Dinner's on The Drawing Board

By Mimi Sheraton

The continuing success of chain restaurants inspires ever new concepts for the gastronomic future. But what kind of chains do today's customers want? That depends not only on what they like to eat but also on how they like to live. Which of the following will be for you?

If you cherish the voice with the have-a-nice-day smile and sunny, all's-right-with-the-world interiors, and if you can spend only about $4 to $9 for a nice sit-down family lunch or dinner, Allie's may be the chain to watch for. With the Marriott Corp. about to roll out 445 across the country and 3,000 planned by 1995, finding one should be no trick at all.

If you are young and striving but currently impecunious; if you buy clothes at Benetton and the Gap and like your eat-in, take-out fast food cheap, light and stylish; and if you love decorative $2.99-to-$3.99 sandwiches so much you're willing to forgo the d, then San'wiches may be for you, though expectations are that it will take five years before the planned 500 are cloned nationwide.

More upscale in taste and budget? Do you search for designer knockoffs and value the Liz Claiborne-Cable Car look? Do a $10 lunch and a $14 dinner (including a glass of wine) sound good as long as you get trendy food in a slick grill-bistro setting? Then hope that within the next two or three years yours is one of the ten or twelve cities that will get the Daily Grill, created by the management that owns the pricey Grill in Beverly Hills.

Right now, all these are among the half a dozen or so eating concepts being tested in pilot restaurants around the country in the hope that they will grow up to be the new-age McDonald's, Bob's Big Boys or Howard Johnsons. Such national restaurant chains are made, not born. Dreamed up by corporate entrepreneurs, they are produced by high-priced, savvy market researchers, advertising gurus, graphic designers and architects -- as well as by food consultants who cook up portion-controlled, idiot-proof recipes to feed the projected image. Owing more to McLuhan than to Escoffier, their packages are the products. Success lies in creating extraordinary images for ordinary favorites: hamburgers, fried fish or chicken, pizza, pasta, tacos and salads.

"With fast food, it's all in the condiments," says Michael Whiteman with oracular solemnity. Whiteman and his partner, Joseph Baum, are the New York City restaurant consultants working on San'wiches. "There's nothing unusual about a hamburger," says Whiteman. "It's the trimmings used by McDonald's and Burger King that make it memorable."

Explaining the marketing strategy behind new chains, Jay Chiat, San'wiches main backer and the superstar executive of the imagemaking advertising agency Chiat/Day, insists that "it's all a matter of the ADI." That is no palate- tingling condiment, but rather the area of dominant influence, or the geographical area that a TV station predominantly reaches (and thus the potential audience for each commercial). That is why, for example, Marriott since June has opened 14 branches of Allie's in San Diego (where San'wiches is also being tested). Only after such saturation will Chairman J.W. Marriott Jr. convert more of his Bob's Big Boys, as well as Wag's and Howard Johnsons, to the new theme.

Of the three aborning chains, the riskiest appears to be San'wiches, which is a tiny pilot on the edge of a dusty highway in a small shopping center. What Chiat and his associates seem to be betting on is that there is a mass market of low-income, style-conscious people who have grasped the hip message that less is more. The effort is averaging about 95 customers a day, far from enough to make it profitable but up to expectations at this point.

What they get when they step inside this boxy eatery is a pseudonaive, kindergarten-like decor created by California's maverick architect Frank Gehry. But customers would be wise to keep their eyes on the ball, for ingredients in five sandwiches sampled were coldly, tastelessly bland. The "Veg'wich" with its crunchy mixture proved far better than "Splash," a meager seafood salad with tough, small shrimp and fake crab meat. As for "New York New York," a deli takeoff of wet, shiny corned beef and pastrami and waxy "Swiss" cheese, the Big Apple should sue for defamation of image.

Walk into the low, freestanding, adobe-colored brick ranch house that is Allie's, and you're in an all-American fantasyland. Each Allie's has a big buffet where eat-all-you-want breakfasts and Allie's "Build-a-Lunch" ($5.49) are laid out. The lunch selection consists mostly of fruit, vegetable and pasta salads, with a few hot pasta and taco choices. The printed menu reflects every currently simmering trend, from Tex-Mex fajitas to "Better-than-Mom's Meatloaf," a thick, pasty slice of meat loaf topped with a sour-sweet tomato sauce. Best bets are the egg dishes and the simpler sandwiches.

Although more fashionable, the Daily Grill follows much the same all-things- to-all-people menu format as Allie's, albeit with an upper-crust presentation. What nails the audience is the slick white-and-black dining room with an open "exhibition" kitchen that sits in Los Angeles' Brentwood Gardens shopping mall. Partner Bob Spivak confesses that a few mistakes were made, including a misguided oyster bar that cost $50,000 to build and remove. Such errors will not be repeated in the next two California outposts, one proposed for Marina del Rey, the other for West Hollywood.

Explaining that their 92 seats account for 600 to 800 meals a day and that there is a 45-minute wait for dinner after 6:30, Spivak says, "It gets very hectic and noisy here at night, so it's a place to come and eat, not to linger."

The menu is as fashion-minded as the setting, and the lunchtime crowd consists of shoppers, officeworkers and junior executives. Salads and pasta primavera appear to be best sellers, and 16% of sales comes from such specials as chicken pie (decent but meager), chili and corned-beef hash (stiff, red and greasy). "Joe's Special," a dish inspired by Original Joe's in San Francisco, is one of the better choices, a soothing scramble of eggs, chopped beef and fresh spinach. Broccoli is the only other vegetable used, "because it fills the plate nicely," says Spivak. And certainly the thin ministeak that sells for $18.50 and supposedly weighs 12 oz. did not fill anything. "I see this as being one step above a coffee shop," says Spivak. If he made it a very small half step, he might be just about right.