"In television," he says, "food becomes a major obsession because you’re locked in a room all day. A friend of mine calls it the ‘veal pen,’ because you can’t get out of this box."

PHIL ROSENTHAL

But Rosenthal goes on about food when he isn’t work-ing, too. Any conversation with him inevitably drifts into the questions that haunt him: Who makes the best hamburger in the country? Which online site has the most extensive list of French cheeses? Where can you find Amedei chocolate from Tuscany?

His wife of 20 years, actress Monica Horan—who played Raymond’s sister-in-law Amy on the show, and put most of her earnings into a foundation that gives performing-arts scholarships—likes good food but finds something Raymond-esque about life with a devotee. "With Phil, it’s always, ‘Do you have any sauce from the Himalayas?’" she says. "People are so intimidated to cook for Phil that we’re hardly ever invited over to people’s homes for dinner." Their children, Ben, 13, and Lily, 10, are developing educated palates, "to the point that now they want to eat only the tuna fish imported from Spain," Horan says. "The other night at dinner, Lily said she thought maybe it would be more fun to live simply. But we know that won’t last."

So of course it was no surprise to anyone who knows Rosenthal that when Everybody Loves Raymond came to an end—leaving him wealthy enough that he never had to work again, but way too young to "just sit around and eat," as he puts it—he became an avid investor in restaurants. He is now 45, and a shareholder in five restaurants in Los Angeles. He has his fingers in many pies, and after a lesson learned during a short-lived foray into full restaurant ownership, he approaches this endeavor as a great hobby, but nothing more.

For Love of Pot Roast
During the Raymond years, Rosenthal was one of 20 initial investors in Jar, a highly regarded Los Angeles restaurant dedicated to retro American cuisine. He bought in with just one share; he won’t say what he paid, but it is typical for shares of top-caliber restaurants in L.A. to be sold in $100,000 increments. "What can I say? I loved the pot roast," he says. "It’s still the best in the world."

Then things grew tricky. Another investor offered to buy everyone else out, close Jar and then reopen it as another dining concept. With the world’s best pot roast at stake, Rosenthal jumped in and decided to be the one to buy out the other investors in order to keep Jar intact. Only the restaurant’s one-woman brain trust, chef Suzanne Tracht, would retain her sizeable chunk of equity.

Tracht was grateful for the rescue and saw Rosenthal as a true believer in her simply prepared cuisine. "With a lot of partners, it’s a casual thing, but not with Phil," she says. But Rosenthal quickly discovered that he despised managing all of the restaurant’s working parts. Once, when the general manager quit, he found it particularly difficult to find a suitable replacement, and spent six months searching the country for a new one. "I didn’t have fun with that," he recalls.

EVERYBODY LOVES Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal has invested in a number of Los Angeles-area restaurants, including Osteria Mozza(top) and Pizzeria Mozza (bottom), two of his most recent ventures.

He had his ideas about cachet, too, and when Tracht had an opportunity to open a branch of the restaurant in the Renaissance Hotel in Long Beach, Calif., Rosenthal thought that even with a renovation underway within the heart of Long Beach, the location was still a tad downscale. He and Tracht parted ways over that; she bought him out and opened the new restaurant under the name Tracht’s rather than Jar.

Rosenthal moved on and now owns multiple shares (but not controlling interest) in a number of the city’s trendiest blockbusters—Providence, the Hungry Cat and Reservoir—plus his most recent investments: Pizzeria Mozza and Osteria Mozza, owned by La Brea Bakery founder Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali. Both restaurants opened in Hollywood this past summer and quickly had months-long waiting lists. "I took hold of Nancy’s knee and wouldn’t let go until she let me invest," Rosenthal says. He knew Silverton from the days when she and her then-husband, chef Mark Peel, were the original owners of Jar. For her part, Silverton was thrilled to have Rosenthal on board. "He thinks about food more than anyone I know," she says. "When he’s not eating or talking about food, he’s reading about food on a website. I’m not a cyber eater the way he is." She introduced L.A.’s diners to the concept of an authentic Italian mozzarella bar at Osteria Mozza, but the white anchovy pizza that is an occasional special was Rosenthal’s idea.

A Garlic Epiphany
Cuisine as spectacle seems to be Rosenthal’s way of expunging the boiled chicken dinners of his lower-middle-class childhood. He always tells people that his mother’s bad cooking was the inspiration for making Debra, Raymond’s wife on the show, a bad cook. "I never had food with any flavor," he says of his upbringing. "It wasn’t something my mother was familiar with. And so when you’re deprived as I was and you get out in the world and you start to taste new things, it’s like a guy who’s been in the desert and finds a wellspring—you can’t stop drinking." He doesn’t remember any particular epiphany other than dining with a friend at an Italian restaurant while he was at Hofstra University on Long Island, tasting garlic and knowing he couldn’t go home for dinner again.

"He thinks about food more than anyone I know. When he’s not eating or talking about food, he’s reading about food on a website."

Shortly after college, he wrote for a TV show that he prefers not to name, because his main recollection is of a horrifying memo a penny-pinching executive producer sent around. "It said it had come to his attention that people were putting milk on their cereal," Rosenthal recalls. "It said the milk was for coffee and the cereal was supposed to be consumed dry, as a snack. It said that the show’s intent wasn’t to provide breakfast to the cast and crew. It was at that moment that I promised that if I ever ran a show, not only would we have milk for the cereal, we’d have the best food of any show in Hollywood."

True to his word, he fed the Raymond cast and crew lean cuts of pastrami flown in from Katz’s Delicatessen in New York, cinnamon buns from a bakery in Chicago and fresh crab claws from Florida. Rosenthal gained 15 pounds during the first few years of the show, but since then he has learned to nibble instead of gorge, and he works out on an elliptical machine for an hour every day.

Next spring a very select team of comedy writers in Moscow might be nibbling flown-in beluga caviar and the latest delights from Arkady Novikov, the city’s restaurant king, as they translate Everybody Loves Raymond into a Russian version of family neurosis. Rosenthal will be going there to guide the adaptation, and Sony Television plans to document the process from his perspective and air it on American television.

"I feel like the luckiest guy in the world, to have gotten to do what I love to do for nine years," Rosenthal says. "I was paid to go in a room and laugh with my friends. And then make a show and have people watch the show and tell me they enjoy it. That’s all you want out of life. Well, that and a really good meal."

Tara Weingarten is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.