Price for Corner Table, The: From Cabbages to Caviar, Sixty Years in the Celebrity Restaurant Trade With Special Pomotions & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping
Product Feature
Product Description
Kurt Niklas, one of the most famous restaurateurs in the history of Beverly Hills, weaves a story as exciting and intriguing as any that Hollywood ever produced. His restaurants -- the Bistro and the Bistro Garden -- were the most renowned celebrity watering holes and eateries in the city's flamboyant past.
For 50 years Niklas has observed Southern California's cafe society with a meticulous eye. In his role as maitre d' at the legendary Romanoff's in the 1950s, he came to know Hollywood's elite -- Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Elizabeth Taylor among them. In 1962, Kurt and director Billy Wilder opened the Bistro in Beverly Hills, with a host of celebrities backing them as investors. The restaurant immediately attracted a heady mix of Hollywood stars, high-powered agents, high society, and underworld figures.
But Niklas's life did not start in the fast lanes of Hollywood; it began bleakly in Germany as Hitler was rising to power. Kurt was born of a Jewish father he never knew and a Christian mother, a pairing that "presented two immediate problems for me," he wrote candidly. "I was a half-Jew in what would soon be Nazi Germany, and my father was married to someone other than my mother."
Forced by Nazi policy to leave school at age thirteen, Niklas found work as a waiter at the famed Esplanade Hotel in Berlin, which was under the supervision of Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect. The Esplanade's restaurant was a favorite of high-ranking Nazis and, at the height of the war, Kurt attended them all -- including Hitler himself.
Narrowly escaping the destruction of the Niklas family apartment by an Allied bomb, Kurt survived the last months of WWII in a forced labor battalion on the western front. After the war he dreamed of going to America, until one day in 1950, when he walked into Romanoff's Restaurant seeking employment, and from there into Hollywood history.
Read more >>
No comments:
Post a Comment