By Garrison Frost

As Pacific Coast Highway winds its way toward south Redondo Beach, it crosses Diamond Street. On opposite corners of this intersection, you will find the Redondo Beach City Hall complex with its low-slung city hall and imposing main library, and Redondo Union High School's auditorium. As nondescript areas go, this is slightly less nondescript.

On what is perhaps the least interesting corner of this intersection, one will find a Starbucks franchise in what is obviously a former Kentucky Fried Chicken. Next to that is Ernie's Bail Bonds, one of those bizarre little storefronts that pops up across the street from local police stations. Here, toward the back of the bail bondman, there's a little history – a history that involves crepes Suzette and King Leopold of Belgium, among other things.

This is the place where Henri Charpentier's dramatic life came into contact with the South Bay.

Charpentier was born to a 19-year-old aristocratic woman in 1880 in southern France. When his father died suddenly, the young boy was sent to live with the much more modest Camous family near the French Rivera.

By chance the young boy's foster brother was head chef at the Hotel Cap Martin and got his new relative a job. Charpentier would go on serve apprenticeships under his brother as well as the master chef Auguste Escoffier and the Swiss hotelier Cesar Ritz. While working in the high-class hotels on the French Riviera, the young Charpentier gained exposure to Europe's elite class, including the aforementioned king of Belgium and Queen Victoria.

As Charpentier says himself in his autobiography, which was recently republished by the Modern Library, "Should you hear me say that when I was a boy of 10, a proud English duchess was my friend, that queens spoke tenderly to me, that kings acknowledged my salutations, that I shared the private chapel benedictions of an empress, that another empress, my favorite, in her boudoir traded bonbons for my point of view, what would you think?"

It was during his youth on the Riviera that his legend began. As the story goes, Charpentier was 15 when he was helping serve a group led by Edward, the prince of Wales (soon to be King Edward VII), when he was asked to prepare French pancakes for the party. Charpentier goofed it, and somehow set fire to the sauce. He served it anyway, and everyone loved it. It was decided to name the dish crepes Suzette after the only girl at the table, Princess Suzanne, Edward's daughter.

From the Riviera, Charpentier went on to serve as master chef at some of Europe?s finest hotels and restaurants.

In the early 1900s, the young chef crossed the Atlantic and continued his success, opening the world famous Henri Restaurant. Eventually, he came to Los Angeles. The list of famous guests at his restaurants includes Queen Margherita of Italy, "Diamond Jim" Brady, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, William K. Vanderbilt, Sarah Berhardt, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Lillian Russell, Rudyard Kipling, William Jennings Bryant, Woodrow Wilson, Florenz Ziegfeld, Bing Crosby, John Wayne, Ingrid Bergman and Ethel Barrymore.

Sometime after World War II, Charpentier retired to Redondo Beach and opened a tiny little restaurant near the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Diamond Street. From the beginning his little place was a big hit. "For the majority of people in the South Bay, that was the big thing, to go to Henri Charpentier's for the evening," Hermosa Beach-based food writer Betty Evans told me.

Evans recalls a two- to three-year waiting list to at Charpentier's place. An Associated Press writer visited the restaurant in 1961, and found the wait to be four years.

"It wsa 65 years ago, but Henri Charpentier, one of the last of the great chefs, remembers that breakfast on the terrace of the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo as if it were yesterday," that writer said in an article printed in the Daily Breeze.

Evans herself ate at the restaurant in the mid-1950s.

"He served many courses," she recalled. "At that time, nobody was used to eating like that."

Evans recalled being served lobster and soup and a beef pastry. "Before the beef dish, we all had to go for a walk over the gas station and back," she said. Of course the desert was crepes Suzette.

According to Evans, the great chef at that time was letting an assistant do most of the cooking. He just socialized and entertained the small group of 15 to 20 guests with stories. "He was just a charmer, no doubt about it," she said. "He was a bit of a show person."

Charpentier was also something of a patriot. Evans and her husband Gordon shared with me some paper placemats that they found outside of his restaurant. They are a tribute to American armed forced, perhaps a thank-you for the liberation of his native France.

Charpentier died in 1961 and his restaurant went with him. If you visit the site of the restaurant now, you'll hardly notice that anything interesting every happened there.

(April 22, 2004)

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