My day job requires that I regularly travel throughout the U.S. and Canada, and I'm spending much of this week in Southern California. One nice perk of my job is that it affords me the opportunity to visit interesting hotels and restaurants, and both my lodging and dining choices on this trip reflect my other great passion, film.
Monday afternoon, I checked into L.A.'s historic Biltmore Hotel. An erstwhile venue for the Academy Awards, this has also been a filming location for movies ranging from Beverly Hills Cop to The Fabulous Baker Boys. Even though I had never been here before, I was able to find my way to my room based on what I had seen in the movies. For the record, I did not ask the restaurant host if I could have a word with Victor Maitland before "parts of the man start falling off."
For dinner, I pointed the car down Wilshire (I feel like such a player in my rental Mercury) and ate at Kate Mantilini, named for a L.A. boxing promoter of yesteryear. More important, the menu states that Mantilini was the mistress of the restaurant's owner's uncle.
As to the restaurant itself, it's one of those boxy yet slick Beverly Hills venues popular with entertainment industry insiders, as evidenced by an $18.50 entree salad named for the Cannes Film Festival. The salad was decent, if a bit overdressed, and consisted of a heaping pile of mixed greens topped with smoked salmon and a finger of toasted sourdough covered with a slab of duck pate. For a starter, I had a $4.5o cup of corn chowder, which was helped by generous sprinklings of salt and pepper. Dessert consisted of a slice of icebox lemon pie, which resembled a less tart version of its key lime cousin.
The food was fine, although not exceptional, but as they say, there's a flip side to that coin. Kate Manitlini could have served me a warmed-over Big Mac and I still would have been happy to be there. How's that? Kate Mantilini is the setting for the greatest tough-guy film conversation of the last two decades, the late-night verbal duel between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Michael Mann's L.A. crime epic, Heat.
Mann did effectively convey the nocturnal energy of the restaurant in this scene and unlike other film restaurant locations that I've patronized (notably the Deux Moulins cafe in Amelie), there wasn't a distinction between what I was experiencing and what was captured on film.
I plan on hitting another L.A. noir location for breakfast and I'll write about that soon. In the meantime, if anyone has any good dining suggestions for San Diego, let me know.
Monday afternoon, I checked into L.A.'s historic Biltmore Hotel. An erstwhile venue for the Academy Awards, this has also been a filming location for movies ranging from Beverly Hills Cop to The Fabulous Baker Boys. Even though I had never been here before, I was able to find my way to my room based on what I had seen in the movies. For the record, I did not ask the restaurant host if I could have a word with Victor Maitland before "parts of the man start falling off."
For dinner, I pointed the car down Wilshire (I feel like such a player in my rental Mercury) and ate at Kate Mantilini, named for a L.A. boxing promoter of yesteryear. More important, the menu states that Mantilini was the mistress of the restaurant's owner's uncle.
As to the restaurant itself, it's one of those boxy yet slick Beverly Hills venues popular with entertainment industry insiders, as evidenced by an $18.50 entree salad named for the Cannes Film Festival. The salad was decent, if a bit overdressed, and consisted of a heaping pile of mixed greens topped with smoked salmon and a finger of toasted sourdough covered with a slab of duck pate. For a starter, I had a $4.5o cup of corn chowder, which was helped by generous sprinklings of salt and pepper. Dessert consisted of a slice of icebox lemon pie, which resembled a less tart version of its key lime cousin.
The food was fine, although not exceptional, but as they say, there's a flip side to that coin. Kate Manitlini could have served me a warmed-over Big Mac and I still would have been happy to be there. How's that? Kate Mantilini is the setting for the greatest tough-guy film conversation of the last two decades, the late-night verbal duel between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Michael Mann's L.A. crime epic, Heat.
Mann did effectively convey the nocturnal energy of the restaurant in this scene and unlike other film restaurant locations that I've patronized (notably the Deux Moulins cafe in Amelie), there wasn't a distinction between what I was experiencing and what was captured on film.
I plan on hitting another L.A. noir location for breakfast and I'll write about that soon. In the meantime, if anyone has any good dining suggestions for San Diego, let me know.
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