Other Cities, County Own Eateries

It sounds like an odd marriage of gastronomy and bureaucracy--cities getting into the restaurant biz.

But when they do, they tend to stay out of the kitchen.

Gerald Breitbart, a consultant for the Restaurant Assn. of California, listed at least three city-owned eateries in the San Gabriel Valley and many more in the rest of Los Angeles County.

The Brookside Golf Club Restaurant, a coffee shop owned by the city of Pasadena, is leased to Arroyo Country Management, which serves breakfast and lunch to patrons of the public golf course. Meals cost between $4 and $6 and include hamburgers and other traditional American cuisine, said Greg Avedesian, the restaurant’s manager.

The City of Industry owns the Sheraton Resort at Industry Hills. In addition to the Top o’ the Brae, a high-end restaurant serving guests at the Sheraton Hotel, the resort has banquet facilities and a catering service.

Irwindale’s Rapscallion Seafood House and Bar is unusual because it was built specifically to get the city a nice place to eat after attempts to woo an outside restaurant chain failed. Also a high-end restaurant, the Rapscallion, which specializes in seafood, charges $14 to $25 for meals. The restaurant also has banquet facilities.

Breitbart said city-owned restaurants generally are no more or less profitable than independently owned restaurants. How well they do depends on their operators, he said.

“If he’s a good operator, he’ll be a good operator no matter who the landlord is,” Breitbart said.

In most cases, the cities act as landlords, leasing restaurants to independent operators and getting a cut of the total sales, usually about 10 percent, Breitbart said. Rapscallion, however, pays the city a flat annual lease fee.

Chris Klinger, deputy director of the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors, said his department leases food locations to vendors at county beaches, including eight snack bars and 10 mobile food carts.

In addition, Klinger said, the county owns the property and building occupied by the popular Gladstone’s 4 Fish restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, by far the county’s most profitable eatery.

Gladstone’s, run by Seaview Restaurants Inc., takes in $14 million a year, of which the county gets about 9%.

Klinger said the county would “like to have about five (more restaurants) just like it.”