Phil Rosenthal’s Happy Place… Comes With Fries

Since Phil Rosenthal began traveling the planet a decade ago to shoot his food travel shows, first for PBS and now for Netflix, his own Los Angeles neighborhood has begun to feel like everywhere else in the world. Affluent Larchmont Village’s idiosyncratic local mom-and-pop retailers are being replaced by global chains like Aesop and Diptyque.

“This has been a wonderful kind of Mayberry, and it’s losing its character,” he says on a recent stroll along Larchmont Boulevard, a short distance from his longtime home in Hancock Park, a Mayberry where the net worth of the neighbors is often eight figures. Rosenthal, whose adult children still live nearby, has decided to do something about it by opening a new diner along the stretch — named Max & Helen’s, after his late parents. “I’m doing it for the community, but it’s also selfish that I’m building this thing. I’m going to be here every single day that I’m in Los Angeles.”

Adds Rosenthal: “I’m not here to make money. I’d like to not lose money. But this is just an act of love for where I live.”

So, why a diner? “They’re disappearing all over America, and they’re small-D democratic,” he explains, “for the rich or poor, young or old — everyone.”

He can undertake such a passion project because Rosenthal himself is a notably rich man, having earned a fortune as the creator and showrunner of the long-syndicated sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which topped Nielsen ratings on CBS over nine seasons starting in 1996. His exact net worth is unknown, but according to the most recent available public records, he’s comfortable enough to have contributed to his family’s philanthropic foundation to the tune of tens of millions of dollars over the years.

Rosenthal, 65, charts his life by the diners where he’s been a regular, from his childhood in New York’s Rockland County to attending Hofstra University to his stint as a struggling actor in Manhattan to his move to Los Angeles, where he found community with on-the-make TV scribes at the since-shuttered Victor’s in Hollywood: “Us sitcom writers would just sit there for hours.” He’s opening Max & Helen’s with lauded L.A. chef Nancy Silverton, whose nearby Mozza he invested in years ago. (Her team has long overseen the wood-fired pizza oven at his home’s storied, star-studded Sunday movie nights, a key Hancock Park screening outpost of the so-called “Bel-Air Circuit,”which sees first-run films sent to VIP residences from the majorstudios.)

“I have no diner nostalgia in my blood,” Silverton says. “I grew up on the West Coast, and we have coffee shops. But he had a vision.” This included items like Rosenthal’s equivalent of a Proustian madeleine: the open-faced turkey sandwich. “The idea is to honor these dishes,” she adds. “So, the gravy is homemade, the turkey breast will be brined and roasted and glazed in the way I’d do if it were at my other restaurants.” Additional dishes will range from a club sandwich featuring Japanese milk bread to a smoked salmon platter boasting sesame bagels sourced from cult Eastside phenom Courage.

For Rosenthal, a haimish service style — that’s Yiddish for cozily unpretentious — is crucial to the venture. He says another acclaimed chef pal, Thomas Keller, has advised him that patrons need to feel like a regular even if it’s their first time in, which aligns with his own view: “Warmth is the through line of everything I do, whether it’s Raymond or the travel shows or this diner.” (Keller consulted on James L. Brooks’ 2004 film Spanglish, in which Rosenthal — performing in a role as a sous chef — draped his hand towel over his shoulder. Keller promptly intervened, explaining, “We’re not in a diner.”)

Rosenthal’s Somebody Feed Phil is now one of Netflix’s longest-running originals. It’s led to an ongoing international live touring schedule in which he has sold out such venues as the 2,200-seat London Palladium for what are essentially kibbitz sessions. (“It’s a surreal dream.”) Yet the series is perennially on the bubble. Rosenthal observes that the streamer’s subscriber acquisition and retention strategy favors new shows. “Every year we don’t know if we’re getting picked up or not,” he says. “The show doesn’t do the numbers that Squid Game does. We are this anomaly. We have a very loyal and dedicated fan base — and we are cheap.” Netflix declined to comment on the show’s future.

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Max & Helen’s is chiefly inspired by Maine’s Palace Diner, which is widely noted for its elevation of comfort-food staples. Rosenthal, who featured it in an episode of Somebody Feed Phil, says, “I went in and said to myself, ‘We need this in my neighborhood.’ “

He believes “the appeal of diners is that it’s the way we want to eat every day. Simple, not fancy. It’s like that scene in Ratatouille where the critic flashes back to his childhood.” Unsurprisingly, Rosenthal’s own ideal last meal “would be a return to childhood favorites: the hot dog, the hamburger, the french fries, the roast chicken and chocolate of every kind. Then I would finish with a bowl of my mom’s matzo ball soup.” (For his shiva — the traditional Jewish mourning period after the burial — he suggests a food festival: “I’m putting it on record here.”)

Over the past couple of decades, Rosenthal has invested in more than two dozen Los Angeles-area restaurants, many of them fine-dining establishments, including the three-Michelin-starred Providence in Hancock Park. Not as a business play — although he made a nice return on Umami Burger — but as an arts patron: “I see it as creating the world I want to live in.” That said, he’ll stop visiting if he’s disappointed in the execution. “I want to be happy when I eat.” Or if the music is too loud: “That’s my pet peeve.”

Rosenthal’s production company is called Where’s Lunch. “That’s the writers’ main preoccupation,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s the only sunshine coming in the room. I believe the army travels on its stomach. Craft service, too. Good food — like cinnamon rolls flown in from Ann Sather in Chicago — goes a long way.”

Rosenthal’s frequent onscreen excitability has become a divisive trademark. He’s aware of his polarizing effect, akin to cilantro. What matters to him isn’t that he’s universally liked but that he’s perceived as authentic.

“Kids respond to me because I’m some 5-year-old that never grew up,” he explains. “I get DMs from people of their children imitating me when they eat: big eyes, dancing, yippee. Which is gratifying to me. My wife says that traveling with me is like traveling with a Muppet because of the reaction that I get. I feel sometimes like a goodwill ambassador.” He’s insistent, though, that it’s not an act, just a specific one: “You’re seeing the real me, maybe on my birthday, getting exactly what I always dreamedofgetting.”

Rosenthal’s daughter, Lily, explains that “he’s the perfect person for this level of fame — for nice people to come up to him every day and say, ‘We’re going to Portugal because of you.’ Nothing makes him happier. That level of gratitude he had earlier in life, from the success of Raymond, continues now.”

Off-camera, Rosenthal’s characteristic ebullience is more cerebral than clownish. Over lunch at Great White, a few doors up Larchmont from the diner, he carefully deconstructs and casually assesses his plate of crispy chicken wings in a disquisition about its dry-brining technique, deboning method and yuzu koshoglaze.

Rosenthal sees Larry David as a kindred spirit in the rare journey from behind-the-camera figure to onscreen personality. He has cameoed twice on Curb Your Enthusiasm. “We both carried over much of our sensibility from our previous shows,” he says, musing that his own self-starring follow-ups might be called Why Curb Your Enthusiasm? “We’re both servicing our personalities.”

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After nine seasons and 210 episodes, Rosenthal thought Raymond had run its course. But he didn’t want to lose his tight-knit writers room. So, he pitched CBS on a spinoff in which the brother played by Brad Garrett moves to Pennsylvania to be closer to his wife’s family. (Rosenthal’s own wife, Monica Horan, played Garrett’s spouse.) “It laid out really well,” Rosenthal recalls. “We saw miles of potential. CBS said, ‘Everyone in the cast is over 40.’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, everyone in your audience is over 80, so what’s the problem?’ ‘We’re trying to get younger.’ ”

Offered only a pilot, Rosenthal passed. “The business changed drastically in the years we were doing Raymond, and we were thrust into a world that didn’t want that type of show anymore.” He adds, “My agents told me: ‘They like you. They just want you to be more hip and edgy.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ve got the right guy. I’m Mr. Hip-and-Edgy.’ “

Years passed. Rosenthal couldn’t get pilots picked up, even when he collaborated with younger people: “I thought that would help. No.” He wrote a book, You’re Lucky You’re Funny: How Life Becomes a Sitcom. He made a documentary, Exporting Raymond, about his experience adapting his hit for Russian television.

Then he sold the first iteration of his travel show, I’ll Have What Phil’s Having, to PBS. “I thought on PBS I would be hip and edgy,” he explains. “The pitch was, ‘I’m exactly like Anthony Bourdain if he was afraid of everything.’ ” This is and isn’t a joke. “I’m not getting a tattoo on my chest by drunken Borneo tribesmen in the jungle. I’m not cool in any way.”

Bourdain isn’t the only salient contrast. “Rick Steves is wonderful — and completely different from me,” he says. “He’s a serious-minded travel expert. I’m a tourist.” Such a self-designation, embarrassing to some, is key for Rosenthal: “I want to be an educated tourist, and the more I travel, the more I am. The point of Somebody Feed Phil isn’t that somebody feeds me. It’s that somebody feeds you. I want you to see that if that guy can do this, maybe you can, too.”

Rosenthal’s origin story for his travel series was a conversation years earlier with his star Ray Romano about vacation plans during the Raymond hiatus between the first and second season. “He said he was going to the Jersey Shore,” Rosenthal remembers. “I asked if he’d ever been to Europe. He said he hadn’t been. I said, ‘Why not?’ He goes, ‘I’m not really interested in different.’ ” This attitude was Rosenthal’s inspiration for a subsequent Raymond episode in which the family traveled to Italy. “The best thing about doing that episode was I saw Ray Romano get it. Right there and then, I thought, ‘What if I could do this for otherpeople?’ “

Romano tells THR that these days when the pair are out to dinner, his former showrunner is the one receiving the selfie requests. “The audience has fallen in love with this Joe Schmo everyman who introduces them to the best food while highlighting the sweet caring people from whatever country he’s in,” the actor explains. “A lot of these fans don’t even know he created Everybody Loves Raymond.” To him, Rosenthal’s gift is “magically making people feel a common bond with each other.”

Rosenthal’s own zealousness for travel was sealed when he was 23 on his inaugural trip to Europe. “First stop, Paris,” he recalls. “Oh, my God. Head blown off. I had no money. Just a baguette and cheese in the park. It’s spectacular. I felt like King Louis! But the most important part was when I went back home to Washington Heights. The basis for comparison, the change of perspective — how I thought about the light and the trees and the layout of the streets. Travel is the most mind-expanding thing we can do in life.”

Now, after so much travel, from Saigon and Santiago to Marrakesh and Montreal, one of his chief takeaways is that just about everyone shares his own desire for “a good cup of coffee in the morning and a nice place to gather. That’s what creating Max & Helen’s is about.”

This story appeared in the Sept. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.