Photograph by George Sakkestad

Bruce and Diane Ogilvie are frequently seen dining at "their" table at Pigalle restaurant in Los Gatos.




Pigalle adds French flavor to Los Gatos dining scene

By Suzanne Cristallo

Pigalle is a cozy, dimly lit French restaurant in Los Gatos. Painted walls depict the shops and cobbled streets of the Paris Left Bank. A back room is a grotto of faux cellar stones. Food is classic: lamb, fowl, beef and seafood--sautéed, roasted, poached and smoked. There's paté and crab cakes, escargots and caviar, truffles, soufflés, creme and sorbet. And chef Ignacio Peña makes it all sing.

Sometimes it happens that the individuals who create unique restaurants like Pigalle overshadow the vivacity of their sauces. Diane Ogilvie is such a person. She has the tang of anchovy, the tenacity of honey and the independence of a French omelet. While Pigalle has been around for 29 years, Ogilvie claimed 80 this month.

"For an old lady, I've got to stop this," she exclaims breathlessly. "This" amounts to owning and managing Pigalle plus ownership of two other Los Gatos eateries: The Cats and La Strada. She also is winding up the tortuous preliminaries to building a hotel complex on E. Main Street that some want to call Bella Diane. But stop is not a word she cottons to, following eight decades of movement.

Ogilvie is a familiar sight in Vasona Lake County Park. Several times a week, her battered 10-speed can be seen along the paths, carrying her on 25-mile stints at racing speed, her pure white ponytail streaming behind her. Travelers on Highway 17 might spot her low in the driver's seat of a dented pick-up truck, its bed spewing cracked corn for the peacocks she keeps at her 30-acre homestead on the hill.

It was at Vasona a few of weeks ago that 60 friends waylaid her on the bike path with balloons and banners, barbecued beef and ballyhoo--not to mention a new mountain bike--to celebrate her 80th birthday. "I still want to be the fastest biker," she sighs, her pale blue eyes glinting.

She didn't start out to be a restaurateur. In fact, it was her singing voice that propelled her along a journey that started in her hometown of Alameda.

"I was four when I first sang," she recalls. "It was at my mother's funeral, and it was something about angels." She kept singing, through the trauma of her father's alcoholism, the loneliness of boarding with relatives who resented her, the death of her stepmother and the responsibility of running the house for her father and brother at age 12.

She dropped out of high school and found her way to Hollywood and, one night, to the Palladium dance hall. "There I saw this gorgeous thing," she laughs. It was Bruce Ogilvie, a student at the time. They later married, and while Bruce furthered his studies in London--watching over their two children who were born there--Diane sang gigs all over Europe, from Les Carroles in Paris to Goman's Gay '90s in San Francisco. Eventually, she sang at The Cats, a restaurant she would later buy from Tony Crawley, also a singer and half of the duet the two formed called "T and A."

All the while, husband Bruce continued his graduate studies, taught at San Jose State University and eventually developed his own practice of sports psychology. "Bruce has always let me be me," she marvels. "It takes a strong man to do that."

It's the "being me" aspect of her life she hopes to encourage in other women. She is writing a book that will be in every room of her new hotel. In it, she points out that nothing in life is handed out. "You have to be a risk-taker and owe money," she says of finding success by living on the edge. "A woman can do whatever a man can do. Just do it yourself," she advises.

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Pigalle Restaurant Francais, 27 N. Santa Cruz Ave., Los Gatos. Open for lunch and dinner Mon.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Brunch Sun. 10 a.m. Dinner until 9:30 p.m. 395-7924.

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