Toscana: How Kamala's Power Spot Became a C-Suite Clubhouse
Harris' blind date with Doug Emhoff was there. Today, Ellison, Iger and Walden are at the window tables. Says Jay Sures: 'I've been coming from day one'
This Ankler Feature is an 12-minute read.
The scene: Friday lunch, mid-summer 2024.
Imagine Entertainment cofounder Brian Grazer is at the corner window table. Soon-to-be-announced-Paramount-CEO David Ellison is noshing with former Fox and Paramount film honcho Emma Watts. The Transformers franchise producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura is there, as is Entertainment 360 cofounder Daniel Rappaport, opposite producer Jenno Topping (Ford v Ferrari). Also holding court in the restaurant’s modestly-sized dining room that seats just 50 people are WME managing partner Dan Aloni; producers Alan Gasmer (Vikings) and Cliff Roberts (Emancipation); and EuropaCorp partner Steve Rabineau.
At one point Disney CEO Bob Iger pops in, wearing an untucked button-down, jeans and sneakers. He goes table to table saying hello to friends before plopping down next to Grazer for 10 minutes. Then he leaves.
On this warm day, the town is still holding its breath over the fate of Paramount, producers are grumbling that no one is buying, and the agencies are closing shop at noon on Fridays. There is a languorous sense of unease in Hollywood. Nothing, after all, is more unsettling around these parts than when things are “quiet.”
Yet here is one place — Toscana on San Vicente Blvd. in Brentwood — still thrumming, proving that at 1 p.m. on weekdays, Hollywood, at least for those at the tippy-top, is not dead.
Toscana has become even more of a lunchtime ritual thanks to work-from-home culture — if home is in the leafy, well-to-do environs of Brentwood. UTA vice chairman Jay Sures, a local, estimates he’s been to Toscana “2,500 or 3,000 times.” Think about it,” “he tells me. “There are 365 days in a year, and they’ve been open for how many years? Thirty-five. Okay, so I’ve been coming from day one.”
Who else are the bold-faced names who dine there and why? I survey several who tell me why they go, what tables you don’t want and talk to owners Mike and Kathie Gordon about what makes it all keep humming.
A Power Dining Survivor
Who knew, so soon after that sleepy, power-soaked day a few months back, that Toscana, which opened its doors in 1989 — back when the best shot at a good meal in Brentwood was the ReddiChick basket at the Brentwood Country Mart — would take a spotlight on the national stage.
On Aug. 22, Brentwoodian Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination to run for president at the Democratic National Convention. But not before her husband, Doug Emhoff, also spoke, revealing details about their courtship. Which just so happened to begin at Toscana, the location of their first blind date. This news took veteran CAA agent Fred Specktor by surprise. “Oh, really?” he asks, when I mention it. “I don’t know if I would take someone there on a first date.” (A birthday party is something else; Specktor’s 85th was at the restaurant.)