Trompe I'Oeil Restaurant

Simply arriving at a Larry Ellman restaurant can be a challenge to belief. A diner bound for Manhattan's Orangerie, for instance, can be picked up and delivered at the restaurant by a customer-service Citroen painted all over with orange blossoms. In the foyer he passes a concierge ready to order theater tick ets or call home to see if the wife and children are O.K. Seated on a black vinyl banquette beneath the leaves of a plastic orange tree, he swills down a triple martini poured from a Boodles bottle and served in a pitcher. By then he may or may not be equal to the doubt ful delight of a tough country pate made with pistachio nuts.

One day, when somebody writes an encyclopaedia of restaurants, the name Ellman may be close to Escoffier -- and not just alphabetically. Auguste Escoffier left the world crepes suzette and peach Melba, but in his own way Larry Ell man is equally inventive. He has given the world the trompe l'oeil restaurant. His idea is to sell atmosphere and let atmosphere sell food.

Stagecoach Rides. Ellman's flair for this sort of thing, based on a canny assessment of the average diner, has made him one of the most successful restaurateurs in the U.S. Starting with a $2,000 investment in ten Coke machines in 1949, Ellman built up a thriving vending-machine and cafeteria business that he sold for $50,000 in 1958. He then sank the proceeds into a modest Man hattan steak house. He redecorated it in dude-ranch western, renamed it the Cattleman, promoted it fiercely with various gimmicks, including free stage coach rides for the kiddies. The weekly gross quintupled, from $12,000 to $60,000, within a year and a half.

Two 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.

Sailor Suits. Among his latest acquisitions are two Manhattan landmarks --Luchow's, where the schnitzel has been unadorned for decades, and Charles in 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.

But at the Steer Palace, near the new Madison Square Garden, diners perch on the observation platforms of fake railway cars. At La Boufferie, waiters dressed in French sailor suits prance amongst the tables while, over the loudspeakers, Tiny Tim sings Tip Toe Through the Tulips.

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 at the Riverboat in the Empire State Building; the Downbeat on Lexington Avenue offers a similar package for $1 less, with jazz instead of dancing.

The most blatant appeal to the freeloader in Everyman occurs at Cavanagh's on West 23rd Street, where drinking is 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."

Of 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 big ambition in school was to become, in his words, "a tycoon." By putting the sizzle ahead of the steak, he is well on his way.

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