Hearty Helpings.

Serving a stick-to-your-ribs style of cooking, the owner of The Grill has grown his restaurant empire by offering an alternative to trendy L.A. cuisine

WHEN Bob Spivak first opened The Grill in 1984, discerning diners were feasting on such chi-chi fare as terrine of chanterelles with cucumber

By contrast, The Grill offered New York steak, filet mignon with fried onions, double-cut lamb chops and veal chop T-bones with potatoes O'Brien, hashed brown potatoes, shoestring potatoes, fried onions, sauteed mushrooms and steamed spinach.

Foodies didn't know what the heck to make of it. The Grill wasn't just a nice place to eat; it was the flagship for the return to food you could feel in your stomach. Damn the cholesterol; full forks ahead!

The Grill -- and its lower-priced sibling, The Daily Grill -- is the creation of Spivak, an affable fellow with a taste for stylish ties and a long family history in the restaurants of Los Angeles. Indeed, Spivak was born into one of the city's great restaurant families. He didn't grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth, but with a flatware spoon filled with meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

What Bob Spivak created at The Grill and The Daily Grill is a tribute to what his father, Eddie Spivak, was doing four decades ago at the Redwood House and Smokey Joe's.

An early education

"I grew up five blocks from the second Smokey Joe's in Sherman Oaks," said Spivak. "That's my earliest restaurant memory. When I'd get out of school, I'd walk over there, fold napkins and sort beans. I remember I must have been 9 years old, and my father would make his barbecue beans using white navy beans from hundred-pound sacks. And it was my job to sort through every bean and find the three or four bean-sized rocks that would have been missed by the mechanical sorters. Three or four rocks meant three or four broken teeth. I remember sorting beans all summer long. That was where my restaurant career began."

Eddie Spivak was one of those guys who made good, honest food for the rest of us -- and achieved a good deal of populist fame in the process. During World War II, he ran a handful of 24-hour hamburger stands along Broadway, when L.A.'s downtown was a glittering land filled with great theaters and large stores. Soon after the war, he bought a coffee shop on the corner of First Street and Broadway, and a few years later expanded into the space next door. He called it the Redwood House.