The Last Days of Dominique’s
Though its last rites were pronounced by a final bang of the auctioneer’s hammer on August 27, 1994, Dominique’s restaurant died with a whimper. Out, in the satisfied hands of auction-goers, went the autographed photographs of presidents, celebrities, and other famous folk, from Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to Warren Beatty and Frank Sinatra. Out, from the 30-foot-high Garden Room, went the founder’s mounted hunting trophies — an elk from Montana, a jackrabbit from France, a wild boar from Tennessee. And out, finally, went the ghost of Dominique D’Ermo, which had been haunting the restaurant at Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th Street, N.W., ever since the former owner had sold the place in 1987.
In its time, Dominique’s was, as Washington restaurants go, as good a place to see — and to be seen — as any. For starters, there was Dominique himself (“the famous Dominique,” he once joked to a reporter), whose life was the stuff of legend: onetime French resistance-fighter turned restaurateur-entrepreneur extraordinaire, a man who prided himself on his chickens raised on classical music and whose mug adorned a line of pricey canned soups. Then there were the celebrity patrons, the likes of Robert Redford and Tony Bennett and Ted Koppel and Elizabeth Taylor, who kept the restaurant filled with well-dressed gawkers and elbow-brushers-in-waiting. And, of course, there was the culinary exotica — alligator, buffalo, camel, hippopotamus, lion, llama, mountain goat, ostrich, rattlesnake — that had brought Dominique’s some measure of fame extending far beyond the nation’s capital.
By 1994, however, Dominique’s had not actually been Dominique’s for a long time. D’Ermo had sold out seven years earlier, while the going was good, and the restaurant’s new proprietor, Herb Ezrin, was soon pouring red ink the way D’Ermo had once poured Beaujolais. In 1991 Ezrin had kept the restaurant’s creditors in line by putting Dominique’s in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and the business gasped along on life-support for three more miserable years, until the auctioneer came along to liquidate what little was left.
All the while, D’Ermo watched from a distance, helpless to rescue the restaurant — and reputation — that he had sold for a cool $3.3 million or so in cash. He’d used some of the proceeds to buy the Ecco Café in Old Town Alexandria, but most people outside of the business still thought of Dominique’s as his, and the restaurant’s interior did nothing to disabuse them of the notion. His name was damned near everywhere, scrawled in felt-tip pen across most of the framed photographs, even fired into the dinner plates. And that was he, smiling with his staff in the large color portrait mounted above the fireplace mantel, saying, “Au revoir et merci.”
The story of Dominique’s demise is part of the story of Washington’s rapid slide from boom town to bust town in the late 1980s. It was an era when the city’s business landscape was littered with the casualties of good times gone bad, and bankruptcy lawyers made out like bandits, steering their clients through the limbolands of reorganization and liquidation. Giants like Garfinckel’s, Erol’s Video, Raleigh’s, and Dart Drug crumbled. Others, like Dominique’s, expertly played the game of the long goodbye.
It is also the story of an ex-lawyer who hoped to make it big as a restaurateur but couldn’t, and then used his old skills to thwart Dominique’s creditors and stick it to his partners in a seemingly endless chess game played out in the courts.
“It’s a very sad ending,” D’Ermo told a reporter for the Washington Post just a few days before the last dinner at Dominique’s. “But I’m relieved that my name will no longer be involved with financial disaster.”
Dominique’s restaurant could never have become hot were it not for its flamboyant founder. Dominique D’Ermo’s life story, or at least part of it, was made for the movies. During World War II, at the age of 15, he’d dropped out of school to join Combat, the largest non-Communist resistance group in France, and help smuggle Jews into Spain. Two years later he was captured by the Nazis, jailed at Nantua, and sentenced to death for his activities in occupied France. Toward the end of the war he was freed by a fluke — one of his captors, whose father had known D’Ermo’s father, arranged for a friendly judge to find him innocent. A few years later he made his way to the United States with just $10 in his pocket and the dream of running his own restaurant.
By 1972 D’Ermo was ready to make his dream come true. He gave up his job as a vice president of Princess Hotels International, bought Jacqueline’s, a little restaurant just three blocks from the White House, and renamed it Dominique’s. One night Willie Morris, the well-known writer for Harper’s magazine and a guest columnist for the Washington Star, dropped in for dinner. D’Ermo brought a bottle of Courvoisier to the table, sat down, and loosed stories of the French resistance on his guest. A few days later, in his column for the Star, Morris wrote: “Do you remember La Belle Aurore in ‘Casablanca,’ where Bogart and Bergman used to hang out and drink champagne and listen to Sam play the song, back in those days before the Germans came to Paris? I’ve found my La Belle Aurore . . . a joyous little place with Impressionists on the walls and food and wine good enough to bring your favorite girl and say to her, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’”
Dominique’s was a hit, and in 1973 D’Ermo moved his restaurant into much larger quarters across the street. Soon he discovered that his patrons — and, more important, the press — were suckers for virtually any dish that would cause a jaw to drop well before the first bite. You name it, Dominique would serve it. Mark Russell, Washington’s humorist-in-residence, once memorialized D’Ermo by joking that he would strangle Bambi at your table if he thought it would sell.
“To be an in restaurant is not the most difficult thing,” D’Ermo once told a reporter. “The trick, my friend, is to stay in.”
But after 15 years of running the show, D’Ermo apparently decided that it was a good time to cash out. On July 21, 1987, D’Ermo sold his flagship restaurant for an undisclosed sum to a corporation in which he held two percent of the shares and the title of president. News accounts at the time of the sale suggested that D’Ermo had merely taken in some new partners to run the restaurant so that he could turn his attention away from the kitchen and toward bigger and better things. The stories identified the partners as Henri Prati, a well-known Washington restaurateur and longtime friend of D’Ermo’s, and Frederick M. Lacey, Jr., a local real estate investor.
In fact, though, D’Ermo was gone for good, without so much as a seat on the board of directors of Dominique Restaurants, Inc. Prati, who along with his brothers Al and Ermanno had owned and operated several restaurants in the Washington area — including Aldo’s, Channel House, and the Rotunda — held 29 percent of the shares. Lacey, a wheeler-dealer who’d been shopping around for a good place to park some of his money, held 30 percent.
Donald Flynn, a certified public accountant in Alexandria who’d brought Lacey into the venture, took his finder’s fee in the form of a 10 percent stake in the company. Flynn recalls looking at a well-established restaurant with a top name and very attractive lease that was bringing in more than $4 million a year. “It sounded to me like a golden deal,” he says. “It was a very profitable business: It was throwing off nearly $l million a year, and I saw [profits of] $300,000 to $400,000 after debt service.”
News accounts at the time, however, contained no mention of Sandra Ezrin, who held the remaining 29 percent of the shares in Dominique Restaurants, Inc. (a stake equal to Prati’s), or of her husband, Herbert S. Ezrin. But it was Herb Ezrin who’d put the whole deal together and had asked Flynn if he could find someone of “significant net worth” to guarantee the bank loan that he needed to buy the restaurant from D’Ermo. “His ownership was tucked behind his wife,” a lawyer familiar with the events puts it. “He was the guy in charge.”
As a simple matter of public relations, it was a good idea — and probably an altogether intentional one — to keep Ezrin’s role in the company under wraps. In time, Ezrin would be identified in newspaper and magazine stories as the proprietor of Dominique’s, but save for fleeting references to him as a “former Maryland lawyer,” there was nothing to suggest that his past was anything but honorable, or that his exit from the legal profession wasn’t a matter of choice.
Herb Ezrin’s meteoric descent from being “Mr. Everything to Everybody,” as his attorney once described him, was, even to his friends and former partners, downright inexplicable. “This was not just the average Tom, Dick, or Harry,” a friend would later tell the Washington Post. “Herb was a pillar in the community . . . a rock, a person of absolute integrity.”
A native Washingtonian who’d graduated third in his class from Eastern High School in 1956, Ezrin had become a certified public accountant only to give it up for what he once described as “the glamour of practicing law.” He attended American University, returned for law school and, after graduating in 1966, worked for a few years at a downtown firm. Then he and Ronald West went into business together as tax lawyers , and in 1972 they diversified into litigation and real estate law by joining forces with several other lawyers, including Laurence Levitan, who’s now a state senator, and Paul Weinstein, who’s now a Circuit Court judge.
Levitan Ezrin West & Kerxton grew to be one of the largest law firms in Montgomery County, but it disbanded in late 1984 when the partners reached loggerheads over financial matters. After the split, Ezrin, who’d been the firm’s managing partner, continued to manage various of the firm’s escrow and investment accounts. He was by all accounts an exceedingly skilled lawyer.
The following year, in reviewing the settlement documents from the sale of some property they’d owned, Ezrin’s former partners noticed a $10,000 check to him that bore the vague notation, “commission.” It was the first thread that led to the discovery of Ezrin’s secret life as an embezzler.
His financial self-appropriations had started in 1982 and continued through 1985. All along, Ezrin said, he intended to repay the more than $210,000 he’d “advanced” himself. “I did not steal it,” he insisted to a reporter for the Washington Post.”l had kept a record of it, was prepared to pay it back, and had started the process of paying it back when I alerted them to it. . . . In my opinion, nobody was harmed, and if there’s any victim, the victim is me.”
The law did not agree. According to prosecutors, Ezrin, whose annual income from the firm was about $150,000, used the money — which he later repaid — to pay credit card, telephone, and utility bills, and to buy, among other things, a pool table for his $745,000 home in Potomac. He ultimately pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of misappropriation and conversion of partnership funds, drew a 90-day sentence in the Montgomery County Detention Center, and was suspended from the practice of law.
Ezrin attributed his aberrant behavior to “a psychological problem.” The problem, as his lawyer described it, was that Ezrin came to resent his partners for failing to adequately reward him for the time and effort he put into managing the firm and its investments. In other words, since they didn’t pay him enough, he paid himself.
“If anyone would have asked which one of my partners would have ever been in this type of a situation,” one of his former colleagues at the firm later recalled, “Herb Ezrin would have been at the bottom of the list.”
At the time Ezrin’s group acquired Dominique’s in 1987, things were looking good. The restaurant’s franchise seemed as secure as any in Washington, and D’Ermo’s varied business pursuits kept his name — and the restaurant’s — in the news.
There were “Dominique’s Golden Musical Chickens,” raised on a chemical-free diet at D’Ermo’s 200-acre farm in Chestertown, Maryland, to the strains of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and such. (“The more she’s awake, the more she eats,” he once explained. “The more she eats, the more she weighs.”) There were his “original recipe” canned soups and his cookbooks (four, with a fifth in the works) and his column for an in-flight airline magazine. There was the other Dominique’s restaurant in Miami Beach, and there would be talk of yet others in Key West, West Palm Beach, and even Moscow (with the food flown in from France on Aeroflot). D’Ermo even made a surprise appearance on CBS’s “Nightwatch” in May 1987 to disclose his role in a plot to kill Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyons,” as the former S.S. lieutenant was awaiting trial nearly four years after his return to France from Bolivia. Several months afterward Robert Keith Gray, the veteran Washington public relations man, acquired the film rights to D’Ermo’s life story.
Dominique was the master of knowing how to keep himself — and his restaurant — hot. But this was something that Ezrin could not do. Ezrin was intense but not charismatic; it was impossible to imagine him, for instance, in the role of roving raconteur that D’Ermo so happily played. “Herb Ezrin,” as one acquaintance bluntly puts it, “had no personality to run a restaurant.”
Nonetheless, the restaurant’s gross revenues continued to climb for the first couple of years, hitting $5 million in 1989. But the profits that Flynn and Lacey had envisioned at the outset failed to materialize. The issue of where all the money was going would ultimately lead Flynn and Lacey to question why they had gotten involved with Ezrin in the first place and to conclude, in Flynn’s words, that the restaurant was being “mismanaged out of business.”
By the time Washington’s economy hit rock-bottom in 1990 and 1991, Dominique’s was no longer in — it had become more of a curiosity piece than anything else, for there were far grander and trendier places to dine. In the past 20 years Washington had gone from being a culinary wasteland to being one of the finest restaurant cities in the country. Competition among Washington’s expense-account restaurants was fierce, and every place needed an edge to stand out. Without D’Ermo, Dominique’s descended into the realm of a novelty restaurant — practically a tourist joint.
As Dominique’s sunk deeper and deeper into the hole, Ezrin began to regress into old habits: financial skullduggery. As one lawyer familiar with the story puts it, Ezrin fell prey to the dangerous temptation of “borrowing money from the taxing authorities” — failing to pay sales, payroll, and other taxes. Where D’Ermo always managed to focus on the what if and the how, Ezrin was fixated on the why and the if only. D’Ermo ruled from the gut, making instinctive decisions on the spot. Ezrin, on the other hand, analyzed and agonized. Why wasn’t Dominique’s drawing the way it used to? If only he could keep the creditors from pounding on the doors long enough to figure out how to reverse the restaurant’s fortunes.
From the day in August 1991 that Ezrin, his brother Allen, and the restaurant’s accountant initiated involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings against Dominique Restaurants, Inc., Ezrin would try to portray the restaurant’s financial troubles as nothing out of the ordinary. Hard economic times were on his side: Harvey’s, Le Pavillon, the McPherson Grill, and scores of lesser-known establishments, after all, had either closed their doors for good or closed and reopened as different establishments. In talking with reporters about Dominique’s problems, Ezrin always played variations on the same theme: the recession and the accompanying slowdown in tourism. The outbreak of the Persian Gulf war and the accompanying slowdown in tourism. The harsh winter of 1993-94 and the accompanying slowdown in tourism. “I’m looking for a good fall,” Ezrin told a reporter for the Washington Times in 1991, “because I’ve really got everything going for me.”
As it turned out, that was far from the truth: The restaurant’s financial situation was nothing short of grim. In an accounting filed with the bankruptcy court on November 5, 1991, Dominique Restaurants, Inc., showed total assets of $106,966, including about $17,000 in four bank accounts, against total liabilities of nearly $4.5 million. Of the creditors holding secured claims, the biggest by far was Sovran Bank, with $2.8 million still owed on the loan that had allowed Ezrin and his partners to buy the restaurant four years earlier. Of the creditors holding unsecured priority claims, the biggest were the District of Columbia’s Government Finance Department, owed $408,000 in back sales and withholding taxes, and the Internal Revenue Service, owed $378,000 in back payroll taxes.
As the bankruptcy case wore on, however, the restaurant’s landlord, Pepco, became the most tenacious creditor of all. It mounted eviction proceedings against Dominique’s, only to have them vacated by the bankruptcy judge. It accused Ezrin of endangering the building’s other tenants by failing to have the restaurant’s venting systems properly serviced. And it repeatedly complained to the court that the restaurant’s rent checks were bouncing.
Soon, Sovran was trying to get its hands on the restaurant’s books, which were in Ezrin’s possession. In a motion to compel the speedy production of various financial documents, lawyers for the bank argued that “there are indications that the debtor’s business is being mismanaged and that assets of the estate are in danger of being dissipated or misappropriated.” In addition, they said, “Sovran is concerned that estate assets may be being used to pay excessive management fees.”
The bank wasn’t alone. Flynn, for one, says that Ezrin and Prati had been paying themselves “excessive” compensation — to the tune of $300,000 to $400,000 a year between them. “There was a limitation on the amount of compensation they were supposed to take,” Flynn says. “They ignored that provision.”
All the while, Ezrin did his best, with the help of PR maven Charlie Brotman (another of the restaurant’s creditors), to carry on in D’Ermo’s grandstanding tradition. A month before the 1992 presidential election, Dominique’s added “Perot Waffles” to its dessert menu — “strictly,” Ezrin said, “for those diners who are dissatisfied with the slate of desserts on other menus.” A few months later, when the Clinton administration arrived in Washington, Ezrin introduced such specials as Fried Clinton Catfish (“Ozark fresh”) and Chicken Fried Steak (“just like mama’s”) and allowed that he might add some Arkansas wines to the wine list. There were free “turkey carving clinics” before Thanksgiving. And there was, of course, the restaurant’s annual race to commemorate the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, which D’Ermo had inaugurated in 1975 at Brotman’s urging.
Ezrin’s most outrageous maneuver, though, came in early 1993,when Dominique Restaurants, Inc., obtained the bankruptcy court’s permission to sell all of its noncash assets to another company, Twentieth & Penn, Inc., as part of a deal in which it paid roughly $252,000 in back taxes to the District of Columbia. The IRS and a slew of other creditors were left holding the bag as the assetless company moved into Chapter 7 bankruptcy on June 4,1993.
Ezrin, his pursuers would soon learn, was the new company’s president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, general manager, owner, and sole director. “He basically managed to sell the restaurant to himself,” a lawyer involved in the proceedings recalls. At the same time, Ezrin managed to strike a deal with NationsBank (which had gobbled up Sovran) that cleared him and his wife — but not Prati and Lacey, who, along with their wives, had signed the promissory note — of responsibility for the big bank loan. “Mr. Ezrin has negotiated a deal which gets him off the hook for nearly $3 million,” their lawyers argued in court filings. “The proposed sale is nothing more than a bailout of Mr. Ezrin’s personal guarantee on the $3 million obligation at the expense of the unsecured creditors and petitioners Prati and Lacey.”
But the bankruptcy judge threw out the motion, ruling that they’d waited too long to file their motion to stop the sale of Dominique’s to Ezrin’s new company. “There is friction between the parties,” Ezrin told a reporter for the Washington Post at the time. “I’m sure they are upset about it.” As for keeping Dominique’s in business, he said, “I think we will not have any problems at all.”
But that was just another of Ezrin’s lines. By August 17, Pepco was back in court with another motion to evict, and on November 30, a team of U.S. Marshals visited the restaurant to take an inventory and schedule the eviction.
The next day, Ezrin and two associates filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition against his own company under Chapter 11, staying the eviction. It was déjà vu in more ways than one. He was acting again as his own lawyer, attaching “pro se” to his name in the filings and generally plotting the legal strategy by which he would try to keep the restaurant’s gaggle of creditors at bay. What’s more, this was the second time that he’d attempted to force his own company into Chapter 11 as a defensive maneuver, and amazingly, it would not be the last.
Ezrin just couldn’t let go. “l’d have dropped it two or three years before he did,” Brotman, who thinks of Ezrin as a friend, says. “l never saw a guy work so hard, work so many hours. But it just never materialized.”
Others, including Flynn, have a darker view. “They just bled it,” he says. “It’s a shame to see such a beautiful restaurant like that go down the tubes. But I think Ezrin had it in mind all along. I feel that he set out with that design.”
These days, Ezrin apparently has a don’t-call-me-l’ll-call-you relationship with friends and former associates, including Brotman. He has an unpublished telephone number, and Regardie’s was unable to reach him despite repeated attempts. Moreover, the lawyer who represented Dominique’s through most of the bankruptcy proceedings declined to talk with Regardie’s. “His preference,” Brotman says of Ezrin, “is not to keep it alive.”
It’s a lesson, ironically, that came too late. Dominique’s Famous French Restaurant limped along through much of 1994 in Chapter 11 when Ezrin was finally forced to call it quits.
On April 19 of last year, S. Martin Teel, Jr., the U.S. Bankruptcy Judge for the District of Columbia, dismissed Ezrin’s second Chapter 11 petition, ruling that it had been filed in bad faith, and ordered that neither he nor his company could file another Chapter 11 petition for a period of one year without the court’s permission.
In a last-gasp effort to stave off eviction, however, Ezrin appeared in D.C. Superior Court at approximately 1:20 p.m. on June 29, 1994, with yet another involuntary Chapter 11 petition, this one signed by three friendly creditors with relatively puny claims. A little more than three weeks later, Teel, who’d clearly run out of patience, set aside the petition and allowed Pepco to proceed with eviction.
The final meal came on August 10, 1994, just one week before a hungry crowd would jam into Dominique’s one last time — not to eat its famous delicacies, but to pick over its remains.
Bill Hogan