Author: richardfoss

Business owners spend a lot of time thinking about “curb appeal” – that indefinable something that makes someone outside decide to come in. It’s about projecting your style, the cues that tell someone that you have what they want, and you provide the atmosphere in which they’d like to buy it. In the case of an Italian restaurant called Sara the Wine Bar in Culver City, that involved painting their building bright purple. The spattered paint along windows shows that exuberance sometimes overcomes skill, and along with black doorframes and tribal accents in dark blue, the building looks like...

The sign at the door welcomed me to Morocco, and I glanced around to see if there were any camels or itinerant rug merchants along this stretch of Lincoln Boulevard in Venice. None appeared, so I shrugged and went into Casablanca, which I assumed had been a Moroccan restaurant before it was converted into a Mexican seafood place. I was wrong about that – while restaurants occasionally change cuisine but not decor, this was not one of them. Casablanca has a more interesting story, of a talented chef who had such a fascination with a golden age film that...