Mike's Place

"Everyone has the idea that it's a good chef that makes a restaurant. I know of no greater fallacy. A restaurant is only as good as its owner's personality."

The framer of this apothegm is the proprietor of both a good restaurant and an unusual personality. He is the self-styled Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, once a Brooklyn-born orphan boy named Harry Gerguson, who spent half his life amiably panhandling the rich of two continents. But in Hollywood, where Mike Romanoff settled after being immortalized in a five-part New Yorker profile, he finally cashed in on the fact that...