People

"I was never really comfortable eating in restaurants," confesses Mariel Hemingway. But her worries about upstaging the cuisine appear to have piqued her appetite for entrepreneurship. Last January the actress and her husband, Restaurateur Stephen Crisman, opened Sam's Cafe on Manhattan's East Side. With Crisman's background, the move might seem natural. Yet at a time when absolutely everyone seems to have a favorite place to eat, a mixed bill of celebrities has decided that the coolest thing on the hot restaurant scene is to own your own.

"I feel comfortable at Sam's," says Hemingway. "It's like people are in my living room." Eric Goode, owner of Manhattan's Area disco, feels more or less the same way about his generically named Restaurant. "It's like my own dining room. It's just for fun." For others, restaurants can be just a good investment. Chicago Bears Running Back Walter Payton belongs to a group that owns three places in the Windy City area and plans two more by September.

When Showfolk Business Manager Neal Levin needed investors to bankroll a Chinese dim sum diner named Bao Wow in Los Angeles, he naturally turned to clients, including Olympic Gold Medalist Bruce Jenner, Singer Melissa Manchester and Satirist "Weird Al" Yankovic. The first Bao Wow in Beverly Hills was a dog with the dinner trade and closed after a year; the second, in Encino, is a noon and nighttime hit, prompting dreams of a nationwide chain. The Hard Rock Cafe, which offers young Manhattanites an eclectic menu topped with a hefty dollop of rock-'n'-roll memorabilia that includes Elvis Presley's boots, is already spreading. Co-Owner Dan Aykroyd last week presided over groundbreaking for a Dallas outpost.

Music is also at the heart of the Blue Suede Shoes Saloon in Memphis, which Carl Perkins helped start three months ago. The country-and-western singer- songwriter "wanted it to be a real rockabilly honky-tonk, and I think that's what we've got." And he wanted it to be on Beale Street, "where you could just feel the history of the place, the spirit." New Jersey Generals Quarterback (barring a rumored trade) Doug Flutie was also concerned with locale. Flutie's Pier 17,a 15,000-sq.-ft. restaurant that officially opened last week, is his way of "planting a foot in New York City. I've always been known as a Boston athlete, and this is one way I could become a New Yorker."

Sometimes, by no coincidence, a celebrity partner may attract celebrity friends, who in turn attract a crowd. Actress Helena Kallianiotes, owner of Los Angeles' Helena's, has been known to serve her specials to her Five Easy Pieces costar and suspected silent partner Jack Nicholson. The joint is now about as in as any place off the eaten path gets. And if they are not part of the show themselves, show-biz proprietors know how to put one on. "Eating has become the evening's entertainment for people," says Director-Producer Bob Giraldi. He conceived his 15-month-old Positano in New York "as an artistic creation. A restaurant is a major production. It is like doing a good film."

Valerie Simpson and Nickolas Ashford, of the singing duo Ashford & Simpson, are certainly making a production of 20/20 (named for its address in New York City's Chelsea district, not the TV program). Set to open next month, 20/20 has been designed, at a cost of $1.5 million, for those who like making an entrance. Patrons will come into the room on a raised platform where they can see and be seen from a 50-ft. bar decorated with glass panels from the prewar French luxury liner Normandie. It will be, says Simpson, "a gourmet theater." It's all enough to make a diner wonder whether to beg for a second helping or an encore.