Starstruck Tribeca will open second restaurant.

Starstruck Tribeca will open second restaurant

Tribeca has become one of Beverly Hills' most popular and highest-grossing eateries since opening its doors in August 1988.

On many nights a good-sized flock of yuppies can be found congregated at its front doors, awaiting entry to the capacity crowd inside.

Tribeca's four owners have now decided to capitalize on that success by opening a second location in the new Encino Spectrum complex, which is slated to be complete next month.

"We felt the (San Fernando) valley is a good place to go right now because everyplace else is saturated with restaurants," explains Jack Denicola, who owns and operates Tribeca with fellow New York transplants Ken Falk, Mike Bower and Jerry Rubacky.

Tribeca derives its name from a section of Manhattan by that name, where, coincidentally, actor Robert DeNiro just recently opened a restaurant named Tribeca Grill.

That East Coast opening has, in turn, brought a surge of new business to Tribeca Beverly Hills, even though the two businesses have no common ownership.

"DeNiro's place got a lot of publicity when it opened, but none of that publicity specified where it is located," Denicola explains. "So lots of people started coming in here asking if this is DeNiro's place. And that doesn't bother me a bit, as long as they come in."

While Tribeca continues to pull in capacity crowds in Beverly Hills, its pending Encino site has hit something of a snag.

"We're having some problems with a City of L.A. parking ordinance that requires us to have more parking spaces than are currently on site," Denicola says. "We're negotiating with the city's head of traffic control right now, and may end up having to keep our bar shut down during daytime business hours."

Daytime bar traffic might be a topic of concern in Encino, but it's nighttime bar traffic has caused problems in Beverly Hills.

"The problem is that Tribeca's restaurant patrons have to pass through this narrow bar area to get to the upstairs dining area. And that bar is so crowded on peak nights, it's hard to get through," laments Richard Martin, West Coast bureau chief of Nation's Restaurant News.

Denicola promises that barroom crowding has improved with the recent installation of stanchions and frequent patrols by crowd-control monitors.

The Encino location will be laid out in a fashion similar to Beverly Hills, with a relatively narrow barroom downstairs and an eatery upstairs.

The problems with crowding will be circumvented in Encino, however, by having have separate entrances for the bar and restaurant, Denicola promises, with access to the upstairs entrance provided by an escalator.

PHOTO : Tribeca in Beverly Hills: Benefitted from confusion caused by opening of actor Robert DeNiro's Tribeca restaurant in New York