Richard Krause is not what you might expect from a chef at a Riese restaurant. First of all, he's got a pony tail, and second, he comes from California. This clearly is not some fast food maven. On the contrary, Richard Krause is one of the most sought after chefs in the country.

Krause has come a long way to get to the top of the Manhattan restaurant business. He grew up in the Los Angeles of the 60s, about as far as you can get from
Martini's, his elegant 200-seat al fresco restaurant that spills invitingly onto the sidewalks at 53rd St. and 7th Ave.

He fell into cooking by way of a summer job in high school, and ended up apprenticing with Wolfgang Puck, who remains one of the most renowned celebrity chefs in the country. He stuck with Puck for seven years, working at LA's finest celebrity haunts, including Ma Maison, Spago and Chinois on Main, until someone in New York made him an offer he couldn't refuse. He ended up at Batons on 11th Street in Manhattan. From there it was on to Melrose on Barrow Street, a partnership at the Rose Café on lower Fifth, and eventually to Silverado at 19th St. just off Park Ave.

Silverado is where Krause first met Dennis Riese, who had become a Silverado regular. Krause was quick to put out joint venture feelers, and the result was to become Martini's, an experiment that would soon break every rule in the Riese fast food formula.

With Martini's, Riese wanted to create a full-service, white table cloth operation he could really be proud of. "Dennis is not his father or his uncle," confided Krause recently. "They started the company many many years ago, had their own way of doing things, and they were very successful at it. But Dennis, in addition to continuing the work that they had done, wanted to be able to do some restaurants that he would want to go to himself. He wanted something he could enjoy not just because of the bottom line, but because the food, the service and the design -- the whole package -- was truly outstanding."

The concept was to transform the high-profile property between Central Park and Times Square into a pre-theater restaurant and a stylish spot for the business and neighborhood clientele in the west 50s. With all the development in the Times Square neighborhood, Riese felt the time was right for an upscale restaurant catering to the local community -- which until now felt they had to leave the neighborhood to find a suitable place to eat. It was Riese's first attempt to come up with a restaurant not only for tourists, but for New Yorkers. "Riese knows by the book how to run the hundreds of places he owns -- and he doesn't make any mistakes at it," explained Krause. "In fact they do it very well. But what is remarkable is that he was willing to take the financial risk on an endeavor that was completely unlike anything he had done before. He wanted something with a little more sex appeal."

When Krause opened Martini's a little more than three years ago, there were two big questions: how to keep the sidewalk open in a snowstorm, and how to keep busy on off nights in the theaters. The sidewalk problem was solved with triple insulated, windproof plastic and an enormous heating bill, the dark theater days with artfully prepared food and classy service. "We have been going gang busters here since the beginning," says Krause. "It's been a steady solid climb to what has become more than we ever projected. The old tourist-oriented formula is giving way to a new one -- and that's very exciting. We are certainly making as much money here with the new formula as they could have if they put something here with the old formula -- and it's a place that is more fun to be at. Everyone who works here is real proud of it. And for me, it's a true collaboration -- I'm becoming a smarter businessman and they have become more elegant restaurant operators. We're real partners, and we both learn from each other. That's really exciting."

And the name? Martini's is the name of the restaurant in It's a Wonderful Life, which Krause admits to having watched at least 137 times. It's Italian, he says, but not too Italian -- kind of like the food. Ethnic but not too ethnic. In a word, American. Or more accurately, New York. And naturally, they make a mean martini.