Sweet Butter Kitchen's Word-of-Mouth Success

Sweet Butter Kitchen owner Leslie Danelian  celebrated a year in business at the end of 2011, and took a moment to look back on the rapid success of her small Ventura Boulevard restaurant in Sherman Oaks.

 “When I opened, I did not know I was going to be this busy,” Danelian said. “After a year in business, I look at other restaurants and wonder, ‘What’s it like to be in business for 10 years? Are you perfect now?’ ”

Those feelings are understandable because Danelian, though having spent her entire 30-year career in food preparation, had never worked in a restaurant when she decided to open Sweet Butter.

Yet, the café and marketplace is packed daily for lunch and draws late afternoon customers buying baked goods or her “Take and Bake” main dishes, such as macaroni and cheese, meatloaf and tuna noodle casserole.

Danelian admits the rapid growth—from an initial staff of 15 to the current 45—took a toll on the consistency of the cooking and the efficiency of operations. Nonetheless, word-of-mouth raves created a buzz for the restaurant, which drew customers from far afield of Sherman Oaks.

“Folks came in expecting, I don’t know, a golden egg for breakfast, but it’s just food,” Danelian said.

Yet, it’s food that diners crave, like her Brussels sprouts salad, croque monsieur, fleur de sel caramel brownies and homemade-style soups.

Behind it all is Danelian's passion for food, which she had even as a child cooking with her Suzy Homemaker oven. Although she graduated from USC with a degree in English literature and intended to be a writer, her first job after college was at Montana Mercantile, a cookware store that also had a cooking school.

She began catering at the same time, and worked in food styling at a photography studio for a recipe card company.

“We would get there really early in the morning and make about 30 different items from beef stew to salad to brownies,” she said. “It was like power cooking.”

Later, she cooked daily meals for a family for more than a year, experimenting with exotic and difficult recipes.

“I could make anything I wanted,” she said. “It was like my own cooking school.”

Danelian’s varied food background also includes baking for Mary’s Lamb, a former farmhouse restaurant in Sherman Oaks; running her own catering business, Sweet Somethings; and serving as a consultant on two television food shows, including Napa Style with famed chef Michael Chiarello.

Opening Sweet Butter Kitchen occurred simply because Danelian tired of seeing for three years an empty, graffitied space on Ventura Boulevard with a sign reading “restaurant opening soon.” She came up with her idea for the space, which was actually two separate commercial areas with a walkway in between. She made one side the kitchen and the other a marketplace with dining tables in the alleyway converted into a dining patio. More tables line the Ventura Boulevard sidewalk and around the corner.

Danelian’s husband, Richard Berge, takes care of the business and accounting side of the restaurant while she oversees the food in a setting that combines a French atmosphere with a home-cooking feel.

“It’s a pretty simple equation,” Danelian said. “I don’t skimp on the quality of ingredients. Just use the best ingredients; that’s the key to anything that tastes good. If you’ve got a good tomato on good bread, you’ll have an amazing sandwich; that’s my philosophy.”

Sweet Butter Kitchen, 13824 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; 818-788-2832.