In 1989, a husband and wife duo with dreams to open a Tuscan Italian restaurant created Toscana Brentwood, which has been bringing traditional Italian cuisine to the Los Angeles community. Safe to say their dreams came to fruition, with Mike and Kathie Gordon now having built an extensive restaurant group with five restaurants all highlighting Italian dishes from Rome to Tuscany.
Mike Gordon sat down with BruinLife’s Caroline Gin to discuss his journey in the restaurant business from the highs to the lows as a 1961 UCLA alum.
BruinLife: How did you go from a CPA to opening your own restaurant as a hobby?
Mike Gordon: Basically, growing up I was born and raised in LA. I went to high school in Hamilton High School where we would go out for dinner with my folks and when we wanted Italian food it was pretty much pizza with spaghetti with a lot of red sauce and maybe meatballs. It was a very simple kind of Italian food, but in the mid-’80s, there was a restaurant that opened in Beverly Hills called Il Giardino and the people who founded it were from the area in Italy called Tuscany, where meat, fresh fish and baked porcini mushrooms were kind of the specialty. This was not the Italian food I grew up with but it was amazing. So, I ended up hiring one of the chefs that worked there that wanted to do something of his own so that’s how Toscana was founded, basically from food of that region.
BL: Tell me about your first trip to Tuscany.
MG: We spent a lot of time in Florence. We travelled the countryside and years later, we ended up actually renting a house there for four months and we lived there in an area called Chianti, where they made wine in a little town called Greve. So we got to go to the local, local, local restaurants and they’re all terrific and you’ve never heard of them, you just walk in, but they specialize in these Chianina beef, these special cows and there’s also a butcher in the little town called Panzano, his name is Dario Cecchini, very popular and he’s been here to LA and has held classes, teaching people about meat and how to cut and cook meat. We’ve learned a lot and also visiting the various trattorias which are very casual restaurants, most of them have outdoor areas. We wanted to do something like that in LA; we didn’t want a formal restaurant. That’s how Toscana got off the ground, so we found this location in Brentwood.
BL: What would you say would be the perfect dishes for someone’s first time?
MG: I think if you went there for the first time, I would start out with maybe a light salad that you can get anywhere. Interestingly, when we started Toscana, which was mid-80’s, I had never heard of arugula. Then I would have one of the pastas, which are amazing. If you want something simple, I would just get one with tomato sauce and you can share. Then, the third thing is something with protein, either chicken, whole fish or branzino. We have a huge selection of steaks cooked in a wood oven, which is really special because it has a certain flavor because of the wood. It’s a pizza oven that they cook the meat in.
BL: How do you decide what to keep traditional and what to change to fit American standards?
MG: As little as possible. Matter of fact, there’s a restaurant in Florence called Sostanza, it’s a steak restaurant but one of the most popular items on the menu is called “Buttered Chicken,” which is a breast that is cooked in a lot of butter and finished with a little lemon. I usually have something like a ribeye or Fiorentina steak, the one with a bone. I like veal milanese or chicken milanese, which is fried. We don’t try to chase all the newest and hottest restaurants. We try to stay very true and our publicist has an expression that says, “Started by tradition, but not bound by.”
BL: Why do you think the restaurant became so successful after opening?
MG: Again, just the community. We delivered what people wanted, which was really good, healthy food. If you were on a diet you don’t need to eat pasta, you can have a salad and there’s a great wine list. A lot of restaurants, you don’t know the people in the front, cold, like today as an example, it became like a club. People getting up and talking to each other, one is a producer, one runs a studio, one is an animator, I mean they were all in the business. I call it like the Paramount commissary, you see all the people you work with.
BL: Do you have any advice for UCLA students wanting to break into the restaurant industry?
MG: Don’t do it the way I did it because I had never worked in a restaurant. Go be a busser, a waiter, do anything to learn how to do anything on the job because it’s a very hectic business.
