Who Will Be Missed More?
Mr. Handal leaves when restaurants Downtown are flourishing, swelling to a thundering crescendo. A stream of new eateries has opened in the last three years. Two, in fact, have opened next to Mr. Handal’s San Gennaro in recent months.
In other towns, the restaurant would be missed. In Culver City, because he ranged taller than the restaurant itself, the loss will be of a fiery-toned entrepreneur. Occasionally he presented untrimmed edges. Mostly, though, Mr. Handal was one of the best winds in years to blow through here.
He Was the Face of Revival
Especially in the early years, but, in fact, until quite recently, San Gennaro was the Downtown spot for prestigious group gatherings or more individually tailored dining. Just enough upscale to add a sheen of shiny polish to an outing, Mr. Handal’s store offered the kind of nightclub entertainment on weekends that ran like a blur past every rival until it was out of sight. Downtown was much sleepier when he arrived in 1995. Often, he was the face of revival because of his incessant drive. His ability to simultaneously field multiple calls on his cellphone, converse with three parties in person, give separate direction to his bar and kitchen staff, while congenially greeting a customer he never before had seen all helped to cobble together his sometimes-Superman reputation. Depending on the source, he typically has as many feuds running at a time as he has fingers or maybe closer to the number of hairs on his head. Many of the most prominent ladies and gentlemen in Greater Culver City cultivated strong feelings, on either side of the divide, about Mr. Handal. Just as with his restaurant, Mr. Handal pretty much was the Downtown Business Assn., which lately has been performing at a record level of ambition. He was and is the West L.A. Chamber of Commerce, and its profitable publication.
Never Needed an Invitation
The antithesis of an opaque personality, friends say that one of the reasons he was a force in Downtown for eleven years was his inherent sense of collegiality. From the beginning, he did not stand back deferentially and await invitations or direction. He plunged into the most demanding political, commercial and social affairs of the city. From early, he knew the players, and he quickly educated himself in the town’s preciously valued history. His support of the Youth Health Center on the Culver City High School campus is imprinted on the minds of many decision-makers. For a number of years, he was a camp supporter.
Never a shrinking violet, even at discretionary times when friends wished he had been, it was no accident that he was at or near the controls of many of this town’s big stories throughout the past decade. Mr. Handal is the consummate New Yorker Moved West. Much about his personality and his unique commercial profile are necessarily outsized. Everything he did and does are on a far more ambitious scale than practically anybody else’s. For a number of years, he hoped or believed he could rescue the chronically flailing Western Hemisphere Marathon. No one else necessarily shared the dream, which bothered Mr. Handal not at all.
A Portrait May Look Incongruous
Business owners who know the middle-aged Mr. Handal better than most people say that he could field two sprawling armies of fiercely loyal friends and equally emotional rivals who have vowed never to walk on the same sidewalk with him. Wise-cracking, sharp-talking, compassionate, hard-edged, insightful — Mr. Handal is a large human grid of clashing portraits. He succeeded for eleven years in one of America’s most brutally competitive businesses because he became San Gennaro and San Gennaro was him. With Mr. Handal, it almost always is personal, and many times that is a positive. For the most important persons living on the Westside or traveling through here, dining at San Gennaro was identical to sharing a meal with the owner himself. A handshaker and a headshaker, he was San Gennaro. He also is in show business. In the colorful tradition of the legendary greeters Toots Shor and Sherman Billingsly, Mr. Handal scarcely acknowledges that strangers exist. As raconteurs, perhaps Mr. Shor and Mr. Billingsly could have learned from Mr. Handal.
He fancied himself as possibly the best informed person in Culver City, and he may have been. One reason he was at the vortex of numerous important stories was that he possessed an uncanny knack for being near to where news was happening or hearing about it before anyone else. This last time, Mr. Handal is the news.
