PRUDHOMME TO BRING NEW ORLEANS TO N.Y.’S BUD’S

It has been common knowledge in the food community for a couple of months at least that New Orleans mega-chef Paul Prudhomme plans to import his entire staff (and a cornucopia of Louisiana food products) to New York for the summer--to set up a temporary version of his famous K-Paul’s restaurant, as he did two years ago in San Francisco.

What has not been common knowledge--because it has only recently been decided--is just where Prudhomme will set up shop. But now it can be told: He will take over the premises of Bud’s (formerly Nikki & Kelly’s) at 77th Street and Columbus Avenue--and will be in residence there from July 22 through Aug. 23.

If you’ve never heard of Bud’s, don’t worry. Few people have. It doesn’t yet exist. But what it is --and this is the real news here--is the long-awaited new restaurant created by chef Jonathan Waxman (formerly of our own Michael’s) and his partner, wine importer Melvyn Master, the pair whose enormously successful Jam’s restaurant first brought California-style cooking to New York. The new place won’t be Jam’s II though, according to Waxman. There’ll be less emphasis on grilling, more on sauteing and stewing. Plates will be smaller and less “arranged.� Some dishes may be served family style on platters or in big bowls.

“Bud’s will feature sort of a country version of the kind of food I like to do,� Waxman says. Sample menu items include a sliced Smithfield ham plate with sweet potato salad, grilled tomato and onion soup, a saute of squid with turnips and broccoli in lime butter, brochettes of chestnuts and duck confit, whole sea bass baked in a rock-salt crust with lemons and tomatoes, and puff-pastry game-bird pie.

Bud’s will be larger than Jam’s, too, with a two-level dining room, 14-foot ceilings, 12-foot French windows, a longer bar and an outdoor cafe area. Prices will be about 20% less than at Jam’s, though, promise the proprietors. The restaurant, which is tentatively scheduled to open Sept. 3, after Prudhomme has packed up, will serve dinner only. Watch this space for further details.

THE NEW AMERICAN COFFEE SHOP: Not quite three years ago, having remarked on the alacrity with which nouvelle cooking seemed to be entering the American culinary mainstream, I penned a little piece for this publication in which I imagined that McDonald’s served “Fish McSushi,� the Sizzler served sea urchin bisque and so on. To the best of my knowledge, the piece remains sheer fantasy.

But, responding to a more recent food craze, the Denny’s chain of coffee shops--of all places--has just started testing a special “American Kitchen� menu. I don’t think that Paul Prudhomme, Larry Forgione, Bradley Ogden et al. need to start worrying but, at 131 of the chain’s 1,075 outlets (in San Francisco, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, to be precise), denizens of Denny’s may now order such “hometown dinners� as Maryland fried chicken with country gravy and corn muffins, apple-stuffed rainbow trout, chicken ‘n’ biscuits and that old-timey American favorite, the “open-faced Hawaiian grill�--boneless chicken, ham and pineapple, grilled and stacked on English muffin halves, just like Mama used to make it.

DINING RUMOR: One of the best restaurants in town is reportedly having trouble paying its bills on time--not because the place itself isn’t successful (it is , very), but because its fortunes are tied to those of an adjacent commercial enterprise that is having trouble making ends meet. It would be unpalatable irony, of course, if the superb eating place in question were to fold, through no fault of its own, because some hotshot entrepreneur misjudged the market in another line of work entirely.

READING TIP: Journalist Alexander Cockburn provides a sage and rather funny look at “Tipping in America� in the June issue of House & Garden. (If you hurry, you might just still find it on the stands.) There is always an “element of domination and sadism in the tipping system,� he notes, among other things. Personally, I’ve always thought what a waiter or waitress did on his or her own time was nobody else’s business.

SPECIALS OF THE WEEK: Rosie’s Barbecue and Grillery is new in Northridge, featuring slow-cooked beef and pork ribs, smoker-roasted duck, smoked and charred tri-tip roast with garlic and freshly cracked pepper, and “thunderbolt chili,� plus Heineken (among other beers) on tap. . . . Cafe Caravelle, which had a brief tenure on Lincoln in the Marina del Rey area last year, has resurfaced on Wilshire in Santa Monica, with approximately the same French bistro menu. . . . The superb Raja Indian restaurant, on Pico east of Rancho Park, has added tandoori-cooked scallops, baby salmon and quail to the menu. . . . Elena O’Donnell, a young veteran of Brandon’s, Penelope’s and the El Encanto in Santa Barbara, has been named chef at the same town’s newly redecorated Mousse Odile on E. Cota Street. O’Donnell is adding such contemporanea as local rabbit with red onion salad and grilled duck with sage and pecans. . . . Ma Maison in West Hollywood celebrates Bastille Day (July 14) a bit early, with a dinner-dance--featuring a cuisine de terroir menu at regular prices, plus a $5 music charge--on July 12 and 13. (The restaurant is closed Sunday--on which day July 14 falls this year.) Le Dome on the Sunset Strip is open, though, and plans festivities of its own.

MISSED SWISS: Bereft ex-patrons of the Cafe Swiss in Beverly Hills, which closed its doors on June 22 after nearly 35 years in business (and was promptly partially demolished, with permission, by sledgehammer-wielding regulars), needn’t pine for long: The resaturant’s owner, Laura Hug, has announced that she plans to reopen, with the same staff and menu, somewhere else in the Beverly Hills area--perhaps as early as Sept. 1.

One possible location for the new Swiss is the former Saloon on Little Santa Monica, a few blocks east of the original establishment--but, says Hug, “I’m still negotiating.� Her new place will be smaller than the old one, she adds, probably seating around 150 instead of the almost 300 she had been finding room for. But the bad news is that the reborn restaurant, wherever it is, won’t have a patio--its delightful patio having been one of the best things of all about Cafe Swiss I. “Unless I were to buy a vacant lot and start all over,� Hug explains, “there is no way to have a patio--and I don’t think I’ll do that , after all these years. Unfortunately, I can’t bring the old patio with me.�