Sitting around a table at one of their Beverly Hills restaurants one recent morning before the lunch rush, the four Drago brothers were in a great spot to illustrate the family’s surprisingly big — and growing — fine-dining enterprise.

Besides Enoteca Drago, the restaurant they were sitting in, there’s another Drago restaurant two doors away, Il Pastaio Ristorante. A block down on Canon Drive is a third Drago restaurant, which opened in January. There are two more in Beverly Hills, a new one in downtown Los Angeles and five more in Los Angeles County.

Add them up, and the Dragos own 11 restaurants — more than any other locally based, fine-dining group. (Wolfgang Puck has eight fine-dining restaurants and Joachim Splichal has seven, not counting their quick-serve locations and museum concessions.)

Indeed, the brothers Celestino, Calogero, Tanino and Giacomino Drago, who range in age from 51 to 36 emigrated from Italy seemingly with a genetic drive to open and operate L.A. eateries.

“I knew from Day One why we were here,” said Celestino. “The reason was to really make something out of this business.”

Since Celestino, the oldest and best known of the four brothers, opened his first restaurant in Beverly Hills 24 years ago, the brothers have opened numerous locations, closed a few, and changed some. Except for one Japanese restaurant, all are Italian. However, each is a bit different from the others in menu and mood.

“To me, to open another restaurant exactly the same would not give me pleasure,” said Celestino. “I always want to try new things. My kitchen, I want it to be like a classroom.”

Between sips of cappuccinos, playful ribbing, and rapid-fire bursts of Italian, the brothers talked about another oddity of their budding empire: different ownership.

Giacomino owns three restaurants without his brothers, and Celestino two. The rest are owned by different groupings of the siblings, sometimes with outside investors. The decision on who opens a new spot and which brothers will be involved is handled casually.

“We sit and talk about it and say, ‘We are in,'” said Giacomino.

“It’s beautiful. It’s fun,” he continued. “Yes, you can open up a restaurant, but I would not be able to do it if I wouldn’t have had the help and the support of brothers. You absorb a lot from all the brothers.”

Working with each other may have advantages, but it requires thick skin.

“Sometimes the response you get from a brother is different from a stranger,” said Giacomino, the youngest of the four. “A brother always tells you what he feels and how things really are. You need to face reality right there.”

While the brothers work together, there’s enough room for each to express his individuality within the enterprise. Celestino, Giacomino and Tanino are chefs; Calogero focuses on the business side of running the restaurants he has a hand in. Giacomino opened Sushi House Unico in Bel Air after being inspired by Japanese food while doing consulting work at Italian restaurants in Asia.

Of course, the restaurant business is notoriously difficult, and a recession like the current one can spell doom even for established eateries. While the brothers did not disclose revenues, they said that generally, business is good.

Celestino said that a successful restaurant will make a profit of 10 percent to 15 percent annually. Some of the brothers’ establishments are meeting that criteria, but he said that not all are.

Customer connection

Still, the Dragos believe that their emphasis on customer service and building relationships with diners helps them.

“People don’t come because I am good-looking in the face,” said Calogero, the jokester of the group. “We really try hard to make the customer happy.”

The new Drago Centro in downtown Los Angeles is the most ambitious of any of the brothers’ establishments. It is owned by Celestino and other investors, who put nearly $7 million into building the restaurant on the ground floor of an office tower. Drago Centro has received good reviews since it opened in November, but some critics wonder whether the stalled downtown economy can support such a high-end dining spot.

So far so good, said Celestino, who said the restaurant is serving about 140 lunches a day, and between 180 and 200 dinners each night. However, the Wall Street Journal reported in March that just before opening Celestino lowered prices in a concession to the economy. Still, he is happy with the restaurant’s start.

“I am very pleased,” he said. “It is a learning experience with what is going on down there in downtown.”

While Celestino was exploring downtown, the other three brothers were opening another location, Via Alloro, on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills.

It is the family’s third restaurant on a two-block stretch of the street, just a stone’s throw from Il Pastaio Ristorante, one of the family’s most popular restaurants.

“I wish them the best because I know how hard it must be to own several restaurants in one market,” said restaurateur Piero Selvaggio, who owns the L.A. landmark Valentino and sold three of the brothers a Sherman Oaks restaurant in 2002. “And this is a very tough market right now.”

While Via Alloro features a loungelike atmosphere with several flat-screen televisions and outdoor seating that sets it apart from the family’s other nearby more traditional sites, it has raised the issue of market saturation.

In fact, Celestino was surprised by the decision.

“I would never consider opening another Italian restaurant on the same street,” said Celestino, who isn’t involved in the restaurant. “But if somebody can make the place work, it is my brothers.”

Giacomino believes there is room for Via Alloro if the economy rebounds. “It’s not about being too many,” he said. “That place is building its own character. You cannot judge a restaurant in its first year or its first year and a half. You need to be there, be close and give it what it needs. Then you can judge it, two years later.”

So far, business at Via Alloro has been good, Calogero said.

But some other restaurateurs also wonder if the family has saturated the market.

“Boy, they can’t sit still that group; they are always thinking abut the next thing,” said Andy Brooks, who owns Brooks restaurant in Ventura, and worked as a sous-chef at Celestino’s Santa Monica spot, Drago Ristorante, from 1996 to 1998. “I think they are spread thin a little bit. It’s tough when you’ve got 10 or 12 restaurants, you can’t be in them all the time.”

For their part, the Dragos say they still work hard at the important task of being there for the customers. They often travel across town to visit several of their eateries in one evening, and that presence has gone a long way for them, said Sophie Gayot of Gayot.com, a high-end dining and travel guide.

“In L.A. it is very tough to stay in business for a long time,” said Gayot. “You have to find a way to attract people to your restaurant. The Drago brothers make you feel like you are their friends or family so you are always welcome.”

The history

The brothers come from the Sicilian village of Galati Mamertino, growing up on a farm. Their parents, Maria and Antonino, still live there. Three other siblings live in Italy, and a sister lives in Los Angeles and works at Il Pastaio Ristorante.

Celestino was the first brother to come to Los Angeles. In 1979, he left a job at a restaurant in Pisa for a chance to work at Orlando-Orsini, a former Hollywood hotspot.

He quickly discovered that Italian cooking in Los Angeles was inauthentic to his taste. He set out to change this by including more traditional ingredients and dishes. There’s a strong Sicilian influence in his dishes, such as pasta with sardines and wild fennel, and rabbit roasted in a sweet and sour sauce.

“I tried very, very hard to make a change,” said Celestino. He got a chance to do so in 1983 when he hooked up with restaurateur Jerry Magnin, who handed Celestino the reins at Chianti and adjacent sister restaurant Chianti Cucina on Melrose Avenue. Chianti Cucina had an open kitchen, an ever-changing menu and focused on fresh ingredients.

This set the stage for his next move.

“I said, ‘I want to set the standard for Italian food and when I own my own restaurant one day, a little place, I will do exactly what I know,'” he recalled.

That happened in 1985, when Celestino and a partner purchased a Beverly Drive restaurant for $37,000 in cash. He christened it Celestino and spent an additional $122,000 on remodeling and on paying off bank notes that had been held by the prior owner.

Magnin said it was heartbreaking to see Celestino go.

“I’ve worked with a lot of chefs over the years and there are a few that are special. He’s one of them. He’s got a feel for the business and he’s also an incredible human being,” Magnin said.

As his brothers emigrated from Italy, they began working at Celestino, which has since closed.

The brothers worked together at their next stop — Drago Ristorante in Santa Monica. Celestino opened that Wilshire Boulevard restaurant in 1991 after spending about $500,000 on it.

While working together, the brothers also lived at Celestino’s Hollywood Hills home that he outfitted with a wood-burning pizza oven. The home became a “research and development” facility for the brothers, who often tested recipes there and hosted parties for employees.

The days of living and working as a foursome eventually ended. In the late 1990s and in the early part of this decade they opened several restaurants. With more work and more success came less time together. Still, they hold fond memories of those times.

“I miss those days, the early 1990s, working together,” Tanino said.

But, perhaps not surprisingly, his reminiscence quickly turns to what the Drago brothers seem to know best: an idea for yet another restaurant.

“I just want to come up with a good concept in another place,” Tanino said, “and work all four together again.”