| The Restaurant That Set L.A.’s New Dining Aesthetic Turns 30 |
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| Written by Norman Kolpas | |
| Monday, 18 May 2009 14:56 | |
 LOS ANGELES Nowadays, avid followers of restaurant reviews expect to read details about how the beauty of a new dining spot’s interior design complements the entire eating and drinking experience. Often, such comments will focus on the quality of art a restaurant displays.Yet, as recently as the 1980s, that wasn’t the case. The most one could expect was the sort of European art pastiche that some fussier, more pretentious restaurants displayed—landscapes of Tuscany, for example, in an upscale Italian restaurant, or English sporting scenes in a wood-paneled Prime steakhouse. In the Los Angeles dining scene, that all began to change in 1979, largely thanks to one then-25-year-old restaurateur: Michael McCarty. That year, he opened Michael’s restaurant in Santa Monica, which quickly became the chicest dining spot among the city’s movers and shakers in the world of business, movies, television, and music.  Michael’s restaurant exterior And the reason for Michael’s popularity was not just its version of what came to be known as “California cuisine,” with an emphasis on the freshest local seasonal ingredients, simply prepared and exquisitely presented like a work of art on a plate. It was also the fact that Michael McCarty surrounded his guests with some of Southern California’s finest contemporary art, simply presented in spare wooden frames on otherwise bare walls as you might view them in a top local gallery or modern art museum. McCarty, drawing not only on his own well-honed aesthetic sensibilities but also those of his wife Kim, a formidable locally trained artist in her own right, selected and displayed the works of top contemporary art masters, including David Hockney, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and of course Kim McCarty. Illustrious L.A. sculptor Robert Graham custom-created a bronze frieze of fish on-site for the rear wall of the restaurant’s garden dining patio, one of the quintessential dining environments of Southern California.  Restaurateur Michael McCarty stands in front of “Man in a Red Suit,” a painting by Kim McCarty that also graces the menu covers at Michael’s Now celebrating its 30th anniversary and still led by the ever-ebullient McCarty himself, one of the most gracious and energetic hosts in the restaurant business, Michael’s continues to offer that rarest of dining experiences: an opportunity to indulge one’s other aesthetic sensibilities while partaking of the finest food and wine. The prices for such a meal are commensurate with other top dining spots around, but considering the quality of the food and the beauty of the setting, the value remains outstanding. Through those three decades, Michael and Kim McCarty have also done much to give back in recognition of the role that the arts have played in their own good fortune. They’ve been deeply involved in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art—as well as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, where McCarty opened a second outpost of Michael’s in 1989. Kim also personally curates changing exhibits by local artists in the restaurant’s upstairs private dining rooms.  Dinner guests at Michael’s dine against the backdrop of a print by noted British artist and L.A. resident David Hockney “Kim and I have always believed that a great dining experience should be a complete, knockout show for all the senses, including beautiful surroundings,” say McCarty, reflecting on the role art has played in the success of Michael’s. “We’ve collected some of today’s best artists ourselves, and want to share our love of art with our guests at Michael’s. It's as simple as that. It all contributes to the great party we throw at every meal.”
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 13:51 |