Even a casual fan of the sitcom
Everybody Loves
Raymond might notice that the closing credits
always featured a heaping plate of enchiladas or spaghetti and
meatballs—plebeian grub that changed weekly—atop a red-checkered tablecloth. The
sequence perfectly befitted a production company named Where’s Lunch
Productions. It was a nod to the preoccupation in the writers’ room, especially
of the show’s creator and executive producer, Philip Rosenthal, although the
actual staff lunches tended to be pricey omikase affairs at foodie Meccas such
as Sushi Nozawa in Studio City. Two years after the end of the show’s
nine-season run, Rosenthal still talks about those lunches as "a ray of
sunshine."
"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.
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.
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