Restaurant's menu blends old with the new

On April 7, 1986, we opened A La Carte, Take Away Gourmet, with Elle in the kitchen whipping up "homemade" mayonnaise and chicken pot pie while Terry was out front reading the manual on how to operate a cash register and intermittently dashing back to the kitchen to make sandwiches.

At the end of an excruciatingly busy day, and after washing dishes, scrubbing pots and mopping the floors, we collapsed happy and exhausted on the kitchen floor, at the number of people that came through the door on that first day.

Twenty-one years later, they are still forming lines to get in and more than a few of them have been customers since that chaotic beginning. Our original concept was to offer restaurant-quality dinners that people could take home, re-heat, and that would still taste fresh and delicious. We also offered a variety of salads, desserts and sandwiches. Later, as we grew, we expanded into catering and served our family of clients at christenings, birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, wedding, funerals and every imaginable kind of party.

We did everything from romantic dinners for two on the beach (mostly proposals and seductions with a 100% success rate) to an opening of a new water pumping station in a parking lot for 1,000 people. We sold the business in 2002, and three years later, it was sold again.

The new owner is Estrella Harrington, mother of six, who bought A La Carte when her twins were less than a year old. Talk about a superwoman! She and her former husband had previously owned a high-end Japanese restaurant in Cerritos for 11 years.

After their divorce, she went to New York and spent two years working at a bank in mergers and acquisitions. When she moved back to California and remarried, she had a yen for the food business and one day heard that A La Carte was for sale.

Her background was far better than ours for running a restaurant and believe it or not, this remarkable woman was able to persuade her former husband (a kaiseki trained chef from Japan) to become the new chef.

Equally notable is that she persuaded her mother to take care of the kids. Then, a friend from Florida suggested that she hire Ray Perez, a very experienced catering director who had worked for 16 years at the Ritz Carleton and the Marriott in Florida. Estrella convinced him to move here to run the shop.