Yahoo News R.I.P. The Palm Beverly Hills, Famed Power Lunch Spot Where Hollywood “Celebrated Life”
The Palm Beverly Hills has closed. Long the shorthand for industry power dining, it was for years run by Bruce Bozzi, the fourth generation in the family steakhouse business. A complicated court battle led to a 2020 sale to the hospitality firm Landry’s, whose brands include Del Frisco’s, Mastro’s and Morton’s. Below, Bozzi — husband of CAA co-chair Bryan Lourd and buzzy podcaster — sums up the storied, singular, nearly half-century run of the restaurant, which opened in West Hollywood in 1975 (where it was known for the many celebrity caricatures on the walls) and moved to Beverly Hills in 2014.
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You won’t be able to tell the story of Hollywood without The Palm. It’s where on the same day you’d find Richard Zanuck in one booth, Bernie Brillstein in another and Mike Ovitz in a third. My favorite screen memory is Karen Walker in Will & Grace telling a kid that you’d learn more over a martini with me at The Palm than you ever would at class. It told me that we’d entered the zeitgeist.
The Palm West Hollywood opened in 1975. It was an Italian American family steakhouse, grown by my father Bruce Bozzi and his partner Wally Ganzi. It was very New York, had started in the city in 1926 and, by the ’70s, there were so many transplants in Los Angeles that there was a natural emotional connection and a sort of language that was already spoken, a language that you knew when we opened our doors here.
It was this joint, sawdust on the floor, caricatures on the wall. It was never a pretty restaurant. It was meant to feel lived-in. Those caricatures on the walls told a story of who was running the studios and who was on top of the business, and we just kept adding to it. The story just kept being told.
The Palm was a place where people celebrated life: where you got engaged, where you got divorced, where you did the deal, where you went when someone in your family died and that was their favorite restaurant. The beauty of The Palm is that a lot of customers went from being in high chairs there to bringing their own kids in. There was a small-townness to it. But also, there’s Warren Beatty having dinner with Barry Diller.
The Palm was never trying to be the hot restaurant of the moment. The servers and managers and kitchen crew stayed. They’d be there for decades. At the center of that was Gigi Delmaestro, our maître d’. Nobody really does what he did anymore, not in the era of the chef-driven restaurant. Dimitri [Dimitrov, formerly of Tower Bar and now San Vicente Bungalows] is the only one still around, the last of them.
Gigi … how can I put this? He made people feel welcomed — and unwelcomed in a way that made them feel welcomed. He could facilitate the dance of the evening. When you have a very busy place with high-profile people, it’s truly a dance to make everyone feel like they’re the most important person in the room. Everyone trusted him. It was amazing to watch. It worked because Gigi took the time to learn about everyone’s lives — personal and professional. He could tell you about everyone, in real time, from Dawn Steele to Frank Mancuso.
The beginning of the end of the Palm, to me, really started when Gigi passed in 2002. There were over a thousand people at his funeral. You lose your footing. The restaurant gets more and more beat up. It needs physical improvements. It was being poorly run. We were thinking about doing a renovation, going dark for a year, doing a pop-up Palm. Instead, we left for Beverly Hills.
We took the caricatures off the walls, and we had a big event in the parking lot. It was very meaningful. It was a beautiful goodbye. We gave most of them away. I still have some that were cut out. We framed some and hung them in the Beverly Hills Palm. We had Jack Lemmon and Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors. They became these pieces of pop-culture art.
Beverly Hills was tricky because we didn’t have our own parking lot, so we couldn’t do valet as efficiently as we were used to doing it. But what I loved about the space was the room: Everyone could see each other. You came in, and you were socializing, not just with whoever you were planning to meet, but also seeing Sherry Lansing with Bob Daly — as well as the young people of the moment. Looking back, though, I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen Canon Drive. I would’ve tried to find another space, one that was less pretty, more speakeasy.
Landry’s purchased The Palm in 2020. It’s a very big company owned by a very successful hospitality guy — Tilman Fertitta — and I figured they knew what they were doing. But what they didn’t understand was the culture of The Palm, that the recipes they were changing go back longer than they were alive, that the portions they were making smaller, like the onion rings, were that way for a reason: to impart a feeling of generosity. It was weird to me that they kept pictures of my father and Wally up, yet they didn’t see value in the decisions they made.
There are still a few people out here who are carrying on the spirit of what we do. There’s Wolfgang [Puck], he understands hospitality on a visceral level. Jeff [Klein] runs establishments where they know how to greet you and how to treat you. And Craig [Susser], his place is packed with the same crowd that The Palm had. He gets it, that old-school thumbprint on life. It’s something of a dying art, but when you see it, and you feel it, it’s a very special thing.
Tim Whitlock, COO of The Palm Restaurants, responds that, “We acquired Palm restaurants out of bankruptcy and never changed recipes or portion size. The economy, COVID and competition impacted the Palm Beverly Hills. No other Palm restaurants have been closed since we rescued the iconic brand back in 2020.”
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