get Sharkeez on its feet, and Greg’s wife Lisa took the CFO reins of the business and whipped its finances into shape.
Greg said the Sharkeez restaurants have not suffered employee turnover like much of the rest of the industry, because the owners give partnership shares to general managers and directors of departments — operations, food and beverage, accounting, training and marketing.
“Each time we do a store we give up to 30 percent back to the executive staff,” Greg said.
“The number of points each one receives depends on their performance level over the last year. Some of our people who have been with us 10 years or more, and are super performers, have points in every store now. Eventually if they have 3 or 4 percent of 10 places it is like they have their own restaurant,” he said.
Father and son have found that they have separate areas of interest and expertise that complement each other.
“Greg and I are like a songwriter and a lyricist,” Ron said. “We make great music together.”
Greg and Ron Newman with margaritas prepared by mixologist Manny Hinojosa. Photo
To the future
From their patio at Palmilla, the Newmans recalled their attention to the new project, their modern Mexican restaurant and lounge, on the quieter side of the Plaza.
Inside the restaurant’s doors, the staff was making a practice run, preparing dishes overseen by executive chef Christina Cipres, and mixing drinks fine-tuned by mixologist Manny Hinojosa, under Moroccan-styled perforated bronze chandeliers.
The distinctive look of the place has its roots in the travels of Greg to Cabo, where he fell in love with the chic, contemporary style of Palmilla Resort.
Greg said of the food, “Expect familiar dishes, just done better.”
A ceviche bar offers coctel de camarones, jumbo white prawns with tequila-lime cocktail sauce and avocado, and ceviches such as one made from fresh fish, ginger and aji amarillo, a spicy Peruvian yellow chile. Other appetizers include nachos with Dungeness crab and white shrimp, black beans, queso, and pico de gallo, and short rib taquitos.
Large plates include dishes carnitas Michoacan, traditional roasted pork with refried white beans and corn relish, and camarones Veracruz, sautéed prawns with Spanish green olives, tomatoes and capers. A wood-fired oven is used for steaks such as asada pasilla con bisteca, a dry-aged Angus New York strip served with a queso-stuffed grilled pasilla chile and guacamole.
The bar features eight Mexican beers on tap, an extensive premium tequila collection, and Hinojosa’s cocktail list — including a mango-raspberry blended mojito and a Mexican hot chocolate martini – made with fresh ingredients and house-made syrups.
The Newmans plan to apply some of what they’ve already learned from the Palmilla experience to Sharkeez, tweaking an already successful model. But Sharkeez will continue to lean to casual and youthful, while Palmilla offers a more sophisticated, while still casual, experience.
“You know, as we get older we might stop going to Sharkeez as much and start coming here more,” Greg Newman said.