NYLA, the restaurant partly owned by the pop star Britney Spears, opened loudly on East 41st Street last Friday night, not to the roar of a crowd or to the flash of cameras, but to the rumble and squeal of a garbage truck making the rounds on an otherwise empty block. "The restaurant business is not an easy business, but it's a business you can make a living in if you've got the right people," he said. "Jennifer Lopez has a restaurant, but I don't know if she has the right people. If not, it's a trendy restaurant and it will die. You want longevity."

Mr. Padell learned about longevity working with Mr. Nieporent and Mr. De Niro in the late 1980's, planning the first of their TriBeCa restaurants. Mr. Padell hoped they would call the restaurant Bobby D's, but Mr. De Niro refused.

"He said, `Not a chance, Bert, not a chance,' " Mr. Padell recalled. "Bobby and Drew didn't want people to come because of De Niro. They wanted people to come for the food and service."

What eventually was called Tribeca Grill drew other celebrity investors, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Christopher Walken. But Madonna, one of Mr. Padell's clients at the time, refused to join in. "She said, `There are too many people involved,' " Mr. Padell said. "She wanted to be in charge."

Ms. Spears, by contrast, seems content to let others take command, exercising only the occasional veto. After Mr. Ochs met with her representatives, who liked his ideas, the team hired Jay Haverson, an architect, to transform the Chemists' Club ballroom, a masculine room with bronzed capitals, mahogany wainscoting and a huge fireplace, into a reflection of Ms. Spears.

"We put together adjectives to describe what we thought this restaurant would be like: sexy, theatrical, sensual, feminine, vivacious, youthful but moving into adult life," Mr. Haverson said. "We tried to create a metaphor for where we felt her career was going in the design of the restaurant."

After reflecting on the list, Mr. Haverson said he chose blossoming flowers to represent Ms. Spears. He warmed the room, previously home to Virot, a French restaurant, with pinks and oranges. He draped the ceiling in a shimmering chiffon, designed a metal staircase to look like a catwalk rising to the balcony and placed video screens on one wall that would show a continuous loop of floral watercolors by Birgit O'Connor. When he finally met with Ms. Spears, about a third of the way through the project, he took along a book of Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.

"She didn't know the work, but she loved the images," Mr. Haverson said. "There was a real connection."

Mr. Moinian said the cost of the refurbishment was more than $1 million. None of Ms. Spears's partners, including Mr. Moinian, Mr. Rudolph and Mr. Ochs, would describe her financial involvement. Some celebrities are active investors; others receive a licensing fee for the use of their names, perhaps agreeing to appear at the restaurant a certain number of times a year.

Mr. Ochs said Ms. Spears played a role in putting together the menu, but concedes that she hasn't tasted anything on it. "She has been busy touring," he said. "She hasn't tasted, but her manager and I have. She tasted it by osmosis through her manager." (Attempts to interview Ms. Spears about Nyla were unsuccessful, by fax, phone, even by osmosis through her manager.)

For restaurateurs, the publicity value of a famous name is obvious, though sometimes incalculable. Most people know, for example, that they have a better chance of dunking over Shaquille O'Neal than they do of spotting Michael Jordan at Michael Jordan's: The Steak House in Grand Central Terminal. But still they come. "On a Sunday afternoon, when 11 or 12 people from Japan come in for steaks, are they coming for the name or for the restaurant?" Peter Glazier, an owner, asked.

The history of celebrity-owned restaurants is deep if not particularly long. Professional athletes, starting with the 19th-century heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan, have long been involved with restaurants. But more often restaurateurs — Toots Shor and Michael Romanoff come to mind — became famous through their association with stars, said Michael Batterberry, editor and publisher of Food Arts magazine. "If you think about the star names that started this rolling," he said, "there were Roy Rogers and Arthur Treacher in the 1960's."

Mr. Rogers and Mr. Treacher were both canny businessmen who lent their names to fast-food chains that have had more than a few moments of prosperity. More frequently, though, celebrities don't think enough about the bottom line.

"The problem with celebrities is they want to come in and be treated a certain way," said Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant. "But you have to have strict rules about what partnership means. Do you get to eat for free?"

The mere idea of a free meal is enough to shake the capitalist faith of Mr. Padell.

"Nothing's free," he insisted. "Everybody pays, including Bob De Niro, Bert Padell and Joe the Midget. You're in this business to make money, not to lose it."

Inside Nyla on its opening night last Friday, the crowd included 16-year-old Ali Ehrlich, a Spears fan who had traveled with four friends from New Canaan, Conn. (She pronounced the food "awesome.") There were tourists, like Andrea Zurek of San Francisco, a sales manager for Google, who happened in because she was staying at the Dylan, and there were the curious, like Kim Arbuckle, who works in celebrity management at Wilhelmina Models.

"It's classy but swank," she said over drinks at the mother-of-pearl-topped bar with a friend, Justin Firestone, who works for a private jet business in Los Angeles.

"I like the atmosphere," Ms. Arbuckle said. "I think this is the quietest it's going to be for a long time."


That's the sound of what the industry calls a soft opening, in which business is kept low-key, giving the kitchen and the dining room time to develop an efficient routine before facing the hordes. The real noise will be heard on June 27, when Ms. Spears, accompanied by actors, musicians and politicians, is scheduled to stroll down a red carpet under spotlights and before cameras, officially inaugurating her arrival as restaurateur. Only then, as Ms. Spears steps across the threshold, puts down the microphone and picks up a fork, will Nyla truly be in business.

From Germany to Brazil to Japan and beyond, the world is watching, often with a smirk, as the 20-year-old Ms. Spears, who cannot legally order a drink in most of the United States, tries to add restaurateur to her jobs as teen idol and celebrity endorser. She will be entering a business littered with more stars than Hollywood Boulevard.

Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and company rode the Planet Hollywood roller coaster from windfall to bankruptcy. Robert De Niro is part of a mini-empire of restaurants that have won critical acclaim and stood the test of time. For those with fame and money to spare, restaurants offer a seemingly endless allure, even though the sad truth is that most restaurants fail.

"It's a much more interesting way to invest your money than T-bills," said David Blum, whose 1992 book "Flash in the Pan" chronicled the collapse of the Falls, a SoHo restaurant backed by Matt Dillon, among others. "It gives them a place to hang out and go to anytime with their friends. Most of these people don't calculate the downside — the embarrassment of having a place close in three months."

Just in the last few years, the stars who have leaped into the business include Jennifer Lopez, who opened Madre, a Cuban restaurant in Pasadena, Calif.; Don Johnson, who is a partner with Cheech Marin in Ana Mandara, a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco; and Cameron Diaz, an owner of Bambu, a Pan-Asian restaurant in Miami Beach. And that's not even considering sports stars, including Michael Jordan and the former football coach Don Shula, both of whom own restaurants all over the country. Though Mr. De Niro and Mr. Jordan have achieved success in restaurants, far more stars have burned out fast in a risky business.

"If you open a restaurant and you don't know anything about the business, you better do anything else," said Thierry Kléméniuk, who owns the Man Ray restaurants in New York and in Paris, with celebrity backers that include Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, John Malkovich and Harvey Weinstein.

Though star power is one of the oldest formulas in the book for selling restaurants, few star stories have aroused as much curiosity as Nyla, or, to be more precise, Ms. Spears's relationship with Nyla. With a reputation made on MTV and a coyly conservative image as a sexual tease, Ms. Spears is not always taken seriously by adults except as a moneymaker.

For Nyla and Ms. Spears to succeed, she will have to recalibrate her image to draw in grown-ups, or at least those fans who are of legal drinking age. Nyla, after all, is no theme restaurant. While Ms. Spears's name and image may hang in the air and on the lips of patrons, the restaurant bears no trace of her: there are no photos, platinum records or discarded costumes.

The moderately priced menu does not offer asparagus Spears or Britney cupcakes, although the chef, Michael Perselay, paying heed to Ms. Spears's Louisiana upbringing, has given a Southern inflection to dishes like duck and wild mushroom étouffée, lobster salad with fried green tomatoes, and grilled salmon with sautéed greens. It is a nod made explicit in Ms. Spears's invention of the name Nyla, compounded of abbreviations for New York and Louisiana. For good measure, Mr. Perselay is preparing some of Ms. Spears's favorite dishes, including fried chicken and crab cakes, here with corn-and-chipotle mashed potatoes.

Situated in the Dylan, a boutique hotel in the Midtown building that once housed the Chemists' Club, Nyla will have to appeal to the sort of young moneyed traveler that the hotel hopes to attract, along with the fashion world trendsetters who are ever ready to sneer at any place that does not meet their standards of hipness or exclusivity.

"Basically, it's a lounge, an alcohol environment, and our target is young executives from 25 to 40 years old," said Morris Moinian, the owner of the Dylan and a partner in Nyla, who envisions Nyla as "a place to see and be seen and all that good stuff."

Nyla, surprisingly enough, was conceived in a dentist's chair, said Bobby Ochs, the managing partner of the restaurant. Mr. Ochs has seen the good and the bad of celebrity restaurateuring. With Patrick Swayze, who was just coming off a break-out role in "Dirty Dancing," Mr. Ochs opened Mulholland Drive Cafe on the Upper East Side in 1988, which enjoyed an eight-year run. More recently, Peaches, which he opened in 1998 with Marla Maples Trump as its centerpiece, essentially had the life span of a piece of ripe fruit.

As Mr. Ochs tells it, he was casting about for his next project when his wife's dentist mentioned to her during an exam that his next-door neighbor was Britney Spears's manager. His wife, Carolyn, recounted the conversation to Mr. Ochs. "It was like in the cartoons when a light bulb goes off above your head," he said. "I said, `Bingo!' "

From there, the path to Nyla led Mr. Ochs first to the dentist's neighbor, Larry Rudolph, and then to Ms. Spears's business manager, Bert Padell, who also happens to represent Mr. De Niro's restaurants as well as restaurateurs like Drew Nieporent and Steve Tzolis. Mr. Padell likes the idea of putting stars together with restaurateurs. But, he said, casting is as important in celebrity restaurant ventures as it is in films. Without the right director or restaurateur, the project is doomed.

Written by Eric Asimov, The New York Times
Reported by Dana Bennett
Posted by Ruben