Mama Terano’s Boy Chef: Robert Bell
Most chefs have someone in their background who inspired them to get into cooking, often a kitchen veteran who saw promise in a new dishwasher and evolved from a boss to a mentor. In the case of Robert Bell, chef and co-owner of Chez Melange, the inspiration started at home in Brooklyn, where his Italian grandparents taught him a reverence for good cooking.
“My grandmother was a fun-loving immigrant who came to America at the turn of the century as a child. I lived with them for a few years and what I remember was how much they laughed. They were such happy people, and they adored food. Maybe this was typical of Southern Italian immigrants, but to my family good food was the most important thing. Without good food on the table, they had no status. My mother told me that on her first year of high school she didn’t have enough money for school supplies because they were celebrating someone’s birthday and they used the money to buy veal.”
“My grandmother was a good cook because she had to be. In those days you started cooking when you were little because… that’s just what you did. My grandmother never really taught me how to cook, but what she and that family did was enable me to see the importance of dining and of food being the most important thing you talked about at dinner. Once in awhile you’d talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Yankees or Giants, maybe even politics, but the usual questions were “What kind of salami is this? Where did you get these pastries, on Avenue U? What bakery did you go to?”
With a background like that, it’s almost surprising that Robert Bell didn’t go straight into the culinary industry in New York. However, his mother decided to move to California. He graduated from Hollywood High in 1963. He considered starting at the bottom in a restaurant kitchen, the main industry career path in an era when there were few cooking schools. Instead, and despite the fact that he was an indifferent scholar, he decided to pursue a higher education.
“I took classes at college and changed my major about four times and never actually graduated. I got into architecture and city planning. I did that for 15 years, but I really wanted to cook. In 1975 I got a call from Chuck Lehman, whom I played poker with in high school. He said, ‘I’m opening a restaurant in Hermosa Beach. Would you be interested in doing my floor plan to submit to the health department?’
“We got together and it quickly got a lot deeper than that. When Café Courtney opened in 1976 (now a Round Table Pizza) I was his sous chef, and ended up taking over the reins of the kitchen about two months later. He was a great teacher. I loved food, cooked for family and my girlfriends all the time. He taught me how to do it on a bigger scale, with helpers, and how to delegate. The amazing thing is that I was able to learn from all my subordinates without them knowing I didn’t know anything. I’d go up to one of my cooks and say, ‘The last hollandaise I made came out really thin, how do you make yours? Let me see how you do it and see if mine comes out better.’ I had never made hollandaise in my life, but I’d watch him make it and replicate that faithfully. I was a sponge and I wanted to learn, so I picked it up really quickly.”
Unusual for the time, Robert Bell came out of the kitchen to interact with diners, a habit he developed partly because nobody had told him that chefs didn’t do that.
“Maybe the reason I was willing to come out of the kitchen and talk to people is because I wasn’t really a chef. I was acting as one, but I wasn’t trained not to talk to people.”
In 1976, California Cuisine was barely five years old and was mostly a San Francisco Bay area phenomenon. Wolfgang Puck had lived in Los Angeles for less than a year and was beginning to make waves at Ma Maison and other chefs were starting to pay attention. But hardly an echo of this was to be heard in the South Bay. In that era when diners and steak and seafood joints dominated the local landscape, Café Courtney‘s blend of French and Californian ideas was like something from another planet.
“I started doing stuff that was completely different from everyone else. Everybody else was using frozen fish, frozen vegetables. Everything we were doing was a little newer, a little more contemporary, a little fresher than everyone else. Even simple things like our turkey and avocado sandwich – we put it on different bread. No one had a wine program. No one. Most places had a house red and a house white and that was it. We had a wine list, wine tastings and we used to do a wine of the month. The first month we were open, October of 1976, we featured Franciscan Zinfandel out of Sonoma. We paid $12 a case for it and we sold it for $3.95 a bottle.”
Café Courtney was an immediate success, partly because of the chemistry that developed between Bell and the person Lehman hired to manage the front of the house. Michael Franks, who now co-owns Chez Melange with Bell, had the same dedication to service that Bell had to food. And they shared a fascination with pushing culinary boundaries. Their partnership seemed like such a natural thing that it’s surprising to hear what Bell says about his first impression of Franks.
“When I first met Michael, I remembered thinking, I don’t want to work with this guy. I’m from Brooklyn, he’s from London. He came from what I thought was an upscale upbringing, I was just off the line of being poor. He went through restaurant school, I barely made it through junior college. But we were both very driven, very passionate about what we were doing, and that’s the only reason we got along.”
Michael Franks confirmed that the men who were to forge a partnership that would endure more than 40 years did not have much in common. Before coming to the United States, Franks had worked at elegant but stodgy London hotels like the Savoy and the Dorchester, which he said had “fine service with very predictable food.” He then ran a group of French bistros. None of that had prepared him for a down to earth, straight talking chef like Bell.
“Obviously we had no similarities at all,” Franks said. “Our family life, our business experiences, everything was completely different. The only thing we really had in common was food. That’s what connected us, our love for food. We communicated perfectly on that level, and that’s what has kept us together all these years. Our social life is different, but when it comes to restaurants, food, the business, we’re totally on the same page.”
Their relationship was tested on road trips that Michael says gave them multiple revelations about the expanding culinary world of that era, and led them to take Café Courtney in a completely different direction than what had been intended.
“When we were brought in, Chuck expected a French bistro – he called it an introduction to French food. Robert and I went to Chez Panisse, we went to a restaurant called Ports in Hollywood where they had couscous and a Chinese chicken salad on the menu. We realized that starting from where we were, a combination French Bistro and healthy Californian place, we could serve Chinese food in a French restaurant. You could put anything on the menu, as long as you communicated that to the customer. We decided, let’s do everything.”
Café Courtney was extremely successful and became the flagship for a chain of six restaurants. In 1981, they even managed to get attention from the Los Angeles Times for their wine dinners, which was disdainful of the South Bay in those days. The future looked bright for the company, but the two people at the heart of that success were becoming dissatisfied with running multiple locations.
As Bell remembers it, “In 1982 the owner of the Plush Horse Inn was looking for a restaurateur to run the old Plush Pony coffee shop. He ran an ad in the paper, which Michael and I saw. We were excited about doing what we were doing on a one-to-one basis, not a mini-chain with six units. Ed Wilkinson, who owned the Plush Horse at the time, was smart enough and nice enough to cosign a loan for Michael and me to get the place open. We paid him back in half the time we promised.“
The new restaurant was appropriately called Chez Melange and had innovations that astonished the local community. In place of the hotel coffee shop’s lunch counter there was a sushi bar, a caviar and Champagne bar. The sleek, modern dining room offered food from all over the world. Newcomers sometimes stared at the menu and asked, “What kind of restaurant is this, really?” They couldn’t wrap their head around the idea that they were in a place where you actually could get Chinese stir-fry, French seafood, or an American steak. Even more unusual, the multicultural and eclectic experience was offered at breakfast and lunch rather than only at night. Franks and Bell didn’t particularly want to be open for breakfast but it was required by the hotel, so they decided that it had to be done with the same spirit as everything else.
When Bell first worked at Café Courtney he had commuted from an apartment in Hollywood, but that got old very quickly. In 1977, he moved into a duplex in Hermosa and soon after started dating a wine broker named Michelle who would later become his wife.
A new passion would inspire him to move to the Hill.
“I started cooking professionally when I was 30 and took up golf when I was 45. I really enjoyed the game, and decided I wanted to join the Palos Verdes Golf Club. You had to live in the Estates to join, so I decided to move here. The money I saved up wasn’t enough for the down payment in 1990, so I borrowed money to buy a house. Then I had to borrow money from Michelle to join the golf club. It’s been a great life here.”
The menu at Chez Melange continued to evolve. As they had at Courtney’s, Franks and Bell hosted wine dinners and other culinary events. “I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t work for a winery that has done more wine dinners than I have, I must have done hundreds,” Bell said
Some benefitted worthy causes. In 1985, Franks and Bell cofounded the For Our Children Food and Wine festival and they have contributed their time, energy, and resources to many other events. Asked whether his childhood in a relatively poor family might have inspired his charitable efforts, Bell was reflective.
“I hadn’t thought about it before, but probably yes. Many times I wonder what my life would have been like if I had made one of many wrong turns, or what I’d be doing today if I had never moved to California. I wonder if I’d even be alive. When I turned 50 my mother called to wish me a happy birthday. I asked, ‘What do you think of me making it to 50?’ She said, ‘I never thought you’d make it to 15.’
“After I moved here the people at St. Francis Episcopal Church asked me to get involved in a program called Designs For Dining. I learned from this experience that as an individual I could make a big change in someone’s life. I raised $13,000 every year at this one event, and 100 percent of it goes for college scholarships. I’ve met kids who are in college or have graduated thanks to that program and it’s humbling. I hope they are all better students than I was.”
Though Bell continues to be involved in Chez Melange on a daily basis, he is obviously pleased by the success of his other restaurant Mama Terano, named after his Italian grandmother who taught him the joy of good food. That restaurant recently spun off a second location in the Malaga Cove Plaza. He also works on other culinary projects, including the menu at Plates Bistro.
“After 40 years in the industry, I’m still having ideas and am not ready to quit and sit on a beach somewhere. I have two new concepts that I am ready to bring to investors.”
Michelle says to me, “You’re 70 years old, when are you going to stop?” You have to understand that to me a restaurant is like doing a movie, but it’s personal. In a movie you have someone to do the scenery, someone to do the makeup… In a restaurant you do it all. You design the menu, set up the room, pick the chef… right down to the uniforms and the linens. To do that and then watch it on opening night, there’s nothing like it.”