The Knife

Craft will host Vanity Fair's 2008 Oscar party

If further confirmation was needed of Craft's just-add-water supremacy in LA's power-dining universe, the restaurant has been annointed as the new home for the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Variety's own Bill Higgins got the scoop.

As The Knife reported last spring, longtime VF party house Mortons lost its lease; at the end of this year, it will become the LA outpost of "private dining club" Soho House. And, because Soho House owner Nick Jones is tight with VF editor Graydon Carter, it seemed the traditional location would continue. Said Jones to the Los Angeles Times in May, "We've always maintained strong links with Vanity Fair and conversations are ongoing."

Nope. We hear that Carter took the opportunity to sniff out a half-dozen locations before landing on Tom Colicchio's roost. Or, as Carter puts it:

“When Mortons announced they were closing, we thought it was time for a change... Craft is the ideal place for the party: great food — which we will not be serving family-style, by the way — great location with a dramatic entrance and a big, sweeping space.”

Vanity Fair party changing locations [Variety]

Why Won't Your Agent Eat? Discuss.

From the Great Minds Think Alike Dept. come two recent articles (both written by former colleagues) devoted to an age-old question: What Do Agents Want To Eat? 

Nicole LaPorte says they're thinking small. ("Eat Or Be Eaten," Los Angeles Times' West magazine, Aug. 19):

Indeed, in this decidedly un-go-go era, when agents are flying coach and text messaging has replaced drinks at the Peninsula, a three-hour, multicourse lunch lubricated with gallons of Perrier (midday martinis haven't been seen in Hollywood since "Wall Street") can seem, dare we say, excessive. "People are in and out in about an hour," says Pamela Gonyea, who recently took over as the Grill's lunch maitre d'.

Today's lunch often happens in places such as M Café de Chaya on Melrose Avenue, where the most expensive menu item is $14.95 (teriyaki rice bowl with fish). Dessert? Pinkberry is next door.

True, but frugality has never motivated an agent. The one-hour timeframe stems from the fact that a business lunch is intended as a streamlined portal in which you can meet and schmooze while inhaling low-fat protein. As for M Cafe, Chaya's gourmet vegan outpost, it's celebrity catnip; agents would flock there even if they served nothing but $100 wheatgrass shooters.

Monica Corcoran (who recently joined the LA Times) says the agents were only waiting for somewhere to eat ("Let's Do Lunch, Now That There's Somewhere To Do It," New York Times' Style section, July 22). After a great, if apocryphal, tale about agent Ed Limato coping with Fuddrucker's, she says:

..."Restaurants began wooing agencies before they even opened. General managers made the rounds by visiting the principals at agencies to introduce themselves and pitch their menus. The aisles at Craft are wide enough for table hopping, an extreme social sport in Hollywood, where agents tend to circulate with the intensity and purpose of bridal couples at a wedding.

In fact, Craft feels a lot like CAA itself: Impressive, expensive and a little uncomfortable.

Craft: Work.

Is this CAA's new commissary? Yeah. A year from now, will Craft seem as familiar as Kate Mantalini or (the late) Maple Drive? Yeah. 

The bill for two was $150 and, for all the people running around and the natural light from the glassed walls, the dining room felt stiff and formal. (Not unlike CAA itself.)

Agents starving, not on purpose

 

Remember that gas explosion at CAA last week? An agency insider tells me, "Toby the chef has no more facial hair."

The explosion, as Radar pointed out, was in the first-floor kitchen. However, this one has nothing to do with what most of us understand as an office kitchen with its greasy toaster ovens and the manila-colored refrigerator with the door handle that keeps falling off. This one is a Kitchen, designed to fulfill the culinary whims and biddings of an entire agency. (Or in this case, Agency.) And so, when SoCal Gas screwed up and the ceiling went down and the walls went in, it meant something more than needing to trot up to the second floor if you wanted a toasted bagel.

It means, more than ever, that agents are having to eat in a mall.

I've previously wondered just where the hell these agents were supposed to dine when they were used to having all of Beverly Hills at their walking-distance disposal. However, it's worse than I'd imagined.