Word: ellman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years ago, Ellman decided to expand. For $250,000 he bought control of Longchamps, a New York restaurant chain. He incorporated the Cattleman into the chain, and began buying other restaurants, concentrating on decor. His catering empire now includes 115 restaurants in seven states, and will gross an estimated $75 million this year...
...Greenwich Village, where the menu used to be sensible and the decor genteel. Now Charles has burst into a kind of bordello Byzantine, where a female harpist plucks away and the lighting is too dim to see the food (not that one would want to). So far, mercifully, Ellman has left Luchow's alone...
...Ellman frankly concedes that his restaurants are not for gourmets-"We appeal to graduates of Howard Johnson's," he says-and that the appeal is frankly directed at the customers' venality. At Charles, there is free champagne; at the Steer Palace, a weekend "family plan" luncheon at which parents with children get the first child's meal free (even if it is a $6 sirloin steak), the second's for $1 and all others' for half price. Dinner, dancing and "all the drinks you can drink" for $9.95 is the bill of fare...
...done on the honor system; waiters bring full whisky bottles and setups to the tables, and customers are expected to tot up their own bar bills. "If you tell us you only had one double bourbon we'll believe you," reads an ad for Cavanagh's, and Ellman says: "We want the customer to feel that he's putting one over on us, that he's got the edge...
...course, he rarely has. At La Boufferie, for example, the carafe of "Cotes-du-Rhone 1965" advertised on the menu at $1.95 turns out to be cheap Spanish wine. Still, attracted by a $1,000,000-a-year advertising campaign, customers are flocking to Ellman's restaurants in startling numbers. Orangerie serves about 5,200 meals a week, and an offshoot of Ellman's original Cattleman, the Cattleman West, which opened last February, is already serving 1,250 people a day. Those figures are immensely satisfying to Proprietor Ellman, a onetime student of accounting from Brooklyn whose...