From "The End of a Hollywood Era of High Style and High Fat" by Peter M. Nichols, The New York Times, December 26, 1999:

Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow celebrated their first (and last) anniversary there. When she was making Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor had the chili flown to Rome. One evening Shirley Temple had a drink invented especially for her. And on another occasion, as Fay Wray tells the story, Orson Welles picked up a container of flaming sterno and threw it at John Houseman.

Frozen in time, swimming in cholesterol, Chasen's restaurant was the very essence of Hollywood for six decades. When it closed in 1995, the so-called golden age went with it, or so it was said. "This town knows it," claims a Chasen's habitué in Ms. Berman and Mr. Pulcini's documentary about the restaurant and the celebrities who crowded the place as if they were straight from the set of Sunset Boulevard.

Most of all, the film is about the care and feeding of celebrity by chefs, waiters, bartenders and maître d's who, by virtue of their position, served as links between the famous and the rest of us. And serve they did, with pride and slavish devotion.

Alfred Hitchcock, Clark Gable, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Gary Cooper and their ilk patronized the place nightly, as did a raft of producers, directors and politicians and a menagerie of movers and shakers and their hangers-on. In all those years, only Hitchcock and Lew Wasserman, head of Universal, were granted regular tables. On any given night it was not uncommon to find J. Edgar Hoover at one table and the gangster Mickey Cohen at another. "When the Watergate crowd was in town, what you saw on TV was in here that night," one observer comments.

In the film, the hobo steak being cooked tableside is poked across a lake of melted butter. "No calories in that stuff, right?" says the producer David Brown, who points out that one of Chasen's problems was that today there are no more eaters. The restaurant was always a masculine place. A Mexican bartender named Pepe Ruiz mixes an absolute killer of a drink for Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson's ex-sidekick, who calls him the "most important Hispanic in Southern California." The famous could patronize at will at Chasen's. The staff stays adoring.

Then it was over. "It's closing because we don't come here anymore," says the television host Tom Snyder. The crowd was gravitating to hipper, trendier places. In the last days, though, they all piled into Chasen's: Sharon Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Jay Leno, Madonna. "When you die, everybody comes to the funeral," Mr. Ruiz says. Sylvester Stallone is turned away with six people. The management turns to "loss prevention." A woman friend of Daryl F. Gates, former police chief of Los Angeles, tries to take a lamp. Across town, someone notes, a new Chasen's has opened with lighter cuisine.

From "An L.A. Favorite Fading to Black," by Blake Eskin, Forward, June 19, 1998:

It was Jewish immigrants like Louis B. Mayer who created the Hollywood studios and invented the star system, so it makes sense that Jewish immigrants like Dave Chasen and Mike Romanoff created glamorous restaurants where executives from these studios and their stars dined. Like the Jewish studio heads who forced actors to change their names and tried to efface signs of Jewishness from the work their studios produced, these restaurateurs superimposed an invented vision of glamour upon their Eastern European roots. The proprietor of Romanoff's claimed to be a relative of Czar Nicholas II; a perhaps apocryphal story about him is that when an exiled member of the Russian royal family came to Romanoff's, he called Romanoff's bluff by speaking to him in Russian. Romanoff could not respond.

Chasen, a former vaudevillian born in Odessa in 1899, created a bill of fare that mixed dishes of the Old World and fantasies about the new one. "Between the pheasant under glass and the beef Belmont, there would be these Jewish foods," says Shari Springer Berman, who, with her husband, Robert Pulcini, made Off the Menu, a charming, wistful documentary about the final days of Chasen's, which closed in 1995. To be sure, Chasen's served up borscht, lox and whitefish, but its signature dishes were its celebrated chili and something called hobo steak.

Simply watching the scene in Off the Menu...in which a waiter prepares hobo steak in Chasen's dining room is enough to clog one's arteries. Hovering over a wheeled cart, he melts a pound of butter in an aluminum tray and then deep-fries several pieces of beef in the bubbling butter. According to Ms. Berman, Chasen invented hobo steak on a fishing trip with actor Fred MacMurray. Chasen "didn't like fish," she said, and wondered aloud how someone who grew up in a Jewish home could have possibly created such a dish. "Even if he wasn't kosher, he would've been grossed out," she said.

The film recounts famous stories about Chasen's and the entertainment industry, the best of which is how bathroom attendant Onetta Johnson's late-night complaint inspired Donna Summer's number-one hit "She Works Hard for the Money." Off the Menu also chronicles final milestones like the last staff meeting, the last Oscar party and the last wedding, a Jewish ceremony in which a pre-teen makes an obviously difficult speech in which he tries very hard to welcome his stepfather into the family. "It's so L.A.," Mr. Pulcini said. "We filmed the last bat mitzvah there too, of some studio executive's daughter. There was a Walt Disney theme, with Snow White's house and living dolls of different Disney characters. When they introduced the girl, she came out of the magic castle." Over the years, Chasen's was the scene of many bar mitzvahs and weddings. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme held Seders there, according to the filmmakers, and for years record-company executives Mo Ostin and Joe Smith hosted an annual Seder attended by more than 100 people, including film producers Bernie Brillstein and Bob Daly and celebrities like Henry Winkler.

Over lunch at the Cafe Edison (which has the show-business legacy of Chasen's but not the luxury) Ms. Berman and Mr. Pulcini explained how they stumbled upon Chasen's. An agent asked them to come to Los Angeles for meetings about a screenplay they had collaborated on that had sparked some industry interest. "We couldn't afford to stay in a hotel, so we went online and found a bed-and-breakfast," said Mr. Pulcini. It just so happened that their host was Raymond Bilbool, the "banquet captain extraordinaire" of Chasen's. "By day we made the Hollywood rounds, by night we would listen to Raymond tell stories," Ms. Berman said. Chasen's decline paralleled the decline of classic Hollywood glamour; in dire financial straits, it would close two months hence. Mr. Bilbool told the young couple about celebrities from the era before dressing for dinner meant black blazers and blue jeans and about a staff who had for decades devoted themselves to pampering them. "We kind of looked at each other and said, 'Somebody has to make a movie about this,'" Mr. Pulcini said, and Off the Menu was born.

Chasen's, which had always maintained a no-cameras policy, posed a double challenge for Mr. Pulcini and Ms. Berman. "We had to first gain the trust of the people at the restaurant who protect the clientele, and then we needed to gain the trust of the clientele," she said. The first night, she recalled, they set up their equipment only to be told by the maître d'hotel, "You can't film in here, Lew Wasserman is having dinner." The filmmakers won over the staff by staying each night after the restaurant closed. "Someone would sit at the piano, they'd drink and sing songs and we formed a relationship with them," Mr. Pulcini said.

Off the Menu takes the point of view of Chasen's staff, who think of service as a noble profession and who, like Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard, keep their customers convinced of their own importance long after they fall out of the spotlight. "They treated Fay Wray as if she had just made King Kong," Ms. Berman said.

"The new restaurants don't have any resemblance to the way this place is structured," Mr. Pulcini said. "Ivy, it's casual, Spago has an open kitchen. At Chasen's, you could hear each other talking. You knew who was going to be your waiter, your captain. It was more like a private club. In the forties, they had a steam room, a shower, a barber. If Humphrey Bogart was coming in from New York, he would stop there first."

Chasen's was also something of a home away from home for its employees, who made their careers there. In the film we meet Julius Reh, whose family was in the restaurant business for generations in Czechoslovakia until World War II, and the flamboyant Mr. Bilbool, the son of an Egyptian Jew who was a Singer sewing machine salesman in Burma. Chasen's continued to provide work for immigrants, most recently from Latin America, until it closed three years ago.

Towards the end of lunch, Mr. Pulcini and Ms. Berman spoke once more about the restaurant's chili, which was cooked from a recipe Chasen learned while touring with his vaudeville partner.

"One of the biggest controversies," Mr. Pulcini said quietly, "is that the secret ingredient was pork."

"It's not for sure," she said.

"It's true," he insisted.

Ms. Berman explained, "Rumor has it that they used pork. You'd never see this printed anywhere"—an official recipe has been published—"but what I've heard from inside sources is there's an ingredient missing."