“With so much of the menu already familiar, diners will try new things. Clark Wolf, a New York based restaurant consultant, says that where French cuisine can seem stuffy or too rich, ‘if you say Italian everyone just smiles.”

Food can get more elaborate of the economy rises or simple if it falls, says Wolf.

Contacted early this week in New York City, Clark Wolf, a restaurant and dining consultant, immediately said he'd heard of Olives' woes. Being cited and even closed for sanitation issues is nothing new, Wolf said. "From the highest to the lowest, restaurants get cited." But coming back after a closing depends "on the relationship the restaurant had to its community before."

"This is America," says Clark Wolf, a New York-based restaurant consultant. "We happen to love steak." That's the simple answer, but his amplification sheds more light on this renewed love affair with red meat. "There is a bit of creativity fatigue," he says. After a long economic boom and the rise of celebrity chefs and their esoteric flavors, "diners are looking for something familiar."

Consultant Wolf sees another reason for steak sales in restaurants. "It's part of the evolution," he says. "We don't do anything at home." As more people eat out more often, they're more likely to save steak purchases for dining out. And, he adds, they trust steakhouses to have the best stuff. "I think consumers are somewhat concerned about what they're buying," he says, fearful about quality in a supermarket setting.

There is a note of caution, though. As consultant Wolf says: "If the economy drops off, you will see a freeze so fast. . . ." His voice trails off at the thought of a more austere future.

Clark Wolf, a New York City restaurant consultant who often visits Boston, sees no downside. It's the "please open next door" theory, he says, adding that more is usually better. "People need every reason to go to a restaurant and one important factor is that there are plenty of places to go."

One reason New York City restaurants make it is because people go there from all over just to eat. "It doesn't mean the food is always good, but that there's a restaurant crowd.

"Restaurants are about as significant a barometer of culture as there is," Wolf says, "and like culture they are always evolving."

''People ought to eat things that they'd only eat every four years, like major thick-chocolate-chocolate-HoHo-Dingdongs mousse, with coffee-toffee munchies on top and marshmallow munchies on the side,'' offers Clark Wolf, a New York-based food and restaurant consultant. "The Russians actually have something that they're doing right this minute, before Lent," Wolf adds, "which they call 'Butter Week,' where they have a blini festival, and they eat blinis day and night with everything. They get as fat as possible, and then they go have Lent. We could have leap year blinis with Mars bars, or blinis filled with major sausage pizza, or just blinis filled with large chunks of chocolate. Or, we could do a thing where the dessert would come first at every meal, or the dessert was the main course."

But everyone, even cooks in the backward Northeast, knows that blackened foods were so scorned last year that they were practically hooted off menus. Clark Wolf, the New York food and restaurant consultant, says that by the end of '87, "we wanted to see a public flushing of blackened everything."

This year, says Wolf, who consults to restaurants around the country, he's tired of baby vegetables and "infant chefs."

"Infant chefs" are inexperienced chefs, mostly in their mid-to late-20s. Many of the restaurants that opened in the last five years are run by these young chefs and they have received a lot of press. Merrill Shindler also wonders why so many restaurants have young chefs at their helm. "When did chefs suddenly become 19?" he asks, "Where did the old chefs go? I guess they all work at country clubs, taking the crust off the white bread."

Both men are annoyed by the noise in trendy restaurants. Some new restaurants have acoustical problems that the owners can't correct because no one anticipated the problem and the cash flow prevents them from changing anything once construction is finished. Other restaurateurs, claim the consulting architects, ask for dining rooms with an alarming noise level. Noise is exciting and the place will feel lively, they're told.

Clark Wolf says that "ear-melting noise levels" are not exciting, they're annoying and prevent people from having good old-fashioned conversation. Shindler says that in Los Angeles there are restaurants that are so noisy, he can't taste the food. "I've had to step outside to taste what's in the dish," he says.

Clark Wolf is "tired of architecture of the moment, so weird, so terribly exciting this minute, that we're bound to get sick of it." There is a stretch of new Manhattan restaurants between 10th and 23rd streets decorated in a style Wolf calls "Faux Ho" because so much of it is trompe l'oeil. "We don't want restaurants that look like something else," especially, he adds, since "we're recovering from a brief, painful relationship with raw concrete as a design element.

"We're moving into real surfaces." The new year, Wolf hopes, will bring restaurants with "real rooms for real people."