Restaurateur Settles Dispute Over Duckless Pate

Is it the real turtle soup, or merely the mock?

Is it the Lido I see, or only Asbury Park?

--Cole Porter

The menu promised duck liver pate. But investigators say the livers were from chickens.

Abalone was offered, they say, but calamari arrived on the plate. Desserts were to be bathed in expensive liqueurs.

The bath, they claim, was Brand X.

So on Tuesday the city attorney’s office brought a La Jolla restaurant to its knees, accusing it in a lawsuit of culinary misrepresentation and unfair competition. The owner settled for $5,550--to get the city off his back, he said, not as an admission of guilt.

Sure, there was calamari served, said Louis Zalesjak, owner of the Maitre D’. There was abalone, too. And then there was calamari, abalone-style.

But the calamari was with crabmeat and the abalone was almandine. There should have been no confusion.

“You know, I never bought any of the stuff myself for two years!” Zalesjak said, laughing.

But William Newsome III, the deputy city attorney, said the matter was no joke.

“It’s not just an issue of snob appeal,” he pointed out. “A lot of people have very specific allergies to different foods. . . . People don’t realize there are more serious consequences than not impressing your date.”

The imbroglio commenced with an irritated pantry cook, whom Zalesjak said was fired in March, 1985, from the snazzy La Jolla Boulevard restaurant. The man took his beef to the city attorney’s office. An investigator took it from there.

Piecing together receipts from suppliers, the investigator concluded the restaurant was cheating. “She did a great job of poring through hundreds and hundreds of these dinky little fish receipts and literally put the thing together so that it made it very settleable,” Newsome said.

The alleged offenses included:

- Liqueurs like Grand Marnier, Triple Sec and Curacao were promised on the menu--an elaborate affair listing such delicacies as pheasant simmered in Champagne and frog legs with shallots. In fact, the city charged, “less expensive brands” were substituted in preparing desserts.

The duck liver pate listing on the menu strongly suggested that duck liver was in the pate. In fact, chicken liver was substituted, the city’s complaint said.

- The abalone was calamari, the city charged.

- The menu promised crawfish meat “when in truth bay shrimp was substituted.”

“What is langouste and what is crawfish and what is shrimp?” Zalesjak asked, plopping a stainless steel container of small red creatures onto a white linen tablecloth on Tuesday. “In French we say langouste, in American we say crawfish. For myself, it is the same!”

Zalesjak, 50, who started the restaurant four years ago after running restaurants in New Orleans, said he never substituted cheap liqueurs for the real thing. He said Tuesday the French cognac he used was so inexpensive that he couldn’t buy an American version for less.

As for the abalone, he specifically recalled buying pink abalone during the period in question. Oddly, he said, it came in a box labelled “conch.”

He recalled quantities of duck liver in the freezer. If the chef used chicken liver, Zalesjak said, it was not on his orders.

“Lots of chefs use their imaginations,” he explained.

He produced a blizzard of receipts that he said showed that he had in fact been buying abalone and crawfish and duck liver all along. He pointed out that food costs are only a minor portion of his expenses; to scrimp on them would make little difference.

Nevertheless, Zalesjak said he agreed to settle the case rather than spend six months proving his case and pay $10,000 to hire a lawyer to fight City Hall. As part of the settlement, he agreed to pay $5,550 in penalties and refrain from misrepresenting dishes.

The city attorney’s office noted that the settlement, aimed at saving the city the expense of litigation, involves no admission of guilt.

“It makes it more palatable, you could put it that way,” said Newsome. “ . . . It gets us the remedy that we want. We don’t have any particular ego where we need someone confessing to something.”