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Six months after opening, Romanoff's was showing a profit, and by the end of 1941, it was an established success. Several explanations have been advanced for this. One is that, in the land of Hollywood make-believe, where every honest actor is an impostor at heart, the local royalty welcomed this suave masquerader from the East who could play his part better than they could play theirs. A second explanation is that Mike has always had an illustrious following of loyal and genuinely affectionate friends. The third is that he runs a damn good restaurant. In this he has been given extraordinary support by a very pretty and very smart young woman named Gloria Lister, who came to Romanoff's in 1945 as his bookkeeper and who, in 1948, became Mrs. Michael Romanoff. Gloria Romanoff is still his bookkeeper, his business manager and his wife.
THERE was a day, however, when Romanoff's was faced with A ruin by the very snob appeal that had helped make it famous. The original restaurant, which had a front room and a back room, in time became such a reviewing stand for the great that if any eminent patron was not given one of the five tables in the front room he would leave. Inasmuch as almost every customer considered himself entitled to one of these tables, and no one wanted to be seen alive in the back room, the seating problem became acute. In 1950, Romanoff's lost money for the first time, and Mike decided to move.
The site he chose for his new place was just a block and a half from the old one, but it was south of Wilshire, which meant eating on the wrong side of the boulevard. That disturbed Mike not at all. To raise money he simply assured prospective stockholders that "the south is so much warmer." The new Romanoff's has no back room, but its cheery main dining room is so shaped that everybody can stare at everybody else without much strain. Business, so far, has been double what it was north of the boulevard, even though capacity is less. This year the net will probably top $100,000.
Robert Benchley once said that "Romanoff's is the only place I know where the customer isn't always right." Chronic bores, cut-raters and devotees of the club sandwich have sometimes been asked to take their custom elsewhere, and more than once a letter of complaint has been tacked on the wall of the men's room.
But Romanoff's is no longer strictly a family show. Mike has hired an old friend (and original backer) named Harry Crocker, a member of the pioneer California family, to be his greeter, public relations man and, possibly, alter ego. As Crocker knows everyone in California and Mike finds it difficult to remember any name (he once forgot how to spell one of his own aliases), this move should pay off. And it will be necessary for Mike to have someone like Crocker on hand in California if his latest venture pans out: to do over Duveen's former five-story art gallery in Manhattan and open up Romanoff's Fifth Aveaue.