Power lunch: restaurant entrepreneurs: fancy fixings for a jeans-plus crowd.

• Author: Lavrakas, Dimitra
• Position: This Month's Featured Eateries

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Maybe the secret to being a successful restaurant entrepreneur is not being there.

Chef Al Levinsohn, owner of the Kincaid Grill and City Diner, and a familiar weekly host on the Wednesday morning KTUU-TV Channel 2 show "What's Cooking," was nowhere to be found for two weeks this fall. But he was busy, from a trip to Germany to an investigatory jaunt to California restaurants; he was out looking to see what the rest of the world was doing with its food.

Further north, Kathy Lavelle, of Lavelle's Bistro in Fairbanks, was also bustling around, but her husband, Frank, was happy to relate the story of the vision they had for their restaurant and how it changed.

"We had a banquet hall around the corner from a new hotel, and the developer came by and said he needed a classy restaurant," he said. "But we'd been there, done that, and no way."

In between catering gigs, to keep the staff occupied, the pair started Wine on Wednesdays, to introduce vintages to Fairbanksians who might never get a chance to try them.

"It was also a lab to test new recipes on unsuspecting guests," he said.

It was wildly successful, Lavelle said.

So much so they approached the developer and took his offer, and mounted a venue offering extensive appetizers--a tapas kind of place.

"Cafe Alex didn't make it," Lavelle said. So they did a quick scramble and offered American bistro food instead. "Meatloaf to rack of lamb--I call it just good food. There's daily specials that run from Ethiopian to Asian"

And that good food is paired with a 3,000-bottle wine cellar. Some of the newer additions come northward because of the fires in California where the wine is, understandably, not selling well.

This leads to another reason Kathy...