Vitello's moves on with addition of cabaret club: eatery where Blake dined boosts trendy strip.

Up until 2001, Vitello's Italian Ristorante in Studio City was mostly known as a reliable place to grab a plate of chicken cacciatore, cannoli or lasagna. It was straightforward and intimate, and a favorite of celebrities--including its most famous patron, actor Robert Blake.

It was Blake, or more specifically his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, who gave Vitello's its worldwide notoriety when she was found dead in a car down the street after the two had dined there.

While Blake was acquitted on murder charges, the case made a morbid tourist site out of Vitello's.

Business surged.

Five years later, and as interest in the Blake crime wanes, the new owners of Vitello's have taken a different approach to their famous eatery: They turned part of it into a high-end cabaret-style supper club.

"It's doing very well. It has a lot of business," said Matt Epstein, a Sherman Oaks real estate broker who bought the restaurant last year. He said business is up 20 percent from last year. "The cabaret and upstairs are just another part."

Called Sterling's Upstairs at Vitello's, the club is named after Michael Sterling, a long-time theater aficionado and Hollywood publicist for Elizabeth Taylor, Lance Armstrong and Rosemary Clooney, who was brought on to program the space.

Sterling gutted an upstairs banquet hall, built a stage and brought in a list of mid-range entertainment. Since opening June 9, the dinner-and-a-show has hosted jazz acts, plays and concerts by the Drifters, the Platters, Amick Byram and Joan Ryan.

Tickets are $65, which pays for the entertainment and a four-course prix fixe menu.

"Where can you go for that much?" said Sterling, who runs the Sherman Oaks public relations company Michael Sterling & Associates.

Jack McGrath serves on the Studio City Chamber of Commerce and said he stumbled onto the club when it first opened. "The place was packed," he said.

He said that Studio City has so few live music venues that Vitello's has the market largely cornered. He credited Epstein.

"We've tried to do this, get more live music. But you got to be an entrepreneur," he said. "(Epstein is) doing something right."

Keeping the tradition

Epstein had been coming to Vitello's for years when he found out last year that its owners, two brothers named Steve and Joe Restivo, were thinking of selling the parcel at Tujunga and Woodbridge Street. (Joe, who had lung cancer, died last month.)

Epstein jumped at the chance.

"I wanted to preserve that restaurant," he said.

Since taking over, Epstein has kept it much the same, including the weekly opera night near the bar. He's expanded hours and introduced delivery.

"I know a lot of other people would do other things with that restaurant," he said. "The restaurant has been an Italian neighborhood family joint for a long time. We plan on keeping it that way."

The one big change to the upstairs came when Sterling approached Epstein with the idea.

Sterling had been tipped off to the space by Ryan, one of his clients, who had moved into the neighborhood and visited Vitello's.

Sterling and Epstein soon made plans to have Sterling operate the space as an old-style cabaret supper club, a throwback to an earlier era and a type of venue lacking in the Valley today.

"I wanted to create this different type of feeling," Sterling said.

Epstein and Sterling made a handshake agreement to share revenue. "We serve the food and the drinks and he gets the door," Epstein said. "It's a nice partnership."

Today, the dingy hall has been turned into an intimate, 100-seat lounge, complete with raised booths and white tablecloths. A small stage has been erected along the west wall, which on a recent visit housed a black, shiny piano and a silver drum set. A flat screen monitor read "Sterling's Upstairs at Vitello's."

Paul Stroili is hosting his one-act play "Straight Up With a Twist" from the space during July and said there isn't a bad seat in the house.

"No one is more than 30 feet away," he said. "You're right here."

So far, the 100-seat venue is about 75 percent full on a typical night, "which, for a brand new venue, is pretty good," Sterling said. He added that a group of neighborhood regulars is growing, and some have even trekked from as far away as Hermosa Beach.

Of course, the subject of the murder still comes up quite a bit, often accompanied by a roll of the eyes from staffers. Epstein said it's hard to distance the restaurant from the slaying even though it happened five years ago.

"It was a very popular restaurant before that happened," he noted.

Sterling, however, said that to some extent he has accepted the connection, and used it to his advantage in marketing the club. For example, when the press releases were sent out, he made sure Vitello's was mentioned liberally. Even though Blake or the crime were never mentioned, the connection piqued the interest of news outlets and the club got ink in dozens of websites and newspapers. "It was all over the place," he said.

Spillover 

The additional customers not only help Vitello's, but could also benefit neighboring businesses along Tujunga Avenue. Known informally as Tujunga Village, the cluster of about a dozen quaint and trendy shops, cafes and boutiques just south of Moorpark thrive on foot traffic and a loyal clientele, said Jane Goe, who works at Portrait of a Bookstore, an independent retailer in the same space as the popular Aroma Cafe

She said any attention on a business along Tujunga initially helps every business along the street, since people tend to walk from shop to shop. "It's only one block," she said.

Once the initial spotlight wears off, though, it is harder to keep people coming back. "They've seen it once," she said. "It's not destination shopping."

With Sterling's, it is also unclear whether shops would benefit from a nightclub since many close in the early evening.

But McGrath of the Chamber Commerce pointed out that the club could entice people to come back another day. "It's been such a great economic catalyst for that whole area. Some didn't even know Tujunga had a diversity of shops," he said.

The next step, Sterling said, is to add big-name entertainers to the list. Now that word has gotten out about his namesake club, he's getting flooded with pitches from entertainers who want to book the space.

He's even heard from Carol Channing, who is interested "because she started in this type of environment," he said. "At 85, she's still out there," he said. "She supports this art form."

Sterling hopes that by booking acts like Channing, he can help keep cabaret alive. "It's important to bring this stuff to a younger generation," he said. "It's history. It should live on forever."

BY CHRIS COATES 

Staff Reporter