Cecils and Other Restaurant Ventures
Tapping into the popularity of disco, Haber opened Cecils, a 9,000-square-foot (840 m2) Chinese restaurant/discothèque on October 1, 1979. The $1.2 million disco rivaled Studio 54 in popularity and attracted celebrities like Kirk Douglas, Sonny Bono, Evel Knievel, Reggie Jackson, Smokey Robinson, Joan Collins, Jack Paar, Mary Martin, Carol Conners, Lola Falana, Lyle Waggoner, Ed Marinaro, Deney Terrio and John Travolta.
Haber followed Cecils with a pair of dining ventures in the early 1980s: Saturdays and Doubles. Saturdays was a knock off of the T.G.I. Friday's franchise while Doubles was a large restaurant inside the famed Tennis Club. Haber unexpectedly found himself the second largest employer in Palm Springs with approximately 200 people on his payroll.
Read more about this topic: Mel Haber
Famous quotes containing the words restaurant and/or ventures:
“A restaurant is a fantasy—a kind of living fantasy in which diners are the most important members of the cast.”
—Warner Leroy, U.S. restaurateur, founder of Maxwell’s Plum restaurant, New York City. New York Times (July 9, 1976)
“At the moment when a man openly makes known his difference of opinion from a well-known party leader, the whole world thinks that he must be angry with the latter. Sometimes, however, he is just on the point of ceasing to be angry with him. He ventures to put himself on the same plane as his opponent, and is free from the tortures of suppressed envy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)